I noticed today that a new release of OM2009. While I was downloading it I read a discussion on the community mailing list about the relative merits of different distributions. As a result of that I decided to install Stable Hybrid Release on my sd card as an alternate OS. I downloaded a testing image and installed it on the card.

So far I have found one bug. I locked up the UI by swiping my finger across two application icons. Some unstable releases may be better. The build from 2009/08/08 might be worth a try. I will post updates if I find anymore information.

Going very well with SHR. To my surprise, GPRS is working out of the box with my cheap optus SIM card. I opened the Midori browser and it brought the Google Australia search page right up. Browsing this site revealed a few problems. I have addressed them by writing a new style sheet.

Installed SHR Lite from 2009-08-08 (kernel, file system) directly on the phone with dfu_util. Then I connected to it with USB ethernet and installed the remaining packages. I also went overboard installing extra applications. I found that it is possible to keep the external network working on my laptop when the phone is connected and that NAT can be configured so that the phone can be upgraded through the host. I had problems with GPS so I decided to use opkg to upgrade to the bleeding edge of the distro. This was a bad move. Suspend and GSM both stopped working.

So I am reinstalling SHR Lite but this time I will upgrade the OS on the SD card ahead of the OS on the phone. When I find a version which works I will upgrade the phone. I will also post results here so that others can follow the same process.

I set the timezone by doing:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney /etc/localtime
            

Nokia 3210 handsfree / headset schematic

There are two wires coming out of the four pole connector. Wire A has an open shield A1 surrounding a white insulated wire A2, Wire B has two open conductors. B1 is distinctly red. B2 is a natural copper color. Using a meter I mapped the poles on the connector to the wires. Pole P1 is the tip of the connector. P4 is at the other end, furthest from the tip. Mapping is:

P1 B1 red Speaker +

P2 A2 white Microphone +

P3 B2 plain Speaker -

P4 A1 plain Microphone -

OpenMoko Headset

Of the two phones I kept from the box of five, the second turned out to not have a buzz problem at all. The Buzz Fix PDF talks about the need to replace a link with a 2k2 resistor. The phone with the buzz problem has the 2k2 resistor in place. So the only modification required is the addition of a 100uF capacitor. A friend of mine is doing that for me and I should have the phone back on monday.

The standard layouts for the Illume Keyboard in SHR are much too small for me to type numbers and letters with my fingers. I have created two new layouts for this keyboard and I am using them on the phone now.

These layouts make it possible for me to use the phone without a stylus (yay!).

The GPS in the second phone worked perfectly for me the first time I tried it. The GPS in the first phone only worked once and it took about half an hour to lock on. I suspect that there is a problem with the GPS antenna cable on the first phone.

There appears to be a systematic difference between the two phones. One phone has two faults (buzz and GPS). The other phone has neither of these faults. Perhaps there are two production lines, or perhaps there were different production runs. Both are A6 phones.

The phone was taking a few seconds to come out of suspend while it printed log messages so I took this advice. The command "klogd -c 1" only works until you reboot so I plan to find a better way to fix the log output.

Its a bit of a kludge but I edited /etc/init.d/syslog as follows:

I replaced these lines:

start-stop-daemon -S -b -n syslogd -a /sbin/syslogd -- -n $SYSLOG_ARGS
start-stop-daemon -S -b -n klogd -a /sbin/klogd -- -n
echo "done"       
            

...with these lines:

start-stop-daemon -S -b -n syslogd -a /sbin/syslogd -- -n $SYSLOG_ARGS
start-stop-daemon -S -b -n klogd -a /sbin/klogd -- -n
klogd -c 1                                                    
echo "done"       
            

I have been working on an application I call dbview. The general idea is to use a user interface inspired by the SMS messaging application in SHR to browse an sqlite database. The source repository has a tool which can be used to read a CSV file and create a table in an sqlite database. I am currently generating CSV data from my palm pilot with the pilot-link tool.

The package for version 0.1 is now available.

A new store for opkg packages has been created.

The ring and message tones in the phone are too quiet for me. I often miss calls because I don't hear the phone ring. I used signalgen to create some simple tones. Then I built the tones into a package.

In case you haven't noticed I have created a category for openmoko applications on this site. The category has it own RSS feed, as does this page. You can check it for new applications from time to tim.

I just noticed that if you cd into /usr/share/applications and rename a .desktop file to something like .desktop.ignore then the icon is hidden. I wonder if this could be used to create categories for desktop files. Just rename files to show and hide them.