Thomas Wood

I totally missed this until now, but my colleague, Samuel Ortiz, wrote up some information about implementing the Wifi driver for OpenMoko:

http://labs.o-hand.com/2008/02/05/openmoko-wifi-driver/

I’m pleased to say that during my own testing I had no problems and it even works with WPA encryption. Good job Samuel!

Before I took my FreeRunner prototype along to Ole’s OpenMoko talk in London yesterday, I hacked up a little demo application in python/pygtk to display various new features in the FreeRunner (Wifi, accellerometers, LEDs). If you where there yesterday, you probably saw this live in action:

On my previous post OpenMoko post, someone asked about the LEDs on the FreeRunner. Obviously, you can’t see any proof of the LEDs in screenshots, so I took some very quick photographs:

Desktop:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
91 cd
75 ls
49 svn
45 ssh
37 vim
37 make
13 ./test-notes
11 svn-prepare-ChangeLog.pl
11 ./openmoko-messages
11 ./openmoko-dialer

Laptop:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
91 vim
53 sh
52 svn
47 cd
40 ls
31 find
21 git
18 ssh
11 su
11 make


Spurred on by the positive comments in my last little theme experiment for the OpenMoko, I have made a few adjustments based on some of the comments. It’s also now available in OpenMoko svn.

If you have a OpenMoko build set up, you can try it out. Firstly you need to build the package and then rebuild the package index:

bitbake moko-gtk-engine && bitbake package-index

You may have issues if you have built this before, because I did made some changes to the repository that svn can’t handle very cleanly, so if you have problems, wipe your svn checkout and start again.

Then you need to ssh into your neo and run the following commands:

• opkg upgrade
• opkg install moko-gtk-engine
• dbus-launch gconftool-2 –t string -s /desktop/poky/interface/theme “Moko”
• /etc/init.d/xserver-nodm restart

Here are some more screenshots of the theme running on the device. There are still some bugs with colours in a few places, so testing would be much appreciated.

I think the GPS icon is green because the GPS chip was on when I took the screenshots. I’ve been testing a couple of the peripherals on my GTA02 lately and I’m happy to report so far Wifi, GPS, accellerometers and the LEDs all seem to be working correctly. I got a fix from the GPS today which according to Google maps, was within 1 meter of my actual location.

Inspired by ScaredyCat’s discovery that the default GTK+ theme was much faster on the Neo1973 than the current pixbuf based theme (well, no real suprises there…), I set to work stealing his colour scheme and completely redesigning my Moko theme engine. This time totally optimised for speed and simplicity. It’s still a work in progress, but here are some screenshots to give a general idea:

Lines and other visual distractions are kept to a complete minimum. Although it doesn’t look that great on a desktop display, when it is on a 2.8″ 285dpi touch screen, it feels a lot better.

UKUUG is hosting a talk by Ole Tange about OpenMoko next week in London (9th April). I’m planning to go along and take the latest GTA02 (FreeRunner) prototype if anyone is interested in seeing it in action. I’ll probably stick around afterwards to chat and grab some dinner.

More details here: http://www.ukuug.org/events/openmoko/

I’ve mostly been working on non-ui related components for OpenMoko recently (working on the package management system, opkg and it’s associated packagekit backend), which gave me a chance to step back from the GUI applications and take a look at some of the areas that could be improved. I posted some of my thoughts on the openmoko-devel mailing list (thread here) and got some quite interesting and encouraging responses.

So, I set to work building some patches. Here are some screenshots of progress:

Phone numbers and contact photos in the address book contact list

Currently work in progress, implementing “Add to contact” in call log

I’m also hoping to get a few theme tweaks in as well. Here’s another game of spot-the-difference (hint, not anything in the number display). And it actually does make it look a lot smarter on the device’s small screen.
changes to

I need to find an artist to help me improve the GTK+ theme. Firstly the gradients really need to go because not only do they look ugly with the banding from the 16bit display, they also cause significant performance problems. If anyone wants to help me out, please do drop me an e-mail, or discuss on the openmoko-devel list.

Some good progress on Opkg and it’s PackageKit backend recently. New features such as autoremove and tags have been implemented in Opkg, and PackageKit can now take advantage of them. I’ve also increased the PackageKit method coverage by including description searching and group search, amongst fixing various bugs and improving internal feedback mechanisms.

Opkg now has a mailing list for discussion on future development and current issues.

Here are some screenshots of the GTK+ PackageKit frontend using Opkg as the backend:

Current method coverage shown by pk-backend-status:

Listing packages in a group using the gnome-packagekit frontend:

Searching on the description field and filtering to only view GUI applications:

Slightly off topic, but of interest to OpenMoko/OpenEmbedded developers, is the new Poky SDK, which Rob wrote about. The Anjuta plugin is particularly interesting, because it significantly shortens the development cycle when cross compiling.

I haven’t written about work things for a while, but I’ve been working on a couple of things, including Opkg (a new package manager based on the un-maintained Ipkg), and a PackageKit backend to use it with.

And this weekend (starting at the beer event on Friday night) I will be at Fosdem. See you there if you’re going!

Today I achieved a small milestone: I have managed to run and use gsmd reliably on a host computer.

This is really important because being able to use gsmd on the desktop dramatically reduces the development cycle of phone (gsm) based applications. Rather than having to code blind, cross compile, install onto the target device and then test and debug on the target, you can now do the entire cycle on the desktop.

I first tried the gsm passthrough features in u-boot, which effectively turns the u-boot terminal into the gsm terminal. Unfortunately there appear to be bugs somewhere in this process and it would not work reliably. However, with a bit of thought, this functionality is just as easy in user space.

Here are the instructions:

1. Maks sure gsmd is not running on the phone: killall gsmd
2. Run netcat on the phone to export the modem serial port: nc -l -p 5000 < /dev/ttySAC0 > /dev/ttySAC0
3. Compile pty.c and run on the host with: ./pty 192.168.0.202 5000
4. run gsmd on the host with (replacing 0 if necessary): ./gsmd -p /dev/pts/0
5. run openmoko-dialer or any other application which interacts with gsmd

If gsmd from OpenMoko SVN doesn’t appear to work correctly, try Andrew’s git repository: http://folks.o-hand.com/andrew/gsmd.git/

(Update: if you’re wondering why I didn’t use a “proper” application to export the serial port, it is because nc is built into busybox. I did originally use ser2net to export the serial port, but using nc means no cross compiling or extra set up on the phone is needed to get this working.)