Openmoko 2008.9 first impressions

Main menu view

Finally got to the point when I had the time to install 2008.9. Here’s what I did and how is it like.

Flash

• Download images & splash screen
• Flash with the following commands:
  sudo dfu-util -a splash -D Om2008.9.splash.gz
  sudo dfu-util -a kernel -R -D Om2008.9-gta02-20080916.uImage.bin
  sudo dfu-util -a rootfs -R -D Om2008.9-gta02-20080916.rootfs.jffs2
• Start!

First run

So now I’m running 2008.9. new splash screen: the green bar is moving from side to side, nice :) I end in the home view, start view, whatever you want to call it.

Keyboard in terminal mode

I’m asked for PIN and a keyboard is shown that doesn’ have any number keys. Nice. But I know that scrolling up/down on the right edge you’ll get to another keyboard layout that has numbers. So I get there and type numbers – just to find out that the ‘enter’ button is gone. Who needs GPS anway so I close the PIN request dialog – I’ve 2008.x this on a friends Freerunner so I know that you can close programs with the remove button you’ll find clicking the top bar.

Then I read some wiki pages for some seconds and bang – the phone’s black. Suspend, I suppose. I just can’t make it wake up. Touchscreen, AUX and power have no effect. So remove the battery & restart and as soon as the phone starts I go to the settings to disable suspending. Later I try AUX and power buttons to see that AUX locks the screen, power suspends and holding power down shuts down.

Update

• connect USB cable
• ssh in (this is my fr_bind -script, requires bind9 installed on Ubuntu)
  sudo ifdown usb0 && sudo ifup usb0
  sudo ifdown usb0 && sudo ifup usb0
  sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart
  ssh root@192.168.0.202 -X
• great, got in!
• Connect to WLAN: iwconfig eth0 essid coconuts && udhcpc -> connected
• Upgrade to the latest packages: opkg update and opkg upgrade and restart (I’m not sure if it was required: Don’t know what’s angstrom but I it could need a restart so I did it..)
• Reconnect to the phone with USB. ping www.google.com doesn’t work. OK, I see that I’d have to edit /etc/network/interfaces for USB networking to work
• nano /etc/network/interfaces – just to see that the nano text editor  isn’t installed by default. I’m not a friend of vi so..
• opkg install nano and retry the previous command to edit the interfaces file. Will try later if USB networking works.

So at this stage I have the phone updated, nano installed and automatic suspend turned off.

User interface

Dropdown menu

I think the UI is not that bad. Simple icon view layout by default. I have no idea what are the +:s in the bottom, why is there a star in the bottom left corner and why is the launcher for the installer there and not in the default view as a normal icon?

Anyway. Black, slick, colorful icons, time, wlan icon and battery status notifier on top right. UI feels nice responsive.

The drop down menu on the top.. I guess it does what it’s expected to do: enables you to change between running programs and also ‘remove’ programs = kill/close them. But why is it called remove? Why is the ‘remove’ button at the bottom of the drop down menu, not at the top where you’ve just clicked to see the menu. And why isn’t the button to close the menu at the top, not in the bottom again.

Compared to 2007 – I felt 2007 to be more like a phone with the home view and 2008 more like a palm device.

Settings

Settings

There’s a ‘Settings’ icon that starts the settings tool that shows you a list of the most important settings to fiddle with:

• Wifi – looks like it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t show the status of WiFi adapter, list of available networks nor the name of the enabled connection. Useless.
• Bluetooth simply switches bluetooth on or off and shows the status. I don’t know if it really does it or just tries to convince you to have done it. It doesn’t let you edit the Bluetooth pairing settings.
• GPS on/off. I’d hope the following versions to be able to show if there’s a fix, how many satellites are around and so on.
• Brightness high/medium/low adjusts the screen brightness. Excellent tool to save your battery. I had something similar in 2007.2 with five steps to be able to use the lowest possible brightness.
• Profile is ‘unknown’ all the time, no changes no matter how much you click around there.
• Suspend lets you select between off/10/30/60s. That’s the delay between something, maybe the last user action and the phone suspend. Will try it later, so far I have it off because I’m not sure the phone is able to recover from suspend
• Clock does nothing. The real time is 15:57, Freerunner shows 16:51. Should go to the terminal to adjust the time. Who cares :)
• System info shows some information about the software: Tag name (empty) the version (as a md5 hash!?), branch (org.openmoko.asu.stable), build host (barbie), time stamp (Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:25:15 +0800) and U-Boot (Neo1973 Bootloader U-Boot 1.3.2-moko12)

Installer

Installer: categories

There’s this new graphical tool to install programs. Great, it’s a pain to try to find programs in the repositories and install them using the stylus (that I’ve lost anyway..). So I start the installer with the button in the bottom.

