OpenMoko 2007.2, distro comparison and community

2007.2 menu

I have a cool Openmoko Freerunner Linux-powered phone. It ships with Openmoko 2007.2 Linux distribution. Here are some experiences I’ve had now during about one and a half months I’ve had the phone. (+ short distro comparison & some words about the Openmoko community)

Disclaimer: I like the phone but the software is still waiting to be written. Freerunner isn’t yet intended for an average user.  I don’t know everything that’s happened and has been discussed so everything I write here is based on the impression I have. I’m also aware that some things that don’t work is because of kernel bugs, not to actual distro on top of the kernel.

History

As far as I know 2007.2 was originally developed by a great open source software house OpenedHand that was recently acquired by Intel. For some time Openmoko was developing the software but then (I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with Intel?) for reasons unclear to me the development of 2007.2 was stopped and it was abandoned to work on 2008.8, a new distribution. I hope at the moment the phones ship with something else if 2007.2 is no longer supported. Looks like that it was just a test release or similar to have something running there when the phone ships.

Freerunner ships with 2007.2

So though 2007.2 is already kind of dead I thought I’d wrote some thoughts about it here. I still have 2007.2 on my phone but I’m planning to upgrade to the latest releases, more about that later. Maybe I write this to remind me and other people later of the start or enable me better to see what I want and need.

The software version was about three months old when I got my phone so the first thing you need to do is to upgrade to the latest versions of kernel and other software: there have been a lot of changes. I guess you need to flash it unless upgrade works (wouldn’t bet on it..).

Openmoko 2007.2

I think 2007.2 was a great start.. It has a nice ‘home’ view that was able to show the time, strength of GSM field, status of USB, bluetooth, battery and so on. It has a nice menu that you can add programs to (not with the GUI though). Select the category and scroll up and down and click to start the program. 2007.2 even has a nice task manager that you can use to open another active program and kill processes. It has all this phone and messaging software one would need, including web browser. Behind the power button you get a  nice menu to manage connections (GSM, GPS, bluetooth) and power features (power management, power off, lock keyboard). Behind the AUX button you find a menu to make screenshots, rotate the screen and run a program in full screen mode. I think this was a great start! It’s stable, it suspends and wakes up ok and it was possible to make everything work (including GPRS, GSM, GPS, WLAN and with some customization and external programs this includes also WWW and actual phone calls – the volume levels are an issue). So a great start, I think.

.. but it’s not perfect…

• After turning off the GSM you were not able to reactivate it without a restart
• The built-in web browser just doesn’t work. I think I was able to load a page once.
• There’s no a GUI way to make the phone silent for a conference or so
• The alsamixer is a mess! It has about 20 sliders named irrationally so it’s very unclear what to do if you want to change something..
• The calls had echoing and some buzzing sound reported
• The default keyboard was bad! On a linux phone with the OS at it’s current state one needs a full qwerty keyboard to be able to use terminal to install stuff, fix and config..
• There’s no easy way to edit menu or create a GUI to run your own scripts or commands
• The terminology in the power management was a FAIL: Disabled (=lights on all the time for about 5 minutes, then lights turned off), Dim only, don’t lock (= lights on when in use, dims in some seconds and blanks the screen and enables the lock in 10s or so) and Dim first, then lock (=as previous but also, after waiting long enough, suspends the phone). Took me a while to understand how it works. Haven’t yet understood why they were named like this.
• Many button icons missing.. From web browser as well as from the included media player so it’s really hard to use those programs.
• Having GSM on makes the phone wake up every three minutes or so -> drains battery very fast
• Battery lasts only some hours
• Partition table on my uSD card is lost every now and then (the last few days it’s been there all the time, I think) -> I need to recreate it every time I want to use the data stored there after a restart or suspend.

Some things I customized or installed to have it running in the current state that let’s you make calls, suspend, surf the web and so on:

• Install new matchbox keyboard
• Install scripts & settings to enable GPRS (thanks Mirv!)
• Adjust alsamixer settings to minimize echoing and buzz during the calls (thanks Mirv!)
• Disable start and keyboard tap sounds
• Install agps and Tangogps for GPS things
• Install Numptyphysics to show how cool things you can do with a touch screen and a cool device
• Install AccelGame to try and demo the motion sensors
• Install mokoX48 and Mathomatic for maths
• Install Orrery to see the locations of the stars above me
• Make your friend to write you a handy python GUI to run your most important scripts
• Write about 10 small scripts to run most used commands, to be started from the starter GUI. Immediate suspend, adjust backlight brightness, show battery status, connect to home wlan etc..
• Install Mofi-wifi to manage WLAN networks
• Install Minimo to surf the web
• Install Eightball to test motion sensors (and help me with the difficult questions of my life. NOT!)
• And more..

