Hi all, end of the month - time to take some breath of air and write a status update of the OpenPhoenux/GTA04 project.
1. Group Tour is still in production (with problems). About 30% of the boards have been produced but had failures. About 1/3 of those had been without problems or have been fixed now. These units have already been shipped last week (based on a first order first served sequence). The other boards are in rework. The production company now thinks they have managed how to raise production yield. But due to illness and school holidays in Bavaria, they have not yet continued to work. So please expect that it will become End of June for delivery... As soon as these group tour devices have finally been shipped, we can start planning the next version/release. But then with keeping a better eye on the production yield and speed. To avoid misunderstandings: the electronical design is working very well, as the devices show that have already been shipped. It is a pure production problem with the solder joints of the chips on the PCB. No electrical or electronical problems without a workaround. It is like running a completely debugged software on defective memory... Or having a 200mph sports car that you can't use because some of the screws are loose. But for each unit there are different ones so you have to check them all. 2. Presentation at LinuxTag Lukas and myself gave a well recognized presentation for an audience of approx. 70 listeners. And we had that "project meeting point", which is a booth shared by several projects. We had very interesting discussions there. Presentation slides: http://download.goldelico.com/default/Presentations/20120526%20LinuxTag%202012%20-%20Openmoko%20is%20dead%20-%20long%20live%20Openphoenux.pdf 3. free 3D Graphics driver one topic came up during LinuxTag: free 3D graphics drivers. As you may know, the DM3730 has a integrated PowerVR SGX530 GPU which is currently not even used. There exist drivers and non-free binaries for user space and firmware available through the BeagleBoard.org project and TI. So it is not used just because nobody did look deeply enough into the installation procedures. Unfortunately these are "non-free" software. While for the MALI GPU, there is a very active project to reverse engineer and write a free driver. This got quite a lot of attention during FOSDEM and LinuxTag. For the PowerVR there was also a project proposal last year and it was even made a high priority project by FSF. So I tried to find out the current status. Well, FSF forgot to kick off the project (they said they will now take care of it). And there is no more progress than http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:PowerVR_drivers http://lkcl.net/powervr/sgx/ (list of reverse engineered PowerVR SGX USSE Opcodes) http://elinux.org/Create_Open_Source_PowerVR_GPU_driver And I got in contact with a handful of people interested in this. Since I would find it good to give us more freedom of choice for 3D drivers, I offered to use the gta04-owner mailing list for discussions. And maybe some of you are also interested to contribute to this. 4. Nomenclature OpenPhoneux/GTA04 There may be some confusion what "GTA04" and "OpenPhoneux" are and what makes them different. We define: * GTA*: the next generation motherboard(s), i.e. electronics * OpenPhonux: the future "independent mobile handheld" project aiming at complete devices (i.e. GTA04 + case + components) Currently, we run the domains www.gta04.org and www.openphoenux.org. The Openphoenux.org home page will be made more prominent and content rich soon. This is done to become independent from the OpenMoko brand and the www.openmoko.org domain whose future and fate is completely uncertain. 5. OpenPhoenux Community For the reasons mentioned above, we invite everybody to subscribe to http://lists.openphoenux.org/mailman/listinfo/community which we hope will become the new community for those interested in free and open and independent smartphone platforms. For some time there will of course be overlap, duplication and friction... But this new list belongs to a project that is active. After a while we may be able to close the gta04-owner list and switch over to openphoenux community. 6. GTA04 installation parties One more idea was triggered by the LinuxTag discussions: Who of you would be interested in organizing a GTA04 installation party in your region? Some member of the GTA04 core team could try to come and help installing the device, the display, the camera and also give some introduction presentations for software installations. Happy flying with the OpenPhoneux, Nikolaus _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community