FDOM: Fat and Dirty for OpenMoko

Since my upgrade to Openmoko 2008.9 testing failed I decided to try FDOM that many people seem to like. It’s basically 2008.9 with some patches and many preinstalled applications developed mostly by David-Reyes Samblas Martinez

FDOM main menu in landscape mode

Flash!

• Download the FDOM image and the kernel image (I got Fat_and_Dirty_OM.200809_20080927.rootfs.jffs2 and Om2008.9-gta02-20080916.uImage.bin)
• Flash (log)

Waiting for the FDOM image to be flashed (it takes long) I have time to let you know that the Weekly Engineering News has been released again with good news that will – I hope, bring us a software that will make Freerunner usable as a phone: audio, gsm and suspend working. 

We decided to focus our engineering on just the basics, even less eye candy: Robust kernel,  fast boot time, basic telephony with great audio quality, powerful configuration from the command line, hardware quality. That’s it.  We will stop working on our Installer, Locations, Diversity and Settings applications. We will get back to all this when the rest is rock solid, but now is not the time. Feel free to pickup any of these projects in the meantime, it’s a great way to get affiliated with Openmoko as we will surely get back to them later – hardware features of GTA03 remain as currently planned.

You can check here what they’ll be focusing on.

FDOM main menu

Run!

• Same startup graphics as 2008.9, no changes there.
• It boots with a huge list of preinstalled software. Cool – and I suppose it all more or less works!
• Asks for the PIN code. The keyboard layout is different: this one has ‘numbers’ and ‘symbols’ as the 2008.9 one had all of these in one layout. Good, bad? Don’t know yet.
• For some reason it loks like that the registering to GSM network is faster than on 2008.9 and the PIN dialog actually closes after I’ve entered the PIN there :)
• SSH in
• To see the disk usage, check here

Config

• Before anything else I created a dir in my home directory where I uploaded all my custom scripts. To connect to my home & work WLAN networks, adjust screen brightness and so on and added this folder to the path (export PATH=~/scrips:$PATH) and changed the permissions of the files (chmod 755 ~/scripts/*)
• Now I was able install qpe-scap for screenshots: opkg install qpe-scap
• I noticed that the ‘Settings’ tool to control Wifi, Bluetooth, GGP and so on has been replaced by ‘Config’ that has ‘Services’ and ‘Settings’ submenus. Good!
• So I tried to connect to our home WLAN with Mofi-Wifi. The phone was quite unresponsive for a while but it connected anyway. Good! Here I lost the USB-SSH connection. Can’t SSH in through the WLAN either (because it’s been disabled by default, see this to enable). Interesting. Reattaching the USB cable doesn’t help.
• Finally running ifdown usb0 and ifup usb0 on the phone resolved this.
• After this I killed the process qpe (some indexing something) that takes up tuo 90% of CPU: killall qpe - The UI become much more responsive!!  See the fix here to disable qpe scanning the SD card and it’s tens of thousands map files.

Update

opkg update and opkg upgrade downloaded many new files. I run it twice and still some packages failed.

Stuff

As said before, FDOM is about stuff. It has some patches in it that the original 2008.9 doesn’t have and FDOM has a bunch of preinstalled applications, including nano, the text editor of my choice. For some kind of list of the included software check the changelog. Here’re some of my remarks:

• When an application crashes there’s a small stop sign in the icon area (top right). Clicking this gives an ‘Application execution error’ window with some more information. Not bad. Though it looks like that no matter what programs I close I get this :/
• 

  Numptyphysics

  Numptyphysics is nice! It’s a nice toy to let people play on Freerunner and give them the feeling that it’s a cool device. I know that there’s been some nice development done after the last release so I’m already waiting for the next one. And I’d like to see a landscape screen version of it: now it’s very small.

• Midori is OK as a web browser but it’s quite slow, bookmarks and settings don’t work and so on but.. you can open surf the web with it. Anyway, I installed Dillo (ipk download), a lightweight web browser. Yes, It’s fast but it has some difficulties loading pages. I type the address and press enter and.. nothing happens. But when it works, it’s nice. And it doesn’t force you to have the keyboard around all the time.
• 

  FDOM main menu in landscape mode

  Tap/Untap is a tool to rotate the screen. Rotates ok but some gray bars are left around and go away only after scrolling the menu. See the picture.

• pythm works as well – great, the first music player that actually plays music the first time I run it :) I tried playing some mp3 files (I don’t know about the compression.. 4-5Mb/song). If I don’t do anything else it plays ok but trying to do somethin makes the Xglamo jump up top 60% of the processor resources. This doesn’t leave enough resources for the music to play. Usually it’s only temporary but for example Numptyphysics can’t be run simultaneously with pythm. I don’t know if mpd backend would help, I only tried mplayer that you always have to start when starting the program. I had some problems browsing directories to open music files. The volume control is very rough, it has 3 usable volume levels: ~off (the first ~five states), normal and loud and you can’t save the playlist. But hey, it’s able to play your music!
• 

  FDOM games menu

  Games: All the games are under the ‘Games’ menu – except Duke3d and Numptyphysics. I’ve tried Duke3d on 2007.x and it was.. ok. I’m not a fan of games like that but it’s again a nice application to show what Freerunner can do. This time it didn’t start, I suppose it’s about the accelerometers not working. But other than that most of the openmoko games are boring. I like Untangle the most, it’s a nice brain teaser. What wonders me is the order the games are in the menu: it’s not alphabetical.

