For some reason Andrzej "balrog-kun" Zaborowski is still missing from PlanetOpenMoko, so I'll just link to some of his recent posts instead.
Andrzej have written an ELF-loader called Schwartz that can translate OABI to EABI and his latest post shows how to use it with gllin instead of a chroot.
Very impressive! I haven't tried it myself yet, but I definitely will soon.
Showing posts with label gps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gps. Show all posts
2008-01-28
2007-11-24
OpenMoko is growing
I just took a quick look at the statistics for the OpenMoko project and it made me happy.
Currently there is 3500 revisions in the svn repository and bugzilla has reached 1022 bugs, 241 of them are still open. The wiki has 3685 pages and 6090 registered users, and maybe more impressively, projects has 1507 developers and 81 projects registered.
The IRC channel on freenode has stayed at around 320 people for the last six months and there's a lot of interesting discussions going on. It's a friendly atmosphere and people interested in the project are encouraged to drop by. Usually, they get pointed to the right place in the wiki, where most questions have already been answered. A good page to read if you want to know what is going on in the project is the Community Updates page. Right now it has not been updated in over a week, but I'm sure it will be soon.
Unfortunately, a hardware bug in power management with GTA02v4 has required a fifth revision of the hardware for GTA02. It's a bit of a shame that the release will be delayed even further, but I'd rather have good hardware later, than something broken right now.
The most interesting code changes in OpenMoko recently involves gsmd, PhoneKit(pdf) and the dbus interface to it. The dialer and sms handling is also being worked at in a furious pace by the OpenedHand guys. Since about a week, calling has worked without any problems for me. Power management has been improved and the phone should last at least a day now.
Also, some guys from Ixonos have been working on an alternative to gsmd, gsmd2. I haven't looked at the code, but they have some very nice documentation and a detailed specification. Still, lots to be discussed it seems.
The GPS binary driver is still not available for download. OpenMoko have been promised by Global Locate that they will be able to distribute it, but the legal terms are not yet set. Hopefully this will be solved soon.
All in all, a lot is going on and the software will be in pretty good shape for when the GTA02 is released.
Currently there is 3500 revisions in the svn repository and bugzilla has reached 1022 bugs, 241 of them are still open. The wiki has 3685 pages and 6090 registered users, and maybe more impressively, projects has 1507 developers and 81 projects registered.
The IRC channel on freenode has stayed at around 320 people for the last six months and there's a lot of interesting discussions going on. It's a friendly atmosphere and people interested in the project are encouraged to drop by. Usually, they get pointed to the right place in the wiki, where most questions have already been answered. A good page to read if you want to know what is going on in the project is the Community Updates page. Right now it has not been updated in over a week, but I'm sure it will be soon.
Unfortunately, a hardware bug in power management with GTA02v4 has required a fifth revision of the hardware for GTA02. It's a bit of a shame that the release will be delayed even further, but I'd rather have good hardware later, than something broken right now.
The most interesting code changes in OpenMoko recently involves gsmd, PhoneKit(pdf) and the dbus interface to it. The dialer and sms handling is also being worked at in a furious pace by the OpenedHand guys. Since about a week, calling has worked without any problems for me. Power management has been improved and the phone should last at least a day now.
Also, some guys from Ixonos have been working on an alternative to gsmd, gsmd2. I haven't looked at the code, but they have some very nice documentation and a detailed specification. Still, lots to be discussed it seems.
The GPS binary driver is still not available for download. OpenMoko have been promised by Global Locate that they will be able to distribute it, but the legal terms are not yet set. Hopefully this will be solved soon.
All in all, a lot is going on and the software will be in pretty good shape for when the GTA02 is released.
2007-08-19
OpenMoko 2007.2
A few weeks ago I ordered the Neo1973 phone and have been playing around with it a bit since. The software is currently early alpha state and often fails to even build correctly, but that's what we all expect at this early phase of development.
The easiest way to build a complete image to flash on the phone has been to use Rod Whitby's MokoMakefile. Basically all you have to write is "make openmoko-devel-image" and wait a few hours. To compile the whole OpenMoko distribution from scratch takes about 10 hours on my AMD64 3000+, so it's not something you just do in a heartbeat.
The OpenMoko Wiki is really working well and it's still expanding quickly. #openmoko on Freenode is also a very busy channel, currently around 320 people in it. There's always someone there to point you in the right direction if there's some trouble with your Neo.
I have yet to make any applications on my own to install or include in the rootfs, but I'm trying to keep up with the latest development and I'm still learning how bitbake works.
I haven't even been able to make a call with the phone yet, or been able to use the GPS. But that's fine for now, I did order a development sample of a phone. The battery on the Neo doesn't last long either since the power management isn't really working yet. Basically it can be on for a few hours, then it dies completely.
The screen looks great though, and the size is nice. The touchscreen feels good, but is a bit difficult to use near the edges. It's definitely a bit slow to use still, but the GTA02 version (mine is GTA01) will have some nice additions, including WiFi, 3D Graphics accelerators and a faster processor.
There's still a lot of people ordering the developer version of the phone and I'm sure that we'll see a lot of interesting applications fairly quickly. I do worry a bit about the stability and quality of it though. Hopefully they will lock down a stable release in good time before the public release of the phone so that there's enough time to test and bugfix without introducing more problems.
I have no doubt that there will be lots and lots of games and utilities for this phone in a years time. The Neo1973 is still only for tinkerers who like to mess around, but the future is promising.
