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Harald "LaF0rge" Welte: Motorola announces "Ming" phone with Android

Planet Openmoko - Jue, 2010-09-02 04:00

For those who don't know: The Motorola Ming was the A1200, a commercially very successful Linux-based phone in China and other parts of Asia, using the EZX software platform, i.e. the kind of hardware that we once built the OpenEZX software.

Motorola has recently announced that they will follow-up with some android based ming phones. It is my suspicion that apart from some mechanical design aspects, those phones will not resemble the ming in any way, neither on the baseband hardware side, nor on the application processor side, and particularly not on the software side.

So it's probably nothing than a marketing coup, trying to connect to successes of the past. Not interesting from the OpenEZX point of view, I guess.

Categorías: Openmoko

Khorben: Releasing a new snapshot of the DeforaOS smartphone environment on hackable:1

Planet Openmoko - Lun, 2010-08-30 14:57
I have managed yesterday to release a new snapshot of the DeforaOS smartphone environment, as found packaged on top of the hackable:1 distribution. Unfortunately, there is still one obvious blocker bug before it can be easily tested as a real phone at the moment: as it seems, the modem "forgets" the PIN code a few seconds after accepting it, and is then unable to register correctly.
Of course, my current plan is to investigate and fix this as soon as possible (with a new snapshot). Yet, among the changes since the last release of the environment, you will already find:
  • a new finger keyboard, with popup keys (and using Gtk+' theme)
  • the addition of a phone log;
  • preferences windows for the phone application;
  • the return of the background picture, and a preferences window to easily change it;
  • last but not least, the final version of my initial attempt at SMS encryption.
With this, I will continue my work on the user experience:
  • fix and update the web browser (broken since the switch to Debian testing);
  • continue improvements to the finger keyboard (bigger keys, multiple layouts)
  • nicer Gtk+ theme and artwork if I manage (screenshots!)
  • more actual tests and usability improvements to the phone application;
  • power management;
  • GPRS support.
I have also begun to implement an application to configure access to wireless networks, with wpa_supplicant's help. It will take another while though.

For more information, as always, check either http://www.defora.org/, the IRC channel of hackable:1 (#hackable1 on Freenode), the respective mailing-lists (devel@lists.defora.org, hackable1-dev@lists.hackable1.org...) or even, feel free to contact me directly of course: http://people.defora.org/~khorben/place/wiki/13/Contact

And before I forget, the snapshot itself is announced and available there: http://www.defora.org/os/news/3394/New-snapshot-of-the-DeforaOS-smartphone
Categorías: Openmoko

Khorben: Improvizing a talk at Debienna

Planet Openmoko - Jue, 2010-08-26 18:54
I have been staying a few days in Vienna a couple weeks ago, where I happened to join a Debienna [1] meeting. As things went it felt appropriate to introduce hackable:1 [2] (and my current work on it) to this fine crowd. I have therefore quickly prepared a presentation, of which slides can be found there [3].

It was called "hackable:1 (and then more)", and I really appreciated this opportunity. See you guys!

[1] http://www.debienna.at/
[2] http://trac.hackable1.org/
[3] http://people.defora.org/~khorben/papers/h1more/h1.html
Categorías: Openmoko

Harald "LaF0rge" Welte: Convert RSS feed subscriptions from N810 feed reader to Android com.meecal.feedreader

Planet Openmoko - Mié, 2010-08-25 04:00

I'm subscribed to a considerable number of RSS feeds, and so far I actually used to read them all on my Nokia N810, which is more or less permanently located at the bedside table

Now I wanted to import all the subscriptions into an Android RSS feed reader on the Galaxy S. Unfortunately the feed reader that I found most useable doesn't have OPML import. However, looking at its sqlite3 database for feed subscriptions, it was pretty easy to come up with a small perl script to generate "INSERT" statements for all the feeds from the N810 OPML file. In case anyone is interested, the script is available from here.

If you have any suggestions on a good Android RSS reader that can manage large number of subscriptions and put them into a tree/hierarchy of groups, feel free to let me know.

