..the cat came back.. » image builds

The theme of the day…

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:25:37 +0000

So, a couple more changes and updates to my images. First of all I’ve taken out the Oh-puzzles because they don’t work due to this bug – once that’s sorted they’ll go back in. There’s a new little script too which allows you to switch themes. I’ve removed some of the themes that are installed by default essentially because the panel in the top right dies and never returns if you try to use them. So at the moment you get to pick between Moko, ScaredyCat and the original Openmoko theme, openmoko-standard-2. By default the ScaredyCat theme is active. So, no excuses now. Get designing some killer themes.

The next change is due to a request from Taki asking for tangogps to be preconfigured to use the sd card for map and track storage. So now, by default, maps on my builds are stored in:

/media/card/tangogps/Maps/OSM/

and track logs are stored in

/media/card/tangogps/logs/

This should be a little more useful and wont fill up your flash with tiles.

Just a little easier…

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:36:30 +0000

I’ve made quite a few changes and a couple of additions to my images of late. You may have noticed the new boot logo, the new startup sound and the new theme now there are a couple more goodies. First of all the two new applications, well one application and one script. The Bluetooth Keyboard application (really the script) is a simple shell script that hunts for bluetooth keyboards and connects to the first one it finds. If bluetooth is off it turns it on. If I can get zenity to compile properly this will be a much better script. The next item is the Twitter client, GtkTwitter, It’s very basic but it works pretty well. I had to make a couple of modifications to the icons so you could actually poke them with your fingers.

Next up we have a little script that starts on boot, checks to see if you have the gllin ipk ( gllin_1.0+r350-r0_fic-gta01.ipk ) in the root of your sd card. If it’s there it will automatically get installed for you – Very useful post-flash. The script will also replace the standard gllin script with the one from the tangogps site. Why? Well, because tangogps and gpsd are in the image too! Shortly, I’m hoping to provide a pre-downloaded series of tiles for download too. The good news is now you can have gps and a gps application ready for you immediately. Oh one last thing. If you create a directory on your sd card called local you can create bin and/or sbin directories and have applications run straight from there – all those little utils you need to install again after each flash now have a permanent home.

All of these are part of the image, you do not need to install anything extra, unless you want to

Update: The bluetooth keyboard script is much more wizzy now that I’ve added Zenity to the image and use that so you can now pick the keyboard you want to connect to from the list of devices. I’ve also added some notify calls so that you can see what is going on during the script.

Changing device names…

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:29:17 +0000

Some of you may have noticed that that Neo1973 device names have changed from fic-gta01 and fic-gta02 to om-gta01 and om-gta02 in openembedded. Some of you may have missed this and its implications. Essentially all references to fic-gta* have been changed so your old images will try, for example, to grab updates from the fic-gta folders of buildhosts and will probaly fail. While this might be a little annoying now, changing the device names in the future would have probably been much more of a nightmare.

I have decided to move my original OM-2007.2 directory to OLD-OM2007.2-FIC so that you can still get old files if you run older images. The OM-2007.2 directory on my buildhost will now be for om-gta0* images and packages.

The underground bubbles to the surface

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:00:18 +0000

Mickey Lauer recently told us about some interesting developments presented at FOSDEM. More work has taken place and images can now be built – so as always that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll add this to my regular building regime – although the rate of change in this image will probably be a little slower than the main Openmoko and ScaredyCat images . The first one has already been uploaded to my buildhost so you can test it out for yourself right now. Please remember that although it works and you can make and receive calls this is experimental stuff. As long as you bear this in mind everyone will be happy.

There’s an awful lot of work gone into this by emdete (irc nick) for which he should be congratulated. Not only is it a working prototype but he has been thinking outside the box – more of this is needed for new opensource devices to make it in the marketplace. I’ve chatted to emdete on irc and he is aware of some of the shortcomings of this first release. Primarily he was keen to get a working version to demonstrate at FOSDEM, which makes sense. In the future we can look forward to a more modular approach and of course, for those of us who don’t speak German, localization.

These new images also serve as a test-bed for Mickey Lauer’s gsm mux daemon which, wonderfully, has a dbus interface, something I really would like to see in all the daemons in Openmoko.

