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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.

_{»crosslinked«}

Tagged with: image builds • neo 1973 • openmoko • opensource • qtopia
November 18, 2007 20:21

Or more appropriately, when is open source not open source? The answer, I’m sad to say, is when Google get involved. With the release of Android many people got excited about this new open source development environment for mobile devices. Unfortunately, the current license is not an open source one. Android, at this point in time, is not released under the Apache license. What they do say is:

“Once the SDK reaches a more finished form, Google intends to release most of the components under the Apache v2.0 open source license ”

which could mean tomorrow, next year or never. Also note the use of ‘most’ – either it’s open source or it’s not – pick one Google. It also means that even if most components get released under the Apache license, Google could still keep, and use any licensing they like on key components. That is to say Google would be able to pull a “Tivo”.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that Google paid for Android and it’s their product. What I do object to is the claims that it is opensource. At this juncture is is most definitely not. So far all that Google have released is what is required by the GPL and LGPL.

Truly, I’m disappointed.

Tagged with: android • google • opensource • software
November 13, 2007 13:18

After a somewhat lengthy session trying to get a Neo to boot from and image on SD I’ve finally managed to get it working. It took so long because u-boot is broken. Having taken the risk of flashing u-boot many times I finally found one that works properly and, after flashing, the Neo booted perfectly from SD. Sadly for one person, also trying to achieve the same on their Neo, they have a brick after flashing a bad u-boot. Incidentally, when I say ‘booted perfectly’ what I really mean is it part booted and then I got a kernel panic. This was caused by it not being able to mount the root partition which although I’d created as ext2 didn’t work. A quick reformat as ext3, a recopy of the appropriate files, and it booted without issue.

The good news is that I now have a dual booting Neo with Qtopia and Openmoko, although I don’t know how badly booting like this this will affect the current very poor battery life. At least I can now test either as I want without flashing I might even buy myself a bigger SD card and partition it off and have a number of bootable versions, who knows maybe Android will get on there.

Tagged with: neo 1973 • openmoko • opensource • qtopia • u-boot
November 12, 2007 9:42

Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying out a series of applications, the two are just a bit of fun really although I suppose they could be a little useful. Earlier this week I had been messing about with SuperKaramba which I eventually removed after it decided it was going to delete some files after I’d modified them, fixing a couple of bugs. The concept of SuperKaramba is fairly sound, I just worry about why I suddenly lost an entire plugin folder for it. Maybe it didn’t like my modifications, I’ll never know. I also noticed that my cpu usage never went below 30% – It had to go, but it was at least interesting to have a look at and it did introduce me to a bit of Python, something I’ve been avoiding looking at for some time now. I haven’t got anything against Python, it’s just yet another language I’m going to have to learn, along with Ruby – but I have no idea what the ‘on Rails’ bit is about, I’m assuming it’s similar to LAMP, although I prefer it in its xampp form.

Gltail is a little Ruby application that allows you to look at your logs in 3d. I know it’s not very ‘linux shell’ but it is fun to see. You also get a good idea of which files, images etc are attracting the most attention. A stream of spheres spits out from each client or server.

The sphere’s get bigger and smaller depending on a number of factors, but generally the amount of traffic . There are a number of plugins available for it to allow the monitoring of things like apache logs, or mysql queries. The thing I liked most was that it connects to remote servers over ssh and can use keys. There are a couple of flash movies on the gltail page, one showing when the author was ‘slashdotted’. Gltail is a Ruby application, so it’s another opportunity for learning what I’m going to start calling YAFL – Yet Another F&%$ing Language. I enjoyed throwing a few logs at it to see how well it managed, but could never really compare to the author’s ‘slashdotting’.

Tagged with: opensource • software
October 20, 2007 10:46

Since August 8th, 2007 I’ve been making rootfs, kernel images and package updates for the gta01 available via my buildhost. It seems that the official Openmoko buildhost has been down for a while due to RAM issues and it looks like I’ve, hopefully, been able to help out in that respect. Take a look at the graph below

showing the download bandwidth used, in MB for my buildhost. It’s worth noting that the figures for October are to the end of yesterday, whereas August and September are for the entire months.

The last time something like this happened was when I released the very first asterisk live cd although my guide did dramatically increase my hit rate 😀 – incidentally you can get PXE boot and CF card booting editions from the same page as the live cd.

Tagged with: image builds • neo 1973 • openmoko • opensource • software
October 19, 2007 19:12