Marcin Juszkiewicz

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 ;)

Today I finished storage upgrade of my box. Before I had only PATA devices. Recently I bought Serial ATA II hard drive so my config was (2.6.21-rc3 kernel with libata for all SATA/PATA devices):

ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3120026A       3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)

scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            TOSHIBA  DVD-ROM SD-M1212 1R22 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 32x/32x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

scsi 1:0:1:0: CD-ROM            TEAC     CD-W516EB        1.0K PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3320620NS      3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)

PATA bus contain: Seagate 120GB hdd which I bought in 2003, then 9 years old Toshiba DVD drive and 6 years old Teac CD writer. Then SATA Seagate 320GB hdd which I bought one week ago and configured as LVM (some parts of 120GB will be added into it).

Today I took out old PATA optical drives and replaced them with Samsung SH-S183A DVD writer (Serial ATA). Now bus look a bit different:

 ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
 ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
 ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
 scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3120026A       3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)

 ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
 ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
 ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
 scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3320620NS      3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)

 scsi 6:0:0:0: CD-ROM            TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S183A SB02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 94x/94x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

That “94x writer” looks funny as this is 18xDVD writer. And I must say that due to switch to libata in Linux there are no problems with handling Serial ATA devices (nevermind hdd or atapi ones).

USB Networking is not my preferred way of networking but it is quite usable with palmtops or Neo1973 phone (which spend most of time connected to USB due to charging problems in GTA01Bv3). But this also has some problems due to fat that this is hotplugable:

• each plug mean usbX device re-appear
• no idea which usbX it will be this time

Today I moved my Zaurus c7x0 back to using WiFi so second problem disappeared for me (now only Neo1973 is connected over USB) but first problem was still present. I was tired to having to write sudo ifdown usb0;sudo ifup usb0 each time when I reconnected phone so after reading some man pages I updated my /etc/network/interfaces with this:

allow-hotplug usb0
iface usb0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.200
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.0.0
        post-up iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.0.0/24
        post-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
        post-up iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

And now when I connect phone (which has 192.168.0.202 IP) it gets connection to world automatically.

During first days of playing with Neo1973 I got a problem with connecting to GSM modem. It just does not worked at all. It was reported in OpenMoko bugzilla so I added comment.

Today I tried to enable hardware flow control by hand after starting ‘cu’ and it works!

Time to go somewhere and buy cheap prepaid card for testing.

During last weeks I mostly work for OpenedHand company. In this time I became more and more addicted to some of programming related KDE apps. My usual set of working programs consists:

Basket

Great note taking apps which I use to keep 3-4 lists of ToDo items.

KDESvn

Subversion client which is nicely integrated in Konqueror window.

KDiff3

merge util which is too good to not be used

Kompare

difference showing util which visualize changes (KDESvn can use it)

Another interesting apps:

KScope

KDE interface to Cscope — provides a source-editing environment for large C projects. Good thing if you want to work with things like kernel drivers. Linux.com had article about this tool quite recently.

PicoCom

Minimal dumb-terminal emulation program — very useful when it comes to talk with U-Boot on Neo1973 or talking to GSM Modem inside of that phone. Much better then cu from uucp package as this one does not need any permission changes, extra spool directories etc crap.

Some of my readers use them, some use other stuff. If you know interesting application which can help me in doing my programmer/system integrator work then feel free to add info in comments.

Yesterday I got my Neo1973 phase0 phone. It came with black/silver case which I think is nicer then white/orange or white/red ones. By default it came without any phone related applications because they are not written yet or are not ready to be used even by developers.

Phone itself is bigger then my current one. Screen is… awesome — very clear and bright (LCD has 3957 levels of brightness).

When it comes to wireless connections there is Bluetooth 2.0 EDR available and GSM/GPRS (no EDGE or UMTS). By default also USB Networking is available (I do not like this way but it works out-of-box).

Ah.. and it has only two buttons — Power and AUX (also called 911 button). And GPS (Hammerhead chipset).

I plan to write longer review during next few days.