Giacomo 'giotti' Mariani <giacomomari...@yahoo.it> wrote: > Hi David, Michael, all, > thanks a lot for your work, it is very emotional to see this > "little" piece of freedom rising!
You're welcome. :-) > I'm still not brave enough to risk my only (I mean in all my life time > so far) mobile phone, but I will soon ;-) There is nothing at risk really - if the leo2moko firmware doesn't work for you for some reason, you can always revert to moko11, using either our flashing tools or the "official" moko11 flasher. Even in the case of the FFS with the RF calibration values etc, there is absolutely no danger of corrupting this FFS if you issue loadtool commands exactly per the instructions. Saving a backup copy of the FFS sectors is a precaution just in case you erase or write to the wrong part of the flash. If you have this backup saved, you can always restore it. In the absolute worst case scenario imaginable, if someone does lose their RF calibration values and has no backup copy anywhere, you should be able to send your FR to some lab to get it recalibrated. I don't offer such service currently because I haven't acquired the necessary RF test equipment and process knowledge yet, but when I start building my own Calypso phones, I will obviously need to get them calibrated, and once we have the knowledge and the setup to do it, Harhan Engineering Co. will also offer recalibration services to Freerunner users. > By the way, I think that your work, with the right notes about being > experimental and so on of course, should also be in the official wiki. As much as I would love to see it happen, I doubt that the powers controlling that wiki will ever allow it. > A small question about the procedure you describe: is the t191 cable > only needed to backup the "vital parts of the calypso memory" or also to > write the new firmware? Both if you use the uSD system which David just released; neither if you get FreeCalypso loadtools running on the Linux processor of your FR like Norayr did. Oh, and just to be clear as to exactly what the "vital parts of the calypso memory" in question are: the only entity that lives in the GSM modem's flash memory besides the firmware image (which is exactly the same in a device as it is on the web at the official download URL) is the flash file system, or FFS. The FFS in Openmoko's modems takes up exactly 448 KiB of flash space (64 KiB x 7); per TI's design it is structured like a UNIX file system (directory tree, forward-slash- separated pathnames, case-sensitive etc) and stores a bunch of things: * The modem's IMEI; * RF calibration values; * ID strings which say that your device is a "Neo1973 GTA02" made by "FIC/OpenMoko" - Om's late firmwares (moko10/11) appear to not use these strings from FFS (fw returns hard-coded strings instead), but my leo2moko fw returns the strings from FFS following TI's canon; * Some dynamic data written into the FFS (the fw always "mounts" the FFS with R/W access, TI's fw has no concept of a "read-only mount" for the FFS) during the operational lifetime of the modem: history of what SIM cards this modem saw, dialed/received/missed calls, and probably received SMS as well - I have yet to play with the latter. Just this weekend I wrote a new utility for examining FFS images read out of TI-based GSM devices (our beloved FR being one of them); this new tiffs utility (with mokoffs and pirffs wrappers) supercedes my earlier mpffs-* tools I wrote and released last summer. The new utility allows one to list and extract not only the "current" file content of the FFS (i.e., what one sees when "mounting" the file system normally), but also those files which have been logically deleted or overwritten, but not yet reclaimed, i.e., not truly gone. Hence the tool can be used to do forensics on Freerunner modems - I suspect many of you probably never thought about the modem's flash memory remembering the history of what SIM cards you had in there, what numbers you called or received calls from, and probably your SMS exchanges too... The just-described utility currently lives in the freecalypso-sw tree on Bitbucket: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2013-August/068850.html Look in the ffstools directory. Now I need to write some more documentation and make a release tarball for the FTP site. Stay tuned; I'll post here when I make that release. > By the way, yes, a distro able to flash and back-up everything without > additional cables would be very appreciated. Of course... Shortage of qualified volunteer manpower is our only limit. VLR, SF _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community