Openmoko

For the Sleepwalkers Tonight I want to say something wonderful for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith in their legs, so much faith in the invisible arrow carved into the carpet, the worn path that leads to the stairs instead of the window, the ... [More] gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror. I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing to step out of their bodies into the night, to raise their arms and welcome the darkness, palming the blank spaces, touching everything. Always they return home safely, like blind men who know it is morning by feeling shadows. And always they wake up as themselves again. That’s why I want to say something astonishing like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies. Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs flying through the trees at night, soaking up the darkest beams of moonlight, the music of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches. And now our hearts are thick black fists flying back to the glove of our chests. We have to learn to trust our hearts like that. We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep- walkers who rise out of their calm beds and walk through the skin of another life. We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised. –Edward Hirsch For the sleepwalkers among us; for those that trust their heart; this poem is for us. Have faith we are moving forward. –Sean [Less]

Why do we want to do that?One annoying thing while developing applications for SHR is the time consuming cycle of: hacking - building with OE - installing on the device - testing. The UI itself could be developed natively on the desktop too, but as ... [More] lots of stuff depends on the actual hardware (eg. phone calls) that does not cover the whole story.What can we do about that?Now, we have a solution :-) The other day an interesting application was added to OpenEmbedded (thanks mickeyl): dbus-daemon-proxy. So, what is that? If you start dbus-daemon-proxy on your phone it will proxy all dbus methods and signals from your phone over the network to you desktop. This means you can have the hardware dependent stuff like fsogsmd running on the phone and stuff like phoneuid running on your desktop and it will just work.So, what do you need to do that?1) you need a current EFL stack with elementary. Current means you have to build it yourself from Enlightenment SVN. I personally use the get_e.sh script from raster (find it here: get_e.sh). But there are others out there too. NOTE: get_e.sh does not install elementary itself. You have to do that manually after get_e.sh finished installing all the other stuff.2) you have to install dbus-daemon-proxy on your phone. It is already in the SHR-unstable feed, so if you run SHR-unstable (which is somehow important if you want to develop the SHR phone stack ;), then just opkg install dbus-proxy-daemon.3) install the SHR phone stack (and all of its dependencies) on your desktop. To make life easy for you I created a script which does that (setup-shr-build-env.sh). It will install all needed stuff to your home directory. If you don't already have LD_LIBRARY_PATH set to contain $HOME/lib you have to add it.4) stop phoneuid on your phone. Easiest way is to just execute 'killall phoneuid'.5) start dbus-daemon proxy on your phone. Note: you need one instance for every program connecting to it. I'm using one for phoneuid, one for communication with phoneuid (eg. to start messages app) and one for some debugging tool like d-feet or mdbus2. Create something like the following script to start it on three different ports:#!/bin/shdbus-daemon-proxy --system --port 8080 &dbus-daemon-proxy --system --port 8081 &dbus-daemon-proxy --system --port 8082 &make it executable and start it.6) start phoneuid on your desktop with the following call:DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS=tcp:host=192.168.0.202,port=8080 phoneuid7) start the messages app with the following call:DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS=tcp:host=192.168.0.202,port=8081 phoneui-messages8) have fun watching your messages pop up on your desktop :-)Apart from saving a lot of time by not cross-compiling and installing... one big winner is to be able to use some nice gdb GUI to debug the thing. [Less]

I’ve just released omnewrotate 0.5.8 which integrates Tim Abell’s improvements to rotation sensitivity and I’ve added some code so it is smarter about detecting the paths for setting the brightness level while rotating which changed in more recent ... [More] Linuxs (2.6.32 and beyond, I think). As I’m running SHR-Unstable, your mileage may vary but it’s likely it will work As usual, the download links are at the project’s Google Code site for omnewrotate (see the featured downloads section): the ipk of this release (OpenPGP sig). and its tar ball (OpenPGP sig) SHR-Unstable users should only need to upgrade (later today, or in a day or so). Enjoy! [Less]

Après Openmoko, Android de Google, WebOS de Palm, Bada de Samsung, MeeGo de Nokia et Intel, ...... les japonais Panasonic, Sharp, Fujitsu et NEC s'allient pour développer à leur tour un Système d'Exploitation mobile qui serait basé sur Linux.D'après ... [More] l'annonce, celui-ci sera compatible avec Symbian et éventuellement Android dans un deuxième temps. Il équipera les futurs téléphones mobiles développés avec l'opérateur NTT DoCoMo et le fabricant Renesas Electronics.Le but évident est de mutualiser les ressources de Recherche & Développement pour proposer des solutions rivaliser avec la concurrence à l'échelle internationale. Le premier modèle devrait voir le jour d'ici mars 2012.Je n'ai malheureusement aucun détail sur les éventuels degrés d'ouverture au niveau logiciel et matériel. Brève sur toolinux. [Less]

