RE: GTA03, GTA04? (was: Questions about Freerunner: Phone Usability, Battery Life, Shipping Date)

[Tore Dalaker]

I think i gta03 was the aprils fool thingy.. 
http://walkingice.twbbs.org/blog/?p=336

Med vennlig hilsen / Kind regards
Tore Dalaker

-Opprinnelig melding-
Fra: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] På vegne av Martin Bernreuther
Sendt: 11. mai 2008 14:01
Til: List for Openmoko community discussion
Emne: Re: GTA03, GTA04? (was: Questions about Freerunner: Phone Usability, 
Battery Life, Shipping Date)

Hello,

Am Samstag, 10. Mai 2008 18:54 schrieb Mo Abrahams:
> Also... why is it going from GTA02 to GTA04 ? Won't the next phone be
> GTA03 (even if it is a developer model like GTA01 was)?

looking at the Wiki, there're also speculations about another Neo-like device:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/HXD8
This seems not to correspond to the GTA04. (Maybe  HXD8==GTA03?)
Is there a more complete roadmap about the "Neo-Productline" somewhere?

But let's first wait for the GTA02 (Freerunner) to hit the shelves...

Bye,
Martin
-- 
Martin Bernreuther  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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RE: 99 vs RED (or was it PINK) Phone cases

[Tore Dalaker]

There should also be some sort of time controlled switch to turn the 
blinking leds off at night, because nothing is more annoying than trying 
to sleep and then some lights starts blinking..


Med vennlig hilsen / Kind regards
Tore Dalaker
Rosenkrantzvegen 19
N-4353 Klepp Stasjon

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, steve wrote:


I want a software switch that says  "unLEDed" so I can turn blinking lights
off on any app if I so choose.



-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alexey
Feldgendler
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 2:05 AM
To: List for Openmoko community discussion
Subject: Re: 99 vs RED (or was it PINK) Phone cases

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:05:20 +0200, Ron K. Jeffries <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:


It's wonderful the focus of  the community is now
all about $399 vs $400 rather than availability
of Freerunner in certain colors.


That's the marvel of communities. All it takes is a good topic-starter. :-)


and YES I agree, the remaining V5 vs V6 issues seem small
(but we did get extra info and  clarification, thanks Tony).


BTW, there is a way to work around the v5 issue in software. Because the
LED in an unmodified v5 shines 6 or so times as bright as it should (and
eats 6 times more power), the solution is to correct the brightness with
PWM to reduce it 6 times. This would bring the brightness and power
consumption to normal. However, I suspect that for many community members
who were so eager to prefer v6 over v5, simply knowing that there is a
workaround, and thus no known unavoidable hardware bugs exist in v5, would
be enough, and actually implementing the workaround would not be that
important. :-)


--
Alexey Feldgendler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com

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Re: proprietary firmware

[Tore Dalaker]

Med vennlig hilsen / Kind regards
Tore Dalaker
Rosenkrantzvegen 19
N-4353 Klepp Stasjon
+4798024965

On Fri, 8 Feb 2008, Wolfgang Spraul wrote:


Dear Community,

Some of our chips or chipsets contain proprietary firmware in flash memory. 
For example, in GTA02 these include the Wi-Fi, GPS, and GSM chipsets.
Ideally, we would have liked to use chipsets for which even the firmware code 
would be free, but they don't exist right now.

So we accepted proprietary firmware, as long as it was in flash or ROM.

Then we ran into problems when bugs were found in the firmware, and we wanted 
to update handsets out in the field.
The vendors would give us firmware updates and reflashing tools, but they 
wouldn't let us redistribute those tools to our users. We asked for special 
licenses to allow us to distribute those flashing tools to our users, and got 
them in some cases, after months of licensing negotiations.
Next we discovered that those reflashing tools had further issues: for 
example, they would only allow loading cryptographically signed firmware into 
the chipset flash memory. The tools do this because vendors are worried that 
people would disassemble, patch, and reassemble the firmware, triggering 
regulatory reclassification of their chipsets (software controlled radio).
Furthermore, we see that for upcoming chipsets, vendors are switching from 
storing the firmware in flash memory to loading the firmware into RAM at run 
time. One reason for this is that RAM needs less power and is cheaper. In 
this case the firmware, whether original or updated, has to be loaded each 
time the device boots, requiring that the binary-only, restrictively licensed 
firmware updater be included in the OpenMoko distribution.