Categorías: Openmoko

Harald "LaF0rge" Welte: Started to play with the Galaxy S (GT-I9000) phone

Planet Openmoko - Sáb, 2010-08-21 04:00

For many years I'm on a more or less consistent hunt for finding a reasonably open and free mobile phone. This started in 2004 with OpenEZX, has continued with Openmoko, project gnufiish and has resulted in a bit of peeking and poking in the Palm Pre. However, none of those projects ever had the success I was hoping for:

  • OpenEZX was never really finished, and only for the 1st generation phones (A780) by the time they were long end of life
  • OpenMoko Neo1973 and FreeRunner were a great project, and they are still the most open+free mobile phones that ever existed. However, they're GPRS only and the hardware is even more outdated now then it was when we created it.
  • gnufiish was an attempt of running software from the Openmoko days (such as freesmartphone.org) on some E-TEN glofiish phones. However, we never could make the SPI-based modem communication work from our re-engineered Linux driver :(
  • Palm Pre is an interesting device, in that Palm provides easy root access, does not attempt to lock the device down with cryptographic signatures and provides full recovery flashing tools by means of WebOS Doctor. But once again, the proprietary communication protocol with the 3G Modem was the big blocker item for using real custom software and not the WebOS stuff they ship.

So I've constantly been on the watch for new devices that are coming out. Most of the phones you can buy in recent years are either running proprietary software like Windows Mobile, Symbian, Apples iPhone-OSX - or they run Android but then use some integrated Qualcomm Smartphone-on-a-chip product. The problem with the latter (from a Free Software point of view) is that Qualcomm is very secretive about their products, does not provide any kind of public documentation, and the ever-increasing integration between application processor and baseband processor makes it more difficult to run custom software on them.

The Samsung Galaxy S (GT-I9000) seemed like a good candidate to me, for several reasons:

  • Samsung does not use cryptographic signature techniques and gaining root as well as flashing the AP software is relatively easy
  • The phone is based on a traditional separate application processor (AP) and baseband processor (BP) design. The AP is a Samsung S5PC110, the BP is some Qualcomm MSM6xxx.
  • High-end hardware, with the S5PC110 running at 1GHz and 512MB RAM
  • Samsung provides excellent "GPL source code offers" containing the Linux kernel used in their firmware - including detailed instructions in how to build it. Also, many of the drivers are included under GPL, such as drivers for all the integrated peripherals of the SoC, some custom components like the USB multiplexor ASIC, etc. as well as the driver for the dual-ported RAM between the AP and BP for the 3G Modem communication
  • The Android RIL shipped by Samsung contains lots of debugging/decoding/dumping code that can make reverse engineering the AP/BP protocol.

So right now I'm in the exploration phase, making myself familiar with the bootloader, the flashing process, the userspace ABI of the custom (GPL licensed) kernel drivers, etc. It's a fairly pleasant experience so far, and I now have a debootstrap'ed Debian lenny on an additional ext2 partition on the SD card. This provides me with an actually useful userland I can chroot() into, such as lsof, strace, ltrace, tcpdump, etc. to do some more exploration of the phone.

The only real ugliness on the software side so far is the use of proprietary Samsung filesystems (RFS/TFS4). The only reason those filesystems existed, as far as I can tell, was to run legacy filesystems like FAT on top of raw NAND or OneNAND flash. This is mainly necessary if you want to export e.g. a FAT partition via USB Mass Storage to a Windows PC. However, the GT-I9000 doesn't have any OneNAND, but only an internal moviNAND (basically a SD-Card in a BGA package that you can solder on the board). MMC/SD cards already include the wear leveling algorithm, so there is absolutely no point (from what I can tell) in running the RFS/TFS4 stack.

In fact, in several forums people are complaining about the slow I/O performance of the Galaxy S, and they have a much better performance when using ext2/ext3 directly on that moviNAND device.

Categorías: Openmoko

Risto H. Kurppa: Can your phone do this?

Planet Openmoko - Mar, 2010-08-17 22:00

Typing this deletes all contacts in my phone, the famous Openmoko Freerunner, running SHR-Testing

for i in `seq 1 1000`; do opimd-cli c delete $i; done

How do you do it in your phone?

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Tags: linux, mobile, planet-fnoss, planet-openmoko, planet-vapaasuomi
Categorías: Openmoko

Xiangfu Liu: [转载] 博士是什么?

