So now the news is in the open. After Harald mentioned the recent status of Openmoko, Sean talked at openexpo to explain the whole thing.
In my opinion, Sean was more honest then I expected, and I admire that. It’s hard to admit so many mistakes as the CEO of a company.
Anyway, leave the past in the past. Life still needs to move on. I still got my gta02 (freerunner), and it’s still an interesting device that has all kinds of possibilities. What’s missing is just the right software. I still haven’t decided where to put my energy into, whether it should be freesmartphone based or Android. As a FOSS developer, it seems I should really support freesmartphone, but since my next job will most likely be related to Android and my time/energy is limited, maybe I will start with android.
I didn’t put this into Openmoko category by purpose so it won’t show up on planet.openmoko.org.
I guess the reason is this. The .gz files get Content-Encoding: gzip, so wget believes the data stream is compressed. The downloaded tar.gz will in fact become a tar file instead of the expected gz. Firefox actually has a workaround for this.
Maybe I should notify the webadmin of www.amd.com about it… if I can find the email address.
and, on my own computer, I wanted to do:
tar zxf openmoko-asu-image.tar.gz -C /mnt
but instead I did:
tar zxf openmoko-asu-image.tar.gz -C /
So I have to reinstall debian…
Still, I hate to duck your questions even though I also hate to offend other people’s sensibilities—given that software methodology has always been akin to religion. With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, let me just say that almost everything I’ve ever heard associated with the term “extreme programming” sounds like exactly the wrong way to go…with one exception. The exception is the idea of working in teams and reading each other’s code. That idea is crucial, and it might even mask out all the terrible aspects of extreme programming that alarm me.
I also must confess to a strong bias against the fashion for reusable code. To me, “re-editable code” is much, much better than an untouchable black box or toolkit. I could go on and on about this. If you’re totally convinced that reusable code is wonderful, I probably won’t be able to sway you anyway, but you’ll never convince me that reusable code isn’t mostly a menace.
I wanted to move this blog to blogger for more flexible css and java script manipulation, so I wrote this py-w2b project to do that. So far I’m able to transfer blog posts, but not comments, since every comment posted by an authenticated session will become my own comments instead of the original authors. It’s trivial to use so I’ll skip the introduction here.
This is just a guess, but I think the way Dalvik, the JVM of Android, launches an app is similar to the processing launcher I wrote for Openmoko. It starts a service on dbus, then load and run the processing apps by request. This can make the start up time much shorter because basically it runs in the same jvm instance. Something like this:
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fork() if (child) { load the app java class runit } /* I'mparent */ waitandcheckifit'sokay
So, during system start up, the first instance of Dalvik is created, and all the common java classes are loaded because you need to start the ‘home’ application. Now whenever you fork a new process, the linux kernel will try to be smart and only copy memory pages if the child process modified something in it. (copy on write)
Anyway, we will see after the release of Android source code.
2008/09/30:
So, it turns out I’m right. According to Anatomy & Physiology of an Android, that first instance is called ‘zygote’. Quite self-explaining.
I finally got bothered enough to fix the /etc/network/interfaces problem on my Ubuntu notebook. The problem is that when my neo got connected, I want to do some automatic setup. On Debian lenny, it’s quite easy:
But on Ubuntu gutsy it doesn’t work. I have to replace “allow-hotplug” by “auto”. Even if I changed that, it will only work for the first time you plugged the device. That’s because of a bug listed here. The solution is to remove the DRIVER="?*" in /etc/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules.
Now, finally, if works even after multiple plug/unplug. However, there is still one problem left: “auto usb0” basically means the system will try to bring up the device during booting. It works for “lo”, the local loopback network interface because it’s always there. But the usb0 won’t be there everytime we boot. That causes some error messages. My solution is to modify /etc/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules again, replace “auto” by “hotplug”, and use “allow-hotplug usb0” in my /etc/network/interfaces . The final 85-ifupdown.rules looks like this:
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# This file causes network devices to be brought up or down as a result # of hardware being added or removed, including that which isn't ordinarily # removable. # See udev(7) for syntax.
SUBSYSTEM=="net", GOTO="net_start" GOTO="net_end"
LABEL="net_start"
# Bring devices up and down only if they're marked auto. # Use start-stop-daemon so we don't wait on dhcp ACTION=="add", RUN+="/sbin/start-stop-daemon --start --background --pidfile /var/run/network/bogus --startas /sbin/ifup -- --allow hotplug $env{INTERFACE}"
NOTE: The illume info is outdated now. Just opkg install illume-theme-illume and modify /etc/enlightenment/default-profile to get the wrench and qwerty buttons.
I used the Om2008.8-update as the base image, then modify it for daily usage.
First of all I would like to use the illume default keyboard instead of the qtopia one because it gets a full-qwerty layout and it’s more suitable for terminal application. It also gives me access to illume configuration besides of the default ‘Settings’ application, which is not enough for advance usage. To do this, you need to switch to the testing repository.
backup the original /etc/opkg directory. cp -r /etc/opkg /etc/opkg.orig
replace all urls under /etc/opkg to the testing repository
Then remove all the illume related packages and install the new ones.
opkg list_installed | grep libe | grep cvs | awk ‘{print $1}’ | xargs opkg install
Now delete the old configs and switch to the illume default profile.
rm -rf ~/.e
replace ‘asu’ by ‘illume’ in /etc/enlightenment/default_profile
Prevent the qtopia keyboard from showing up:
Add “export QTOPIA_NO_VIRTUAL_KEYBOARD=1” into /etc/X11/Xsession.d/89qtopia
The second thing I did is to lower the volume of gsm handset. The original setting is so loud that everyone around me can hear the caller talking.
(call someone)
run alsamixer
scroll to the right end, lower the “Speaker” volume. You can do this while talking to test the value.
alsactl store -f /usr/share/openmoko/scenarios/gsmhandset.state
(hang up)
I also need Chinese font so I can read the sms messages.
vi /opt/Qtopia/etc/default/Trolltech/qpe.conf , find [Font], change FontFamily[] to the name of the ttf. (not the filename)
Change back to the default om2008.8 repository.