This got quite frustrating, until we met Richard Stallman last weekend. And 
he cleared it up for us rather quickly :-)


He suggested we treat any chipset with proprietary firmware as a black-box, a 
circuit. He suggested we ignore the firmware inside. If the firmware is buggy 
and the vendor needs the ability to update the firmware, we instead ask the 
vendor to reduce the firmware to the bare minimum, so that it can be very 
simple and bug free, and move the rest of the logic into the GPL'ed driver 
running on the main CPU. This way we completely avoid the issue of 
distributing proprietary firmware updates and binary firmware updaters with 
restrictive licensing that load only cryptographically signed firmware.


We liked his advice. It speeds up our decision making and allows us to focus 
on what we do best: Developing Free Software that is available in full source 
code, running on the main CPU, that we and anyone else can modify and 
optimize. There are downsides: We will no longer offer reflashing tools to 
update proprietary firmware, under any license. For critical firmware bugs, 
we will accept returns, or in some cases fix the bug in-house.


Maybe you could do something like a  ssh in to the phone and update it 
remotely? This would be a lot easyer than returning devices both for users 
and openmoko..


We will push vendors to simplify the functionality of their proprietary 
firmware, so we can implement more of this on the main CPU as Free Software. 
Maybe some vendors will even open up firmware for Free Software development, 
that would be the ideal outcome we are working towards.


We hope this helps clarify OpenMoko's current position on proprietary 
firmware: Ignore them while they stay inside of a chip or chipset, and refuse 
to touch them. Focus on what Free Software can do.

Feedback and comments are always very welcome.
Best Regards,
Wolfgang

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RE: Power Management on Neo1973

[Tore Dalaker]

Did you not read this when ordering your phone from
https://direct.openmoko.com/

 



WARNING: Developers only!

Please note that the OpenMoko products are not meant for the end user and
explicitly marked as Developer preview at this time. Read this wiki article
to find more technical details of what you can and cannot expect of these
devices. 

 I have been warned!



 

Tore

 

Fra: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] På vegne av Fredrik Markström
Sendt: 31. januar 2008 20:43
Til: List for OpenMoko community discussion
Emne: Re: Power Management on Neo1973

 

That sucks...

If I buy a GTA-02 and it has hardware issues, will your attention to such
issues
be down-prioritized in favor of the (by then) next generation hardware ?

I really thought I did buy fully functional hardware in the GTA-01. Instead
i had
to wait forever for the GPS-stuff and now it seems like it will never be
usable as a
wireless device !

I'm disappointed !

/Fredrik



On Jan 28, 2008 8:35 PM, Michael Shiloh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:



Fredrik Markström wrote:
> Michael, any progress on this issue ?

Hi Fredrik,

Sorry, not yet. I'm afraid this is not at the top of the priorities
right now. We recognize that it is highly important but our main focus
is always on getting GTA02 out.

Hopefully shortly we will be able to address this.

Michael



Will the GTA-01 ever be usable as
> an everyday-phone, or
> is the hardware to broken ?
>
> /Fredrik
>
> On Jan 14, 2008 8:24 PM, Michael Shiloh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]

> > wrote:
>
>
>
> Tim Niemeyer wrote:
>
>  > On another Thread was this:
>  > ---
>  > And please do get my message right - it is my *hope* that the new
> firmware will
>  > also improve PM since PM issues of the GSM are know to be caused
> by the
>  > firmware. There is no confirmation of this potential fix.
>  >
>  > Can anybody from Openmoko please answer this firmware-pm question?
>  >
>  > Tim Niemeyer
>
> I will add this to my todo list.
>
> Michael
>
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