Le Google Summer of Code 2010 est en marche.Pour rappel, ce programme organisé par Google chaque année depuis 2005 permet rémunérer des étudiants pendant l'été pour contribuer au développement de Logiciels Libres. Cette année, le projet de Thibaut ... [More] GIRKA et son mentor, Gaudenz Steinlin, en intéressera plus d'un parmi nous.En effet, il s'agit d'un installeur Debian pour le Neo Freerunner.(Merci à misc d'avoir passé l'info sur le forum). Voilà le calendrier que les étudiants sélectionnés devront respecter : jusqu'au 24 mai : faire connaissance avec les mentors, lire les documentations, commencer à travailler sur leurs projets 24 mai - 12 juillet : les mentors aident les étudiants du 12 au 16 juillet : premières évaluations du 16 au 20 août : évaluations finales 23 août : annonce des résultats [Less]

After HP announced its acquisition of Palm, I think we can be sure that the mid-time future of WebOS seems quite safe. I also expect mechanically much better hardware among the devices they will ship. However, the acquisition could also mean a ... [More] shift in politics, i.e. cause the new devices to be locked down with cryptographically signed kernel images. One of the big advantages of the existing Pre and Pixi is that they are not locked down and that as a user you can take full control over the device. Another policy that might come under re-evaluation is the relationship between the WebOS Application Market and the third-party application installers like Preware. Lets hope the managers responsible for WebOS future realize that their chance is to be less restrictive and more open than most of the competition - including most Android devices. At least, one could hope, HP has quite some experience with Linux and the Open Source community in other areas of their business. [Less]

Openmokontrol a pour but de contrôler l'interface graphique d'un ordinateur (sous Linux) avec les accéléromètres d'un Neo Freerunner. Une fois installé sur le Neo, il se connecte au serveur X d'une machine à travers le réseau pour envoyer les signaux ... [More] correspondants aux touches ou aux mouvements de souris. Ce projet initié en janvier n'en est qu'à ses débuts, mais certains ont déjà réussi à utiliser le Neo comme manette de jeu pour Extreme Tux Racer (voir cette discussion). Dans le même ordre d'idée, les logiciels Remoko ou encore NIDE/NIDED ont des objectifs similaires mais utilisent des méthodes différentes. [Less]

This has been on my TODO list for at least the last six months or so: Growing the experimental GPRS branch of OpenBSC into something more useful. Right now, you can use OpenBSC with a GPRS-capable BTS - but only if you have an existing SGSN to ... [More] serve the Gb interface of the BTS. This somehow defeats the point. We want to offer a 'GSM network in a box' solution, where no other non-free Software is required to run a fully functional small network. So right now I'm cleaning up the 08.16 (Network Services) Implementation, and will move my way up through the existing 08.18 (BSSGP) and LLC code that I wrote some time ago. With some luck, in a couple of weeks we should be able to run a self-sufficient combined GSM + GPRS (+ EDGE) network out of OpenBSC. [Less]

Last week I finished the contract work for the angular rate drivers I mentioned in my last post. During the final meeting we also verified that the output of the sensors are what we expect them to be. While coding them I was able to check that I'm ... [More] using the right registers, values are changing when I turn the device, but I had no test equipment to see if the measurement is really correct. At the DLR we could use an angular rate table for this. The device itself was mounted on the rotating table with power and data connection on sliding contacts. Some pictures of the setup can be found here. From the measurement point the MLX90609 and the SAR100 variant we used are quite different. The MLX is capable of 300 degree per second while the SAR100 was able to measure 1500. In our test we even had good results with 1800. During this testing we found a bit different offsets as described in the data sheets but still pretty close to what we expected. I'm really looking forward to the launch of the rocket to hear about the results the sensors produced and how it compares to the big money equipment that it used for the flight control of the rocket. Once the rocket is back and the data is analyzed I also should be able to get a board back and do my part on getting the drivers into mainline. For now I have posted them as demo to the openmoko kernel list. [Less]