Planet Openmoko - Dom, 2010-08-15 10:47
这篇来自美国犹他大学的助理教授Matt Might,原址在这里。汉化:阮一峰

译者注解:

美国犹他大学的助理教授Matt Might,用这组图解释,博士学位到底是什么意思。他说,每年都有新生的入学教育,但是有些观点语言说不清楚,不如画图。

我觉得,这组图真的很好懂,而且一点没错,博士就应该是图中的意思。老子说”大道至简”,可是真的要很简单地表达出来,却是非常难的一件事。


1.  假设人类所有的知识,就是一个圆。圆的内部代表已知,圆的外部代表未知。 2.  读完小学,你有了一些最基本的知识。 3. 读完中学,你的知识又多了一点。 4.  读完本科,你不仅有了更多的知识,而且还有了一个专业方向。 5.  读完硕士,你在专业上又前进了一大步。 6.进入博士生阶段,你大量阅读文献,接触到本专业的最前沿。 7.  你选择边界上的一个点,也就是一个非常专门的问题,作为自己的主攻方 8.  你在这个点上苦苦思索,也许需要好几年。 9.  终于有一天,你突破了这个点。 10.  你把人类的知识向前推进了一步,这时你就成为博士了。 11.  现在你就是最前沿,其他人都在你身后。 12.  但是,不要陶醉在这个点上,不要把整张图的样子忘了。

Categorías: Openmoko

Harald "LaF0rge" Welte: Worlds first 20 minute voice call from a Free Software GSM stack on a phone

Planet Openmoko - Sáb, 2010-08-14 04:00

As Dieter Spaar has pointed out in a mailing list post on the OsmocomBB developer list, he has managed to get a first alpha version of TCH (Traffic Channel) code released, supporting the FR and EFR GSM codecs.

What this means in human readable language: He can actually make voice calls from a mobile phone that runs the Free Software OsmocomBB GSM stack on its baseband processor. This is a major milestone in the history of our project.

While Dieter has been working on the Layer1 TCH support and the setup of the voiceband path in the analog baseband chip (audio ADC/DAC), Andreas Eversberg has been quietly working on getting call control of Layer3 into a state where it can do all the signalling required for mobile-originated and mobile-terminated call.

Combining both of their work together, they have been able to make a 20 minute long voice call from a baseband processor running a Free Software GSM stack. For all we know, it is the first time anything remotely like this has been done using community-developed Free Software. Five years ago I would have thought it's impossible to pull this off with a small team of volunteers. I'm very happy to see that I was wrong, and we actually could do it. With less than half a dozen of developers, in less than nine months of unpaid, spare-time work.

Sure, the next weeks and months will be spent on bringing the code from alpha level to something more stable, fixing known issues and known bugs, etc. But I'm confident the biggest part of the work on the OsmocomBB stack is behind us. Big thanks to the developer team driving this project forward.

Categorías: Openmoko

Risto H. Kurppa: GPS (+Heart Rate) trackers for Linux

Planet Openmoko - Mié, 2010-08-11 18:34

I’ve been recently playing with GPS devices on Linux (for example i-gotU gt-120, and the linux software to download tracks). I’ve also been discussing gps+heart rate data storage options. The obvious choice is (ex-Nokia) Sports Tracker and it didn’t even cross my mind that you could do something like this with local Linux software.

But it’s useless to ever think like that – you’re surprised with the variety of apps that are available and developed for Linux.
I bumped to this blog post on Planet KDE: Sports Activity Tracking App: The Baby Needs a Name.

And it looks awesome.

Reading the comments I found some other apps that do more or less the same, and Google gave me even more. So here’s just a quick list of GPS / HRM apps you might want to have a look if they’d be useful for you:

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Tags: gps, linux, opensource, openstreetmap, planet-fnoss, planet-openmoko, planet-ubuntu, planet-vapaasuomi, review, software
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Xiangfu Liu: Linux 2.6.36 内核将支持 国产君正 XBurst JZ4740 CPU

Planet Openmoko - Mar, 2010-08-10 21:31

Linux 内核将在 2.6.36 版本中支持 国产君正 XBurst JZ4740 CPU。

JZ4720 CPU Bonding wire

经过一年的努力,Lars 最终将 JZ4740 的代码提交到 Linux 的主干分支,第一个被支持的 JZ4740 设备 Ben NanoNote 也一起提交到了主干分支。

Ben NanoNote

Ben NanoNote

国内一些用 君正 CPU 的公司也就不再需要向老的内核上打补丁来支持JZ4740,而且也能享受到更多新内核的功能。要感谢Qi Hardware 项目对同步的重视,和主干同步给代码的质量带来的好处一言难尽。被官方支持是对一个软件项目的肯定,对于投身自由软件的工程师来说是最好的奖励。一个项目的代码如果不再修改了。证明这个软件项目停止了(要消亡了。。。)。而不是证明这些软件的代码已经达到一定水平不需要修改了。国内很多自由软件贡献者都是在外企,这也证明了国内软件企业不明白和主干同步的重要性,这是一种共享,一种融合,付出就有回报,而在付出的同时我们得到的是更多的对项目意见,而且这些意见都 来自从事软件事业十几年或者几十年的工程师。