No gpsd dependency in ScaredyCat images

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:23:57 +0000

I’d noticed that one of the developers had added a dependency on gpsd to the image build. Unfortunately gpsd depends on python-ncurses when you use –python in the build. While I’m sure they tested first, there is no .bb for python-ncurses in oe dev. Since this is preventing me building I am removing the dependency on gpsd from my builds. This allows me to build as normal. It is also preventing the build of gpsd but older versions should still work.

This should only affect people who build from oe dev and not the om version and should be fixed at some point. Although I am unsure as to why Openmoko is depending on gpsd anyway, at least at this stage.

Update: This should now be fixed. ~~I’ll be rebuilding today’s build and making them available soon~~ (busybox currently broken). Thanks go to Michael “mickeyl” Lauer…

New SDK for Qtopia and Neo 1973

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:58:57 +0000

Today Trolltech have released a new Qtopia SDK for the Neo 1973. The download is and ISO which apparently contains a VMWare virtual machine so everything you need to compile and generate your own flash images is included. You’ll also need to get a copy of the Qtopia source of course, but you can get it here so that’s not a problem.

TrackMe on the Neo

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:53:22 +0000

Remember when I mentioned my tracking application for the TomTom Go? Well last night I found a little bit of spare time so I could port it to the Neo 1973. I say ‘port’, it wasn’t so much a port as a ripping out of the TomTom specific stuff and adding a little GTK interface. It’s not massively impressive to look at but it is actually my first GTK application. There is quite a bit of hard coded stuff in there at the moment but I do intend to move this to a config file. Currently, if the distance between the previous and current positions is below a certain threshold, a packet is not transmitted at all and position checks only occur at 15 second intervals. The data that is sent out is encrypted with a very simple algorithm, but I’m more interested in low cpu usage and speed at this point. I’m also going to be fairly honest about the state of the code at the moment, it’s not a pretty sight at all. I need to put together something on the server side to decode the packets, I know I have it somewhere, it’s just a matter of locating it.

I did wonder if the application should have an interface at all or if it should just run in the background, ’secretly’ so that if someone stole your Neo you might actually be able to trace it.

The one thing that this did show me, however, is that you can’t actually run gllin for a particularly long time. I think it’s a minor fix but it does tend to fill up the free space on the Neo with its log data. I guess just disabling this might help, though I haven’t actually bothered to poke around with that just yet.

The other news is that to build this application I used the new toolchain and I have to say it makes life a whole lot easier. As a result I will also be building the toolchain at regular intervals and providing downloads via my buildhost. Sorry, but I can only build 32 bit versions at this time.

Qtiopia – New media engine

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:52:42 +0000

Lorn Potter from Trolltech dropped a note into the Openmoko community list to let everyone know that Qtopia can now use the fully GPL’d Cruxus media engine in their Qtopia builds. This is another step forward and away from Helix, which was basically holding Qtopia back in terms of a GPL phone stack. Now all I have to do is get it working properly, once it is I’ll be adding it to my builds. Stay tuned.

A face in the machine?

ScaredyCat / Andy Powell — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:21:53 +0000

Some people have been seeing things. Faces. Faces in their Neo’s. Don’t worry, it’s not your imagination it’s me, and I mean that literally, peering at you from under the clock. It’s not some vanity thing, it simply means you’re running one of my builds and allows you to quickly identify that fact.

If you ssh into your Neo and you are running one of my builds, then you will also find a file called

/etc/release

with the release date and time of the image, for example

ScaredyCat release qtopia-image-200711181035

The file appears in both my Qtopia and ScaredyCat builds but, as always, the standard Openmoko builds I do are unaltered so do not contain anything other than what is normally there – at this point that’s nothing, but may change in the future.

If you want to change the picture it’s a fairly simple procedure, either replace the file

/usr/share/pixmaps/wallpaper.png

with the file you want or change the gconf entry

/desktop/poky/interface/wallpaper

and make it point to the file you want to use. For example,

gconftool-2 –config-source=xml::/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults –direct –type string –set /desktop/poky/interface/wallpaper /media/card/mypicture.png

You will need to restart the Openmoko-Today application which, for most people, will mean a reboot of ther Neo.