Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
laforge.gnumonks.org
laforge.gnumonks.org
Sadly, it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to build our own smartphones from components, but it would be nice if we could at least get manufacturers to stop actively blocking attempts to run alternate software and what-not. :-(
All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.
I'm not sure Neo900 has even figured out how competently handle their donated funds, let alone how to get a device to production. ( https://neo900.org/funds-transfer )
I'm watching the Pyra project very closely, but I have never heard of these problems. Can you give me a source on this?
Where did you get this idea?
Thanks, but no thanks.
Uh...you can still do this? Why the past tense
Maybe it's a subjective thing, but it feels to me like we've actually taken several steps back in the last 5 years or so.
Hell, even if I wanted to run straight Debian (let's be honest, I do) - where's the dialer program? It's actually pretty straightforward to plug a GSM dongle into a regular desktop machine and get a perfectly functioning modem TTY that does calls and SMS and all the rest of it. Where's the friendly interface? There isn't really one.
This is something I hope that the Pyra will help with. We'll have regular Debian "desktops" with GSM modems in peoples pockets being used as phones. That's bound to spur some development effort.
But hey, they were the ones that tried.
2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop.
3) What is preventing FOSS on phones is not software stacks. It's the closed hardware.
In fact, as person trying to avoid both KDE and GNOME, I am so glad there was not one concerted effort in desktop environments. It's the only reason I still have choice. Had QT been GPLed originally, I wonder what the world of free desktop software would look like now.
If the APIs were stable, there would not be a need to drop one for the other.
Look at the kernel, there have never been a situation where one have to go "sorry, but i only support X+1 from now on".
Similarly, until the 64-bit version, and that in turn was because of hardware not software, one could run binaries from Windows 3.0 (at least) on present day Windows.
That is the kind of stability i am talking about. That is the kind of stability that get third parties to stay with a platform.
Fluxbox was easy to configure with multiple monitors and customize in general. Just tried xmonad with xmonad --replace, and crashed X. Which has been my only experience with xmonad honestly.
Edit: I do like gtile and some other gnome extensions.
I run xmonad at the moment. The learning curve is huge if you don't know Haskell. It took me ages to get it set up and working. But after I learned Haskell, it's really very nice.
Will need to work on getting these features through xmonad, or something else. gtile itself seems to be js.
He finally concluded his defense of the device by saying "Well, this isn't a phone for people who like to get stuff done".
Until this changes we won't see much progress of open-source in the real world. For such a phone to succeed it needs to be as easy to use (if not more) as its proprietary competitors.
What's the "real world" here? Open Source software has made great strides in the mobile and server/datacentre space.
Open source UIs used by the general public, less so sure. But then one could argue that most of the UI frameworks people use these days are open source and written in JS...
Yes, open-source libraries are indeed everywhere - I was talking about a complete open-source OS, like a Linux distro. Sorry for the confusion.
Linux distros are huge in the datacentre and server farm, and AFAICT Android is open source....
But I do know what you're getting at, and Openmoko had a huge problem with UI/UX - it's not even that it was a bad UX, it's that the underlying platform was constantly shifting so radically that there wasn't a good base to build UX on!
The GTK-based om2007 it came with was a joke, and had already been ditched for EFL (Enlightenment) in om2008 when it arrived. The EFL UI got the job done, but all of the actual 'phone applications (contacts, SMS, calls, etc.) came from QtMobile (QtExtended), so I ended up installing QtMoko (Debian + QtMobile) and have been using it like that for years.
Some annoyances I've had:
- The mic volume inexplicably getting set really low; I seem to remember fixing it via alsa.conf
- WPA WiFi doesn't seem to work in the GUI; running wicd-curses in a console is fine
- Can't manage to get audio out of a bluetooth headset
- The excellent predictive keyboard was ditched in an OS update in favour of a clunky non-predictive one. Apparently this was due to prediction only working well for English; as an Englishman, I was fine with that, but haven't been able to reinstate the old one :(
Maybe one day.
Got a device to hack on and the fact that I could SSH into a phone and have a shell to goof around was exciting back then. Android was just announced IIRC and getting it work on Freerunner was so much fun.
It was great if you wanted to show someone the linux bootup text on a tiny screen. It was kinda fun to play with raw GPS data, running xterms and stuff onscreen, and various toy things.
But IMHO the change of "desktop" environment about three times during the first year of release was a killer. The platform devs seemed to be switching around massive parts of the lower stack at the time they should have been stabilising so folks at other layers could build on it. Instead we were told over and over not to get too comfortable as it was all going to change (again) any day now. Eventually I had to buy a dumbphone to make calls, and switched out entirely to the Nokia N900 when it turned up.
Getting a GPS fix? Why yes, wait for 2-5 minutes and be ready to lose it at the sight of a building in a far distance...
Call/voice quality was abysmal - short: it was a nice gimmick with big ambitions, but it was not ready for prime time.
Definitely wasn't ready for prime-time, but that wasn't a surprise. It's that it wasn't even ready for as FOSS loving geek who would have put up with a lot of unfinished, rough edges if it had been anywhere close to having a coherent platform. Instead the stack got changed every few weeks and the "star" developers seemed to be determined to churn out a new keyboard every release....
They had grandiose visions (mesh networking), but all I really wanted was rock solid calling and wifi. It's actually only recently (last year) that I moved to a smart phone, otherwise I'd happily support an open phone.
Also, I believe the freerunner was not 100% open. My recollection was that both the GSM driver (either firmware or device driver) and the graphics driver (openmoko was unable to open up the source to the device driver although they tried) were closed.
Apple even stole some of the visual design elements. The speaker grill was almost identical: http://gizmodo.com/229243/openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-...
Openmoko was also promoting the "app store" concept much earlier than Apple, which tried to prevent third party native apps the first year of the iPhone.
From a 2006 linuxfordevices.com article about openmoko (remember this was before the iPhone was unveiled):
"The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card. Typical of Chinese phone designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said. The phone features an A-GPS (assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is apparently open. Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard "AT" modem commands. The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB. It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection. [...] Moss-Pultz adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future." [...] As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser [...] He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. "