Links:

http://www.openmobilefree.net/?p=644

http://en.qi-hardware.com/w/images/2/2f/Bonding_wire10.jpg

http://en.qi-hardware.com/w/images/c/cc/Ben_on_hand.jpg

http://projects.qi-hardware.com/index.php/p/qi-kernel/source/tree/jz-2.6.35/

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=e6b78c4f224925c71cce57033b1e6e30dd56add7

Categorías: Openmoko

Risto H. Kurppa: 3-in-1 stylus – Now with reset tip!

Planet Openmoko - Dom, 2010-08-08 22:20

I ordered something from proporta.com webshop. They’re nice – they let me choose one item from some options for free. I chose a 3-in-1 metal stylus to use with my Openmoko Freerunner touchscreen smartphone.

They delivered fast, 3 days or so from UK to Finland.

Opening the package I had a closer look of the 3-in-1 stylus. It has

  • Stylus tip – of course
  • Ball point pen – smart & useful!
  • Reset tip

Having a reset tip in the stylus must tell something about the quality and reliability of the devices nowadays. And it’s true – every now and then you need to reset your Tomtom GPS navigator, your Nokia smartphone and so on. I do still hope that the gadgets would get a bit more reliable and not having to always carry something with you to reset the device.

However, thanks Proporta, you’re good!

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Sean Moss-Pultz: Challenges

Planet Openmoko - Dom, 2010-08-08 12:25

After an incredibly rewarding weekend of breaking through old models and stubbornness, comes this picture from a friend:

Never forgot to check-in with something other than your mind for verification. Sometimes this is the only way we can see the forest from the trees.

Categorías: Openmoko

Sean Moss-Pultz: Kundera’s Immortality

Planet Openmoko - Dom, 2010-08-08 09:18

Immortality” by Milan Kundera is one of my all-time favorites novels:

Challenging, witty, provoking, but most of all – absolutely brilliant writing; “Immortality” is a unique form of the novel. It’s the only book I can remember reading twice. Each time I walked away a changed person. It begins with a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor. That gesture creates a character in the mind of Kundera whose own person story is wound together with that woman into a novel.

Death and immortality are at the core. They, “form an inseparable pair more perfect than Marx and Engels, Romeo and Juliet, Laurel and Hardy,” explains Kundera. To this he overlays a fascinating sub-story of Goethe and Hemingway. They meet in heaven and debate the reason for their fame. Is it their books or their own characters? “Instead of reading my books, they’re writing books about me,” Hemingway says. “That’s immortality,” replies Goethe. “Immortality means eternal trial.”

Kundera’s style of fiction is rare; Inspired by the philosophy of Nietzsche and the great (Kundera thinks the greatest) novelist Miguel de Cervantes, Kundera writes by layering the lives and loves of multiple third-person characters – essentially all figments of his imagination – with that of his own dialog, in the first person. What emerges is a beautifully rich array of interwoven stories spanning sometimes vastly different time periods. A result that is equal parts poetry with magic.

Here is one such passage, a sub-story within the main story, where Kundera’s own character is having a dinner conversation with a friend (Professor Avenarius). His friend asks:

“What are you writing about these days, anyway?”
“That’s impossible to recount.” [relies Kundera]
“What a pity.”
“Not at all. An advantage. The present era grabs everything that was written in order to transform it into films, TV programs, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the nonessential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in a such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”

“When I heard you,” Professor Avenarius said uneasily, “I just hope that your novel won’t turn out to be a bore.”
“Do you think that everything that is not a mad chase after a final resolution is a bore? As you eat this wonderful duck, are you bored?” Are you rushing toward a goal? On the contrary, you want the duck to enter into you as slowly as possible and you never want its taste to end. A novel shouldn’t be like a bicycle race but like a banquet of many courses… I am really looking to Part 6 [of this novel]. A completely new character will enter the novel. And at the end of that part he will disappear without a trace. He causes nothing and leaves no effects. That is precisely what I like about him. Part 6 will be a novel within a novel, as well as the saddest erotic story I have ever written.”

This, I believe, illustrates the essence of Kundera’s craft. Tackling profound issues of human identity, while at the same time playing with ambiguity, paradox, and healthy doses of irony is his gift. Once, in an rare interview, Kundera explained, “The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.”

