Unpacked the phone. I love the hardware. It feels very solid though compared to the iphone it feels very brickish. It doesn't come with an Australian power supply so I used the European one with a power plug adapter. The OM software booted up okay and asked me for a PIN to unlock the SIM card. I hit my first usability problem here. The keyboard it displays is in tended for a stylus and configured for alphabetic input. I found help for that online. You have to use the stylus to swipe vertically twice to get numeric input. Type the PIN then double click on the displayed digits of the PIN. The digits will be copied to the input field so you can hit the Enter button. The phone will then unlock. The arrangement is pretty silly and caused me to go off and look at Qtopia.

I used this procedure to install qtopia on a micro SD card. I bought a 4 gig card with a full size SD card adapter from DSE. I used my ubuntu laptop to install the software on the card. Followed precisely the procedure worked perfectly. The only problem I found was with partitioning the disk in fdisk. The first time around ubuntu couldn't find the second partition. I repartitioned the disk and all was well. I am currently running qtopia on the phone but it isn't clear how to use wifi and the GPS so some work remains to be done. The open moko lets you choose the boot device at startup. Its very simple to use. Just hold down the AUX button at startup.

I couldn't see how to get wifi working in qtopia so I went back to OM for now. Wanting to get a terminal I configured USB networking and manually setup wifi. I am connecting from an ubuntu host with a USB cable going to the phone. If I just connect the two systems NetworkManager kills the USB network. If I disable wifi in ubuntu the USB network stays up. The routing table on the phone had two default routes. The wifi wouldn't work until I deleted the default route to USB0.

I then ran opkg from an ssh session and installed packages. I had to manually start dropbear on the wifi IP address to be able to log on to the phone from elsewhere.

opkg initially failed for me. I followed this thread and used the fix which that page recommends. I was able to start openmoko-terminal2 but was again blocked by the uselessnes of the built in keyboard. It tries to autocomplete in a unix shell. It won't let me type "df". It suggests alternatives from the dictionary.

Today I plan to start qtopia and fix the audio issues by logging in through USB networking.

This page works for qtopia as well.

Qtopia would accept calls but it would not ring. I had to rely on vibration and screen display to see incoming calls. I mounted the micro sd card back on ubuntu and grepped the file system for references to alarm.wav. This gave me a config file pointing to .wav files in a non-existent directory. I found a wav file to use for a ring tone and copied it to the sd card. I edited the config file and pointed it to the wav file. Then I booted qtopia and used profile settings to select the new file. Now the phone rings for incoming calls.

The next problem is that microphone gain is much too low. I plan to use the alsa mixer to try to fix this.

Connected to qtopia on the phone. For the record the procedure is:

            smithm@michael:~$ sudo ip address add 192.168.0.200/24 dev usb0
            smithm@michael:~$ sudo ip link set dev usb0 up
            smithm@michael:~$ sudo route add -host 192.168.0.202 dev usb0
            smithm@michael:~$ ssh root@192.168.0.202
            root@192.168.0.202's password:
            root@om-gta02:~#

The root password is empty by default.

The alsa mixer tool works but it seems to be overidden by the qtopia UI. This forum thread discusses sound settings in qtopia. It points to this gsmhandset.state file which can compared to the file in /usr/share/openmoko/scenarios/gsmheadset.state on the phone. I increased the Mic2 Capture Volume in my file and rebooted. I also increased MIC volume in the qtopia UI. Microphone gain has improved for me but I need to better analyse differences between this file and mine.

I noticed that qtopia won't suspend while on battery if it has been connected to a PC. You can fix that by connecting it to a mains charger than taking it off charge.

I have been using a Hong Kong 10 cent piece to open the case of the phone. I reckon its cheaper than using a guitar pick.

I have subscribed to the openmoko community mailing list. It is a good place to ask questions. Based on what I have read OM 2009 might be worth running in a couple of months.

Using a finger to scroll a list in qtopia is problematic. I found that it responds better to light quick flicks from the corner of my little finger. It doesn't like my attempts at slow, full finger dragging.

I charged the phone overnight but this morning it was partly discharged. My theory is that it draws power from the plug pack until the battery is empty, then runs entirely on the battery. If true this is clearly a bug.

Qtopia has separate power management options for battery operation and powered operation. I had set the phone to never suspend when on the power supply. I have enabled suspend under power to see if that works around this problem.

I have installed the version of gsmhandset.state described in this page. Audio performance is quite different. The microphone is louder but noisier. I will use this as a basis for experimentation with sound.

I have installed OM.2009 on the phone. Qtopia is still available to dual boot but I am not using it at the moment.

I installed this file system image and this kernel. Check the download page for more up to date files.

I installed dfu-util from the ubuntu repository and made a backup of the phone.

Then I flashed the kernel and file system.

The OM 2009 distribution is very different from OM.2008. It has a clean industrial feel. It can be operated almost entirely by fingers as opposed to the stylus. The wifi gui interface actually works. All in all this build is a step in the right direction.

Working on wifi and ssh in OM.2009. To convince dropbear to listen on all interfaces edit /etc/default/dropbear and set the contents to DROPBEAR_PORT=*:22

Normally the phone will not go into suspend while connected to a power supply however there is a bug and a workaround is often required. See this page. "unplug usb until LED goes out, then plug usb in: you need to keep the device awake by touching the screen until the LED comes back on."

I set the background image of the home screen but I had to battle wifi along the way until I understood the power management issue.

Looking here. To enable the GPS:

dbus-send --print-reply=undocumented --system --type=method_call --dest=org.freesmartphone.ousaged /org/freesmartphone/Usage org.freesmartphone.Usage.SetResourcePolicy string:GPS string:enabled
            

To disable the GPS:

dbus-send --print-reply=undocumented --system --type=method_call --dest=org.freesmartphone.ousaged /org/freesmartphone/Usage org.freesmartphone.Usage.SetResourcePolicy string:GPS string:disabled
            

Success: tail -f /var/log/frameworkd.log | grep ogpsd

Gives:

2009.06.19 12:14:11.966 ogpsd DEBUG Got UBX packet of type NAV-POSLLH: [{'LON': 1449872265, 'HMSL': 503937, 'HEIGHT': 500002, 'ITOW': 353684998, 'LAT': -377624530, 'Vacc': 1873, 'Hacc': 72391}]

1449872265,-377624530 is my location.

Still working with the current OM2009 test release. I have put together a package of adaptions I have made to the software. It is available in this repository. The idea is that the package can be installed in one action after the operating system has been installed on the phone.

Wifi is still unreliable. Currently my preferred way to connect to the phone is via usb ethernet.

I had a lot of lockup problems with OM2009 yesterday so I reinstalled the file system this morning. Enabling gps significantly increases the number of trace messages from frameworkd and I think the additional load is causing race conditions to break the phone software. So I am not runniung the GPS at the moment. I may have to change frameworkd so it doesn't fail in this way.

Also I wonder if the load from frameworkd was causing my wifi problems. I need to investigate this.

I recommend that anybody starting out with a new openmoko not follow the above article. Instead I suggest you follow my experiences with SHR. To be continued in http://glitch.tl/working_with_shr.html