So after this I have a cool phone that can do stuff and is OK to show other people. The battery still dies in some hours, you have to have phone volumes very low to get rid of echoing and you still end up using command line every now and then to recreate the uSD partition. But it’s still a cool open Linux phone that you can have in your pocket with your Nokia that you use as a primary phone.

Other distros

Zhone, (C) Openmoko Wiki

2008.x, (originally released as 2008.8 then upgraded to 2008.9) developed by Openmoko, uses EFL for the launcher, and Qtopia on X11 for phone stuff. It has a nice graphical application installer, locations GPS application and other things like that. 2008.9 is an update of 2008.8 and has a bunch of fixes that should improve the stability, compatibility and security of the phone. If I read the page correctly it doesn’t have many new features but mostly improvements and fixes. There’s still a long list of known issues like strong echo when calling, GMS stops working after x hours, wifi connects only once and so on. I have had 2007.2 running nice and read in the openmoko-community and openmoko-support mailing lists mostly complaints about 2008.8 so I thought that it’s not worth installing it. I still might give this a try later.

FDOM, is basically 2008.x repackaged: the Fat and Dirty OpenMoko distribution tries to take all the useful patches and great apps and make it to a distro that should be as complete as possible with the current resources. They don’t do kernel patching that much but include the latest applications. It has some cool applications written by the community installed by default, for example some tools for GPS, WLAN and accelerometers. For a list, check the FDOM wikipage. Sources are not available :(

Anyway, FDOM sounds like a good choice. Using the latest stuff (2008.x) and including the best and latest software I think it’s doing to Openmoko community what Ubuntu is doing to desktop Linux community – making it popular and cool for a normal people to start with. You don’t have to mess with all program installations, patches and fixes, it just works.

FSO (abbreviated from FreeSmartPhone.Org) is a bigger effort to create a common phone framework to be used on different platforms. Currently 2008.x, FDOM and SHR use the frameworkd originially created by FSO. As a distribution I have no information other than that the milestone 3 has been released. Go, try and report.

SHR is the Stable Hybrid Release. It uses the UI of 2007.2 but tries to replace the gsmd phone programs to frameworkd to make it actually usable as a phone.

Qtopia is developed by Trolltech (recently acquired by Nokia). It’s supposed to be a full working distro, as far as I know but from what I’ve heard the experiences have not been that good on Freerunner. I don’t really know. They’re about to release Qt extended soon.

Debian – who is surprised that you can install Debian on your Freerunner? Well, if you didn’t know that ARM architecture (version 4 or something) is supported, you might be surprised. But anyway, yes, you can install Debian on Freerunner. As far as I know it installs Zhone as the default phone app. XFCE seems to be popular as the desktop environment. The coolest benefit of installing Debian is the 20 000+ packages you can easily install by just one command. Cool is also the debian community that has all the tools there to make the development easy and well supported.

Gentoo is for freaks :) No, I really don’t have any experience here but some people have succeeded installing Gentoo on their Freerunners. Check it out, it’s an option :)

For more information about the distros check Openmoko wiki.

n+ distros – why?

So just some months after the release of Freerunner there are around 7 distros (we’re waiting for Google Android..) for you to install. I understand that Gentoo and Debian are around with their long history but to me the existence of 2007.2, 2008.x, SHR and FDOM sounds like bad community management. I know that the free/open source allows you to fork a project if you’re not happy but.. I just can’t see why 2007.2 was abandoned. With some little changes it could have been actually an usable distribution (as I’m writing this, 2007.2 doesn’t wake up from suspend any more. :( – after all it’s what shipped with the phone.  So then there was SHR that tries to use fix the biggest issues of 2007.2. Then we get 2008.x. The first comments were not encouraging but disappointing mostly. I suppose 2008.9 has fixed some of the issues. We’ll see what 2008.10 is like..

Community guidance required?

(C)Sephora / Rubino

About the community stuff, I think there must be something wrong if FDOM and SHR are needed. Why cannot these changes be made in the ‘official’ distros, 2007.x and 2008.x. Is it too difficult for a random developer to participate in the development? I really don’t know but the impression I get is that yes, it’s difficult to participate. The mailing lists seem to be a mess with people discussing X distributions there. I really don’t know what I’m allowed to submit in the OpenMoko bug tracker. I can’t see any guidance of the community, it’s just a mass of users talking on the mailing list with no real common goal. OK, some of us do write some instructions on the wiki and submit patches but.. I don’t know. I just like to have free/open source softwares communities to be a bit more than just a mailing list and a bug tracker.

I like the way Sephora and FDOM devels are listening to the community. Way to go!

Anyway, I believe that Freerunner and the Openmoko Community will eventually find the right direction. More information, more constructive communication and so on.

Comments? What’s your top distro?

Disclaimer: these are just my opinions and I’m not fully informed and there might be some wrong information so I’m sorry. Now I’ll try to back up 2007.2 and install Debian and/or FDOM and/or 2008.x.

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