• GPS applications (GPS & Map (=tangogps), Navit and GPS Testing (=AGPSui)) can be found in a single menu as well. I’ve never tried navit and wasn’t able to test it now either but it’s supposed to be able to navigate you home or something. Actually also Orrery is a GPS app but its in the main menu, not here. And Orrery is a nice tool to study stars! What I don’t like here is that Tangogps is set to use Google maps by default, not Openstreetmap. Not good!
• 

  FDOM calendar

  Calendar looks cool. Didn’t test it much but looks like that it doesn’t have a proper touch screen support (you cant slide the stylos to scroll to next/previous day/month etc..). And I wonder how the alert works, I suppose you need to have the application on to get a reminder alert.

• Contacts, Dialer, Messages. I don’t use Freerunner as my primary phone yet (but I think the time is near..). I think these applications do the basic stuff but need still some love to have all the cool features. I’d like to know if some application handles the long SMS’s (up to 3*140 characters?)?
• Voice quality: you can enable the echo cancelling downloading the .so file here and a new gsmhandset.state file (located in /usr/share/openmoko/scenarios) here.
• 

  Qtopia clock

  Clock is visible in the icon bar. Howerever you can find a c00ler one from top menu -> wrench -> scroll down -> clock. Here you also have alarm and stopwatch as well as a GUI to set the time.

• Linphone – if this really works, it’s cool! It’s a VoIP phone software which means you can make phone calls for free anywhere where you have WLAN connection. But again, I can’t type in the account settings because of the small screen killing the layout.
• To have Pidgin is a nice idea but at this stage it’s a fail. Some programs or windows have content that doesn’t fit the screen (Pidgin -> add account -> Google talk for example on some cases). And always there are no scrolling bars to allow you to go and find the ‘save’ button from the bottom of the screen. And if you need keyboard this becomes even more of a mess.  So I can’t add Google Talk / XMPP account in Pidgin. And anyway, the content of the windows becomes visible only after I’ve once clicked ‘cancel’ which again scales the window to even smaller. It’s nice to have an instant messenger here but this one just doesn’t work at the moment. Has someone given centerim a try?
• 

  FDOM module settings screen size fail

  Battery settings and Module Settings behind the wrench menu are useless, you can see only a small part of what’s there. Starting this over SSH -X would be ok if I only knew what command to run. There seems to be some problems with the screen size and windows: many applications are useless because of not being able to see all the UI elements that flow outside the screen and so on.

• The installer application of 2008.9 has been removed. Why? It was a nice and user friendly way to install the most popular apps of the repositories and I hope that in the future something like this ins included in all distros.
• 

  Omview thumbnail view

  OmView is an image viewer. And I still can’t believe it’s able to show RAW images (Nikon NEF in my case). I’m 99% sure this is the only phone model in the world that does this. GREAT! I’d like some navigation hints here: In the directory view you can open a directory by clicking it’s name. You can scroll the list of directories by sliding the stylus from right to left (or vice versa). When you open a dir that has images you automatically see the thumbnails. Again right/left slide shows you more images. Sliding up takes you up in the hierarchy and sliding down doesn’t do anythin. Now when you click an image, you see it full screen (looks great on this display!). Right-> left shows the previous photo, left-> right the next one. Sliding down->up shows you the thumbnails. Clicking the image gives you the 100% view (here you can pan around with the stylus) and re-clicking takes you back to the ‘fit to screen’ mode. I noticed that opening the 100% mode rotated the image from the ‘best fit’ rotation to actual. So a landscape image is shown like this (Freerunner on portrait view mode): landscape thumb, portrait ‘best fit’ and then again landscape 100%. This keeps your phone moving :) Just a reminder: the RAW support is so cool, I want to thank all the developers here

• Not included in FDOM but a some cool games to enjoy: OpenMooCow (tilt the phone down & up to get a ‘moo’ sound) and Pingus (Lemmings-clone) and

But after all, FDOM is an easy way to make your Freerunner be almost a working phone. Suspend works, wlan works, phone works. I think the setting starts to clear: Openmoko will focus on core stuff (suspend, wlan stability, audio quality problems etc) and others will work on the applications. FDOM is a good example on this: it collects the bits and pieces of the small projects and creates one image to flash into your phone. This is what Ubuntu does to desktop Linux community: makes Linux useable and easy to use. And still, still people are saying they don’t contribute. I think it’s a huge contribution from both FDOM and Ubuntu. Great work!

Share

No related posts.