Looking at the world through the eyes of a question, I truly believe, is an incredible skill! Kundera has mastered the art of the novel. If you enjoy reading, I strongly encourage you to read his novels. And “Immortality” is a excellent starting point.

If you would like to read this book, tell three people about my company’s latest project, WikiReader, and then send me an email. Before next week, I’ll chose a name from random, and send the winner my book.

Shipping, anywhere in the world, is on me.

Categorías: Openmoko

Harald "LaF0rge" Welte: Working on a document on smartphone hardware architecture

Planet Openmoko - Dom, 2010-08-08 04:00

I've started to write upe some information on modern smartphone hardware architecture. It will be in a similar style to what I previously wrote on feature phones and gsm modem hardware, but with a specific focus on smpartphones, their multiple processors, memory sharing, AP/BP interface, audio architecture, etc.

I should have done this a long time ago. In fact, I think I should write more documents like that on various technical subjects. If you want to learn about low-level aspects of modern telephones, there is way too little published information out there.

Categorías: Openmoko

Talpadk: Stroke recognition keyboard for matchbox

Planet Openmoko - Vie, 2010-08-06 19:34

YouTube video of strokerecog

In yet another shameless self promotion/public information attempt I bring you a video of strokerecog my “handwriting recognition” keyboard application.

Unlike initially for the matchbox finger friendly theme there is already a .deb package that can be used to install stroke-recognition on your phone.
You may download it from HERE.

However the stroke-recognition-x11_0.29_armel.deb package is not as polished as the matchbox theme .deb file
(The theme is by now installable using apt-get install)


Categorías: Openmoko

openmoko-fr: Communauté Francophone : activité de juillet 2010

Planet Openmoko - Mié, 2010-08-04 22:57

Je dois avouer qu'en ce moment mon temps extra-professionnel est plus accaparé par la préparation de mes vacances que par la mokosphère (honte sur moi !). Mais je vais au moins faire l'effort de rédiger le billet mensuel. ;-)

C'est parti pour le résumé du mois juillet ...

Actualités

Voici une sélection d'informations intéressantes :

Consultez les pages Community Updates (page du 01/08) pour plus d'informations.

Comme nombre d'entre vous, je n'ai pas été très actif sur le site ce mois-ci.

Seulement 2 billets ont été publiés en juillet :

  • le premier pour rappeler les 2 ans d'existence du Neo Freerunner et de la communauté francophone
  • l'autre pour signaler le l'ouverture des RMLL 2010

Voilà l'état des lieux sur le forum :

  • Nombre total de membres : 625
  • Nombre total de discussions : 1288
  • Nombre total de messages : 14678

Souhaitons la bienvenue à : guisemau, Cissou, Xanatos et ngm,

Voici une sélection des nombreuses discussions du dernier mois.

Communauté :

Logiciels :

Matériels :

Projets :

Divers :

Il n'y a pas de nouvelles pages à signaler pour le wiki en juillet.

En revanche, les pages suivantes ont été mises à jour :

Statistiques du site
  • Graphique des visites : 

  • Nombre de visites par mois : 
(Cliquez sur l'image pour l'agrandir)
  • Répartition par pays : 

  • Visites par jour : 

  • Statistiques du forum : 

  • Les statistiques du wiki : 

Bilan

Au vu de l'avancée de certains projets (overclocking, FNBv2, Openmoko Beagle Hybrid, Debian, ...), j'ai l'impression que le mouvement se radicalise.

Avec le temps, le Neo Freerunner s'oriente moins vers objet grand public (ce qu'il n'a jamais été d'ailleurs), mais beaucoup plus vers un outil pour hackers en tout genre.
Comme un élément de base pour des bricolages de plus en plus complexes, un genre de couteau suisse pour bidouilleurs.

Personnellement, ces projets me fascinent mais restent relativement hors de portée.
J'espère donc qu'il restera des énergies et volontés suffisantes pour produire des solutions utilisables par le quidam lambda.
En ce sens, les progrès sur le noyau et les distributions généralistes sont encourageants.

Sur ces réflexions, je m'apprête à prendre des congés bien mérités avec un périple qui s'annonce sympathique.
Aussi je vous souhaite bonne vacances et je vous donnerais des nouvelles à mon retour. ;-)

Categorías: Openmoko

Talpadk: Finger friendly matchbox theme, now as a Debian package

Planet Openmoko - Mié, 2010-08-04 13:23

YouTube video of the theme

The package is not include in the official  pkg-fso.alioth.debian.org repository yet, but you can download the files HERE.

