OpenMoko first impressions

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The physical design is excellent. The screen quality is awesome.

I started by flashing pre-built images to get something working. I flashed a new kernel and rootfs. The basic functionality is there, but things tend to crash a lot.

Building the software locally took quite some time, maybe close to a day on my laptop. The build tree is 11GB large. That is huge. Updating the software to the latest version and re-building it is pretty fast though; around a few minutes.

With todays’ build, I was finally able to make a voice call. The openmoko-dialer seems quite solid. What is missing is the audio settings. I’m now using alsactl -f /etc/alsa/gsmhandset.state restore to put the audio in the right state. There was a lot of echo and noise during the call.

Playing MP3 works fine. I was worried about performance problems, but the GUI is still responsive, even while copying a ~50MB file onto the 512MB mini-SD card. I discovered that the external audio connector isn’t a standard audio contact, it is smaller. I need to go out and buy a converter to be able to plug the neo into my stereo. It would have been nice if this cable had been included.

I briefly tried bluetooth, and at least the low-level stuff seems to be present and working. There is no GUI to power up the bluetooth chip though.

3 Replies to “OpenMoko first impressions”

  2. Messaging doesn’t work right now.

    The GUI (which seems to be a unified SMS/E-mail application) is mostly just a mockup, with some dummy e-mails and SMS. It just displays To/Subject, the message contents doesn’t seem to be displayed anywhere.

    The medium-level gsmd interface doesn’t seem to work well:

    root@fic-gta01:~$ libgsmd-tool -m shell
    libgsm-tool – (C) 2006 by Harald Welte
    This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY

    ?
    # # A Answer incoming call
    D Dial outgoing number
    H Hangup call
    O Power On
    o Power Off
    R Register Netowrk
    T Send DTMF Tone
    pd PB Delete (pb=index)
    pr PB Read (pr=index)
    prr PB Read Range (prr=index1,index2)
    pf PB Find (pff=indtext)
    pw PB Write (pw=index,number,text)
    ps PB Support
    sd SMS Delete (sd=index,delflg)
    sl SMS List (sl=stat)
    sr SMS Read (sr=index)
    ss SMS Send (ss=number,text)
    sw SMS Write (sw=stat,number,text)
    q Quit
    sl
    # List SMS
    Segmentation fault
    root@fic-gta01:~$

    Going down another level, I was able to send a SMS though:

    root@fic-gta01:~$ cu -l /dev/ttySAC0
    Connected.
    at+cmgf=1
    OK
    at+cmgs=”0708…”
    > test
    %CPRI: 1,2

    +CMGS: 1

    OK

    The SMS was received fine. This seems to need some work…