It’s really slow. I mean really slow! I’ve heard that having a lot of stuff (like some gigs of openstreetmap images) on the µSD card can kill your phone because qpe (whatever that is) starts to index the files there. So I started top over the ssh and killed qpe and got the phone responding again. For a better fix see known issues.

Ah, to be able to use installer I need a network connection so iwconfig eth0 essid coconuts && udhcpc again.

Installer: list of programs

Installer starts with a list of the program categories. Clicking a category you get a list of programs there. Playing around for a while I realise that the buttons on the bottom (install / update / uninstall) change the view in the categories. If ‘install’ is active and you browse the menu, you see a list of programs that you can install and if ‘uninstall’ is active, you see a list of programs that are installed and can be uninstalled. First playing around I selected a program and pressed the ‘install’ button in the bottom and was wondering why is it so fast installing stuff like Midori, the web browser. The next thought is that maybe I now mark  programs to be installed and install them all later on one go. No, that was wrong too, you install programs by hitting the huge button in the program detail view. The package is downloaded and installed nice & smooth.

Installer: program information

A problem with the installer is that the names of the programs doesn’t fit in the screen so there are a lot of ‘qtopia-phone-x11-’ programs that you have to go and check to see what it actually is.

So this is what I installed. Some were installed just to see what they are like.

• Midori, web browser
• diversity-nav, ‘a GPS location based communicative application’
• diversity-wifi, something to manage wifi connections?
• qtopia-phone-x11-taskmanager-app?, a task manager
• openmoko-terminal2, the Openmoko command line terminal
• comic-reader, a comic reader for Otaku (whatever that is..)
• comic_book_cc_comic, another comic reader
• qtopia-phone-x11-fifteen, some kind of a game
• qtopia-phone-x11-minesweep, minesweeper game
• qtopia-phone-x11-snake, a snake game
• illume-config, a new Illume theme with configure tools and a button to launch the keyboard manually -> ASSASSIN got stuck because of this! I killed assassin and installed on the command line: it asks to replace /etc/enlightenment/default_profile and Assassindoesn’t know how to show this.
• omview, an image viewer that supports RAW images! Let’s see how Nikon NEF images work here..
• openmoko-calculator2
• qtopia-phone-x11-photoedit
• openmoko-mediaplayer2 (important information)
• qtopia-phone-x11-calculator
• qtopia-phone-x11-mediaplayer
• qtopia-phone-x11-textedit
• gpe-scap for screenshots

The more I use 2008, the more I like the interface. I like the animations it has downloading and installing stuff, opening menus and so on. It just makes it look more like a finished product. Well done you devels over there!

Then I uploaded some photos (jpg,tiff, nef) and music (mp3 and ogg) in the phone to try the media players and image viewers. But anyway, I think I’ll review the software later.

After these updates the ‘wifi’ option in the settings menu was able to show me the networks (though connecting failed for some reason), I actually had profiles (ring only/ ring and vibrate/silent/vibrate only) amd so on. Also suspend seems to work, just remember that to wake it up you need to press the power button for a very short time or it will suspend again. But then later I again lost the profiles.. weird..

General fail

I don’t know what happened but the programs won’t start any more. If I try to start the Dialer from the menu, nothing happens. Same thing with Messages and Contacts. Actually there’s only very few programs I can start from the menu, some from command line and some wont start at all. Openmoko-terminal, -calculator and -mediaplayer start ok.

Here are some of the messages I get:

Diversity-nav
Error connecting to bus: dbus-launch failed to autolaunch D-Bus session: Autolaunch requested, but X11 support not compiled in.
Cannot continue.

Fifteen
Segmentation fault (#2015)

Qtopia mediaplayer (and other qtopia programs)
Nothing happens.

So I can’t start Messages, Dialer nor Contacts to try to the calls stuff. I once got the screen telling I have two new messages, do I want to see them and yes, I was able to see them. Another time I called Freerunner from another phone but nothing happened, possibly because of the lost profiles in the settings menu. For some programs (like mofi-wifi and accelgame) it helps to edit /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py line 82 and change ‘init’ to ‘_init’ (#1718)

Do your homework

I’ll go to have a better look at the wikipages like this, this and this about 2008.x, the bug tracker and mailing lists if I’d be able to find some solutions or then write some bug reports.  Anyway, I think that by Christmas we have something very useful as this is already in a very good state!

For more reviews, check http://onlinedev.blogspot.com/

Some days later

Programs run nice, I’ve found some more cool applications. Profiles work more or less. Calling (with some echo) and SMS works, wlan and gps works. I’m happy. Until I decide to try to upgrade to 2008.9 testing repository. After the upgrade the phone just won’t start. A change to try something else :)

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