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It’s true. There is no GooglePhone. What we are going to get is an SDK, Android, which will hopefully allow us to build quickly and simply. Sadly the licensing still allows devices to be locked down tight, so don’t expect to see a flood of Opensource devices hitting the streets any time soon.

Since the SDK isn’t due to be available until the 12th November 2007, I’ll hold back for now. Once I have my paws on it I’ll let you know what I think. As it stands I don’t see it as any sort of challenge to Openmoko, in fact I think it adds strength to it.

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Tagged with: android • Google Phone • gphone • openmoko
November 10, 2007 17:10

Previously I’d talked about slimrio, software that enabled the DDAR/Rio to talk to Slimserver. Now that I have it installed I can say that it works, to some degree. The slimrio software was a doddle to install, basically requiring nothing more that untaring the slimrio root filesystem over the existing one. Rebooting the DDARs resulted in a rather swish looking logo sliding in from the right, followed by some author info, also sliding in. This, I thought, was a good sign. Unfortuneately the DDAR screen is only a fraction of the size of a real Slim devices player so everything beyond that looks dire. It’s usable, but my wife is never going to like it or get used to it at all. Thankfully the solution appears to be a Nokia 770 web tablet. The slimserver allows its layout to be configured one of those options is Touch, making the software very usable from a Nokia 770.

Once I’d got AlienBBC installed and the streams set up everything worked as planned. While the interface isn’t perfect it certainly makes slimserver usable with the DDARs. I can now put my plans to buy the overpriced $299 Slim devices players on hold, in favour of the 5 DDARs I have and a couple of the, now reduced in price, Nokia 800’s.

Tagged with: DDAR • Nokia • Rio • slimp3 • slimserver
November 10, 2007 17:02

My Fon hardware arrived today. It consists of a “La Fonera +” wifi router and a “La Fontenna” antenna. I have to say I haven’t bothered to open the boxes yet at all. My biggest concerns are with the company behind the whole idea and the lack of any real security on the devices.

A number of times various representatives of fon have claimed that fon is an opensource company and that anyone can reflash the hardware with additions etc if they want. Well neither of those is true. Fon is not an opensource company, they don’t know the meaning of the words. They might use opensource, but they don’t seem to understand that there is a difference. In terms of the software side, Fon are as opensource as Tivo. They have met their obligation to allow access to the source code, which they used from openwrt , but the hardware only allows images signed by them to be flashed. Incidentally, they didn’t really make any effort to publicize that you could download the source and were indeed in breach of the GPL prior to doing so.

So, I’m sitting here with my Fon hardware wondering if I should bother. I started out doing this because I wanted to be able to roam about and have internet access wherever I could find a Fon router – thinking about the GTA02 from FIC and being able to build nice client which would connect whenever it could and tunnel over ssh just to be sure of a little bit of security and privacy.

Tagged with: hardware • opensource
October 19, 2007 14:10

I work at LinITX.com and we sell the X2040 LCD display from Pertelian. LCDproc supports the LCD with no problems but there was no driver for lcd4linux so wrote I one. It has been submitted and accepted for inclusion in the lcd4linux project svn repo. I’ve documented it on the lcd4linux wiki.
As an addendum using multiple displays is possible with no real issues.

Tagged with: hardware • opensource • software
October 1, 2007 22:15