The easiest way to build a complete image to flash on the phone has been to use Rod Whitby's MokoMakefile. Basically all you have to write is "make openmoko-devel-image" and wait a few hours. To compile the whole OpenMoko distribution from scratch takes about 10 hours on my AMD64 3000+, so it's not something you just do in a heartbeat.
The OpenMoko Wiki is really working well and it's still expanding quickly. #openmoko on Freenode is also a very busy channel, currently around 320 people in it. There's always someone there to point you in the right direction if there's some trouble with your Neo.
I have yet to make any applications on my own to install or include in the rootfs, but I'm trying to keep up with the latest development and I'm still learning how bitbake works.
I haven't even been able to make a call with the phone yet, or been able to use the GPS. But that's fine for now, I did order a development sample of a phone. The battery on the Neo doesn't last long either since the power management isn't really working yet. Basically it can be on for a few hours, then it dies completely.
The screen looks great though, and the size is nice. The touchscreen feels good, but is a bit difficult to use near the edges. It's definitely a bit slow to use still, but the GTA02 version (mine is GTA01) will have some nice additions, including WiFi, 3D Graphics accelerators and a faster processor.
There's still a lot of people ordering the developer version of the phone and I'm sure that we'll see a lot of interesting applications fairly quickly. I do worry a bit about the stability and quality of it though. Hopefully they will lock down a stable release in good time before the public release of the phone so that there's enough time to test and bugfix without introducing more problems.
I have no doubt that there will be lots and lots of games and utilities for this phone in a years time. The Neo1973 is still only for tinkerers who like to mess around, but the future is promising.
2007-03-28
Geotagging
GPS tagging photos on Flickr has been done for a long time, but I had not seen it on regular blogs yet. Why not? You could do a lot of fun with that! At least I hadn't heard any noise about it so I thought it hadn't really taken off. But of course some clever people had started working on this long ago and things are well on the way.
The first thoughts around this I got from reading an article on O'Reilly radar about Google supporting GeoRSS. That led me to the GeoRSS homepage which links straight to geotagthings.com. In geotagthings (still in beta) you can subscribe to a feed that's an aggregation of many geotagged feeds that are limited to be within a certain area of your choice. I think it would be really fun to see what other bloggers in the block are saying and what pictures they are posting.
Then of course there's the question of how to easily add geotags to all blog posts. It should of course happen automatically if possible, but good support for adding it manually should be built into all blogging software. There should be the possibility to save some default locations where you do most posts from and a row with free editing, just to enter latitude and longitude.
There's a newly started GNOME project called GeoClue, which is about making a DBus service for geographic information. They have a great list on the homepage with suggestions of how this information could be used and I really hope this to takes off. The more this is integrated into the desktop the better.
One of many cool things mentioned on the GeoClue page is Placeopedia. Placeopedia is an effort to connect Wikipedia articles with the location they are talking about. This is exactly what I want to have in my Neo1973 when I'm out traveling somewhere. "Is there something interesting around here?" - One look on the map and I can click and read the article about it.
Of course some clever minds at Google have also been looking at this stuff. There's been some rumors that maybe Google was making a phone, but of course they were not going build any hardware. The proof for this is this patent for quicker search results when using a mobile device was dug up by Mad4MobilePhones. It shows that Google was, as usually, looking for a way to get better and faster search results. Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica took a closer look on this new mobile search and really liked it. The last piece of the puzzle is how to add the positioning automatically. (Google's mobile search currently needs you to enter your current Zip code to tell where you are.)
GPS receivers are getting built into more and more things and now we have to make it possible to get the geographic information to all programs that can make use of it.
The first thoughts around this I got from reading an article on O'Reilly radar about Google supporting GeoRSS. That led me to the GeoRSS homepage which links straight to geotagthings.com. In geotagthings (still in beta) you can subscribe to a feed that's an aggregation of many geotagged feeds that are limited to be within a certain area of your choice. I think it would be really fun to see what other bloggers in the block are saying and what pictures they are posting.
Then of course there's the question of how to easily add geotags to all blog posts. It should of course happen automatically if possible, but good support for adding it manually should be built into all blogging software. There should be the possibility to save some default locations where you do most posts from and a row with free editing, just to enter latitude and longitude.
There's a newly started GNOME project called GeoClue, which is about making a DBus service for geographic information. They have a great list on the homepage with suggestions of how this information could be used and I really hope this to takes off. The more this is integrated into the desktop the better.
One of many cool things mentioned on the GeoClue page is Placeopedia. Placeopedia is an effort to connect Wikipedia articles with the location they are talking about. This is exactly what I want to have in my Neo1973 when I'm out traveling somewhere. "Is there something interesting around here?" - One look on the map and I can click and read the article about it.
Of course some clever minds at Google have also been looking at this stuff. There's been some rumors that maybe Google was making a phone, but of course they were not going build any hardware. The proof for this is this patent for quicker search results when using a mobile device was dug up by Mad4MobilePhones. It shows that Google was, as usually, looking for a way to get better and faster search results. Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica took a closer look on this new mobile search and really liked it. The last piece of the puzzle is how to add the positioning automatically. (Google's mobile search currently needs you to enter your current Zip code to tell where you are.)
GPS receivers are getting built into more and more things and now we have to make it possible to get the geographic information to all programs that can make use of it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
