Free of the FreeRunner

I've given up on trying to use the FreeRunner as an "every-day phone". There aren't enough buttons to support Android properly. Suspect/Resume support (vital on a power-limited device like a cellphone!) was always touchy. It was just all a bit too unfriendly.

So I bought a G1 from a friend-of-a-friend for cheap and unlocked it to work on my current provider. It's been fun! ConnectBot gives me an 80x22 ssh session anywhere - that's only 3 lines from the size of the standard PC text console that I spent so many of my teenage years in front of. The dev environment is open enough that I experimented with writing my own game - a falling-blocks game called Polyfallminoes. Contacts sync with google, the browser is fine to read ebooks on (I read html ebooks that I buy from webscriptions.net and host on my own server), and in general it acts like a nice polished platform. Not that things aren't missing, because they are... but I'm going to see what I can do about fixing that :)

microSD data corruption

In trying to get an FSO-daily on my microSD card, I discovered some microSD corruption: I copied a 35MB file over USB via scp straight to the micro SD card... and it was bogus. So I copied it instead to /tmp, which is on a ramdisk - and it worked fine. So to verify, I then tried to copy the file from /tmp to the micro SD card via 'cp'... and it was again bogus. So there's some corruption hiding there. This is with qtopia 4.3.2 rootfs and kernel.

A month of FreeRunning

So I ran Qtopia until I couldn't stand not being able to suspend it, at which point I decided to try the 2008.8 update. I put it on my 'unstable' partition (the microSD card) and it seemed to work okay. I ran with it for a while, always switching back to the (battery-eating) qtopia when I needed more stability.

Then I decided to do an opkg update/upgrade on the 2008.08 and... it merrily assumed that it was the main distro and reflashed the NAND kernel as well as (correctly) upgrading the uImage.bin in the FAT partition on the microSD card. *sigh* At that point I didn't have time to deal with it and 2008.08 seemed fine, so decided to see how it would go.

...and the answer was: unstably. It was nowhere near stable enough for daily use. So as of a couple days ago, I'm back on qtopia (4.3.2) as my main stable feed with FSO(m2+testing feed) as my 'unstable' distro. I did have to tweak the 'Speaker Playback Volume' in /usr/share/openmoko/scenarios/gsmhandset.state up to 127 (from the default of 100) to be able to hear the other end a bit better. Oh, and happily, qtopia now suspends correctly, so battery life is greatly enhanced to say the least!

Qtopia killed my battery!

By the way, if you have a FreeRunner and are running the Qtopia distro, you might be tempted to try and extend your battery life by enabling suspend... don't. It doesn't work correctly and far from saving your battery it will drain it so dead that sitting on the moko charger all night won't charge it.

Which makes me really glad I bought an external battery charger from some random cellphone supply shop I found on the 'net.

jffs2 to .tar.gz

Milestone 2 of FSO came out a few days ago, but inconveniently for those of us who wish to try it out by booting from a microSD card, there's only a jffs2 image file when what we really want is a tarball of the root filesystem. Sadly, the obvious loopback-mount-the-image-and-tar-it-up trick fails with an error:

MTD: Attempt to mount non-MTD device "/dev/loop0"

Here's a brief howto gleaned from the depths of the 'net:

• modprobe mtdram total_size=131072 erase_size=128
• modprobe mtdblock
• dd if=root.jffs2 of=/dev/mtdblock0
• mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock0 /mnt

The image itself is only 47M, so I reduced the 131072 (128k) above to 65536(64k) and it of course worked fine.

FreeRunner now running

On Friday I received my Openmoko FreeRunner phone. I've been waiting for this phone for literally years - I first heard about the project in December of 2006, and couldn't wait for it to materialize. Well, the Neo1973 came along and I couldn't justify it without wifi, but the FreeRunner corrects that lack, so I got in on a group order and got one.

2007.2 is a bit... confusing. I found the icons mostly non-intuitive and overall it felt very much like trying to extend the desktop metaphor into a UI space that it's not really meant for. The ASU daily build that I'm currently using is much simpler and nicer. I look forward to it maturing and hope to help it in that direction some myself!

As with most things, the technology is, in the long run, less important than the people. In this regard the community around the FreeRunner shines - #openmoko and the mailing lists are both quite helpful, as are the folk I met via the group buy.