Marcin Juszkiewicz

When I got my Neo1973 it was known that there are problems with charging. Package contained USB wall charger (with US plug) which was useless due to not being conform with USB specification as device can use only 100mA and for more it have to ask — but how to ask dumb charger?

Before Pingwinaria 2007 conference I got into moment when my phone was so discharged that it had problem with charging itself. I started hunt for cheap Nokia phone using BL-5C batteries to use it as charger. I was also thinking about Nokia DT-14 (standalone battery charger). None of GSM shops which I visited had phone in acceptable price, but in last one seller told me that I should look for cheap 3rdparty battery chargers. Few days later I had one on my desk (with extra no-name BL-5C compatible battery).

It is good that I did not got DT-14 — Mickeyl got one and it refuse to charge original Neo1973 battery. Nokia phones also does not charge it. I even used Nokia 770 to test — it booted but no charge.

Now my Neo1973 most of time spends on desk connected via USB cable to powered hub which stay powered even when USB Host (my desktop) is not powered — from what I read many USB hubs switch off power on all ports when host goes down.

Few days ago Thomas Kunze wrote to openzaurus-devel list that he has working SD/MMC driver for Sharp Zaurus SL-5000/5500 (aka Collie). He provided patches and later also Ångström image + kernel so anyone can test.

I asked him for patches to current OpenEmbedded metadata and added them later so now anyone can build 2.6.20 kernel for collie to test SD/MMC. Koen Kooi built images for Ångström so it can be taken as start of support for this machine. Who knows.. maybe there will be no new OpenZaurus release when driver will work OK…

My collie (after charging and removing dust) booted nicely to 2.6.20 powered Ångström console image so I was able to test my cards against driver. Only 16MB MMC card was working so I sent two SD cards (64M and 256M) to Thomas. Now he will have also some not-yet-working cards for testing (all his SD/MMC cards works).

Also worth reminding — there is a bounty for writing SD/MMC driver for collie/2.6 so if you want to appreciate Thomas work you can join ;)

Today Koen gave me link to one discussion on Maemo-devel mailing list. It was about end of support for Nokia770.

Thread is interesting — some guys from Nokia wrote that this does not mean end but in same post write that there will be no new OS releases for 770. Hacker edition of OS2007 for 770 is also mentioned as solution but this is unofficial and unsupported (it works quite good on my device).

I think that Nokia770 is another device which will go into trashland due to fact that no one work on building external images for it. Ok, OpenEmbedded can build software for it but flasher is closed source and I do not know does format of flash images is published somewhere.

And some parts of Nokia rootfs are closed source too..

During last weeks there was so many things to do, few places to visit so I forgot to write about anniversary…

It was 2004-03-20 when I sent first contribution to OpenEmbedded mailing list. So I’m using OE for more then three years now :D

For over year I am making money on it and for last two months I work only on OpenEmbedded related things.

I wrote some about my work with OE in past:

• 30 months of OpenEmbedded and me
• Year with OpenEmbedded

As you see I moved my website to blog.haerwu.biz domain. Why? That’s good question.

In September 2006 I created my own company for my OpenEmbedded commercial work. I named it HaeRWu as this is how my nickname Hrw sounds in Polish. Did not wanted to use name such like ‘Hrw consulting’ as this will get too many false hits for people wanting to find Human Rights Watch organization. As result I have name which is probably hard to pronounce for English speakers (and most other).

I will leave old domain running for few months as redirect to new one. Also need to start moving my mail to haerwu.biz domain.

Interested what is under haerwu.biz address? It is website of my company where I plan to post more technical stuff such like OpenEmbedded or Linux related articles. My blog will became more private and I plan to write more often.

FIC Neo1973 phone is more or less ready for developers. GTA01Bv4 will be shipped soon but it will not have WiFi. The reason is simple — creators did not found chip which will:

• be small enough
• not eat lot of power
• have open sourced driver (I wrote more on drivers before)

If everything will go OK then during Summer there will be hardware update which will add WiFi (they are meeting with Taiwan companies to discuss availability of good chipsets) and maybe faster CPU or more flash…

I have to admit that I did not understand why people want WiFi in phone so much… But this is because I mostly use wireless when I am at home so I can use my desktop machine. But when I had to spent two hours on Munich airport during way to FOSDEM (Thx goes to Secunet company which sponsored my plane tickets) I had an option to use WiFi (not free iirc) so with proper hardware… RSS, Emails..

But time will show what will be in GTA01Bv5 (if it will exist at all). Now we have to get used to current hardware and write software for it.

In February I was at FOSDEM. As OpenEmbedded project had a booth there I took ProGear machine to show x86 machine running Ångström distribution. When I returned to home I had over 400 mails in inbox (result of few days without reading mail).

Week ago I was at Pingwinaria. This time I took laptop from Ania. It was Toshiba with 15.4” screen and MS Windows installed… So big, heavy and without Linux. But I was able to read mails so only ~200 mails was left to read after conference.

After that I decided that this is a time to buy laptop for own usage. It will be used only for conferences or other trips so it does not have to be powerful but small and light. Few guys from #oe, #openmoko suggested IBM ThinkPad X31/X32, one suggested PowerBook with G4 cpu. So now I am looking for cheap, used X31 or X32 (with WiFi, Bluetooth not required but would be nice). Contact me if you have one to sell for good price.

Why not something faster? I was thinking about buying AMD Turion X2 or Intel Core2 Duo to have machine powerful enough to do OpenEmbedded builds but I have quite fast 64bit desktop now which also work as build box so no need for fast portable machine. And such beast would not be small…

Yesterday I first time tried avahi on my Linux systems. And I have to tell that it looks interesting. All my machines provide informations about running services, I can connect to my phone via simple ssh neo.local instead of remembering which IP it has etc.

And all services can be checked from any host with one simple avahi-browse -a command:

Server version: avahi 0.6.16; Host name: home.local
E Ifce Prot Name                                          Type                 Domain
+ usb0 IPv4 Remote Terminal on neo                        SSH Remote Terminal  local
+ eth0 IPv4 Remote Terminal on c7x0                       SSH Remote Terminal  local
+ usb0 IPv4 SFTP File Transfer on neo                     SFTP File Transfer   local
+ eth0 IPv4 SFTP File Transfer on c7x0                    SFTP File Transfer   local
+ usb0 IPv4 home [3a:c2:64:5e:7b:1f]                      Workstation          local
+ usb0 IPv4 neo [92:5a:40:01:4a:77]                       Workstation          local
+ eth0 IPv4 c7x0 [00:10:7a:11:11:11]                      Workstation          local
+ eth0 IPv4 home [00:50:da:11:11:11]                      Workstation          local

UPDATE: Ångström will have avahi in default system ;)