I still need to figure out if is okay that the changes file is labeled as i386 or what I need to do differently.
But at least it passes “lintian -i -I –show-overrides –pedantic matchbox-theme-finger-friendly_7svn_i386.changes” without any problems.


Categorías: Openmoko

Harald "LaF0rge" Welte: Playing more with Erlang

Planet Openmoko - Mié, 2010-08-04 04:00

Last year I started to occasionally play with Erlang. People who know me as die-hard C coder who tries to avoid C++, Java and Python wherever possible will probably be surprised here now.

I have no intention of changing my general position on programming languages. I don't feel comfortable using something where I don't know and/or understand the immediate impact on how this code will be executed on the actual silicon.

However, if you have a need to play with anything that uses ASN.1, but particularly the aligned/unaligned PER encoding variants, then it is pretty clear that there is nothing available as Free Software that can compare to the Erlang asn1ct/asn1rt modules.

At that time last year I was doing some rapid prototyping with the RANAP protocol, and the progress was quite quick. I never had time to return to that project, so it (and my Erlang skills) were left dormant.

In recent weeks, I have picked Erlang up again - again to work on ASN.1 encoded messages: This time TCAP and MAP. While we still need the in-progress TCAP+MAP implementation in C for OsmoSGSN, there are other tasks at hand where an Erlang-based implementation might yield a much higher productivity.

So right now I'm working on a program that parses/decodes and iterates through every MAP component in a TCAP message and replaces certain fields, re-encodes the entire message and sends it off the wire. Once that is done, I think I'll actually try to do a more complete TCAP server and implement a simplistic HLR for OsmoSGSN testing.

Categorías: Openmoko

Harald "LaF0rge" Welte: Official wiki page on GSMTAP created

Planet Openmoko - Mié, 2010-08-04 04:00

I've come up with GSMTAP about two years ago while working on airprobe. The goal was to have something similar to what radiotap does in the wifi world: A pseudo-header that adds additional information and context that is not present in the actual message.

Initially, GSMTAP was intended to be a separate link-layer type in the pcap file format, but this would preclude its use in real-time protocol analysis. So I modified it to be encapsulated in UDP packets, which are sent and received using normal UDP/IP sockets.

Over recent years, GSMTAP has not only been integrated into multiple programs of the airprobe project, but is also understood by wireshark. OpenBTS has also decided to adopt the format and can generate GSMTAP messages for debugging purposes.

After creating OsmocomBB, it was taught how to generate GSMTAP messages very quickly, too.

So by now, at least when it comes to Free Software, it is definitely the de-facto standard for capturing/transmitting and analyzing protocol messages from the GSM air interface.

However, until now, there has never been any official "homepage" of the GSMTAP header. This has changed now, the GSMTAP homepage is now part of the OsmocomBB wiki.

Categorías: Openmoko

Talpadk: Finger friendly matchbox theme

Planet Openmoko - Lun, 2010-08-02 10:15

YouTube video of the theme

Finger friendly window manages presents special challenges mostly caused by the need for larger controls due to inaccurate finger tapping.
On small screen devices like mobile phones this presents another challenge, we do not want to use too much of our small screen for controls.
On the Neo/Freerunner this is made even more complicated as the bezel around the screen makes it hard to tab the edges.
And the edges are where we normally put the controls.

But Nokia seemed to have succeeded in making the Matchbox window manager finger friendly on the 770.
And while the 770 does have a larger screen, why not our Freerunner?

I am not graphics artist so I am pretty sure that it could have been made to look nicer but here is what I have done.

  • The top window border have been enlarged to 48px, no other border needed.
  • The window chooser and close buttons have been made larger and moved away from the left and right edge.
    (But the entire area left or right of the icon can be clicked)
  • Only a small area above the window chooser displays the window title (also activates the chooser)
  • The font size used for the chooser and application launcher has been increased to allow using them with your fingers
  • The remaining space is used to “dock” the matchbox-panel , so it does not have to use valuable screen estate.

There are still plenty of things that remain to be done most importantly create a Debian package to allow others to install the theme easily.

And since there MUST always be one window open to show the  launcher I should probably while(true) spawn either zhone
or some sort of home window in .xsession.

And something must be done to the launcher, as it does not show half of my installed applications including any terminal (shiver), I could either:

  • Fix the launcher config files, I do belive that can be done…
  • Remove the launcher from the panel and replace it with the “home window” thing.
    This would also free the panel space for extra notification icons

Categorías: Openmoko
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