Messages

1

General Discussion / Openmoko Freerunner - The Saga Continuums

« on: February 12, 2012, 02:56:24 am »

This might be a bit naive of a question... But how is GTA04 any better than an average android or WinMo phone with similar specs and an unlocked bootloader?

You get the schematics and a description of all components. So you *can* write and modify the drivers without much reverse engineering efforts. And, there are solder pads so that you can develop hardware extensions. Or even order a variant with B2B connectors to change the display. So it is much more open and flexible and easier to modify.
There are also real community driven software stacks not under the control of big sponsors: QtMoko, SHR.

-- hns

2

General Discussion / Openmoko Freerunner - The Saga Continuums

« on: February 11, 2012, 07:23:30 am »

continuums ?

I wouldn't mind a GTA04, but not at those prices!

So please help to bring down the price.

Prices are determined by component and labour cost. And both go automatically down if the number of units in each batch increases. So the only way we know to get that price down is to get more people interested and involved.

-- hns

3

General Discussion / Openmoko Freerunner - The Saga Continuums

« on: February 07, 2012, 02:47:15 am »

No, that is not sad - the title of this thread it is simply wrong.

The Neo Freerunner is still in production, on sales and in operation. And the open software projects continue. Only the successor GTA03 (AFAIK did not yet have an official name) is no longer developed by an internal Openmoko team.

Currently, there are also activities to put the GTA03 (or however it will be called) development on a broader basis. Like e.g. www.amsat.org is developing and launching satellites.

Even this forum would not exist if there would not have been so many lovers of the good old Zaurus after it really went out of production.

If possible, I want to suggest to edit the title of this thread.

-- hns

It is time to highlight that this was still not the end of the story:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Go...Openmoko-GTA04/

4

Mac Issues / New Version Of Ajzaurususb

« on: June 26, 2010, 12:57:04 pm »

It was quite quiet for a while around AJZaurusUSB since it simply worked. Except, one major bug that we never found. But now, we unexpectedly got a kernel panic which allowed to track back the issue which was that the driver did panic if a MacBook was sent to sleep. Sometimes it did not even wake up.

Now we are happy to release the new Version 0.6.0 where this bug has been fixed.

Since we have moved and rearranged the servers a little, the new download link is:

http://projects.goldelico.com/p/AJZaurusUSB/downloads/

Project home is:

http://projects.goldelico.com/p/AJZaurusUSB/

And sources are now available through GIT:

http://projects.goldelico.com/p/AJZaurusUS...ce/tree/master/

If you encounter bugs and problems, please write to the Issues tracker.

-- hns

5

Qt/Qtopia / Cross Development On Mac

« on: January 24, 2010, 03:26:52 am »

Hi

I set up a cross compiler and QT tools to develop for Sharp or Cacko ROMs
on my Intel Mac.

Would anyone be interested if I write a how to guide ?

Is it different from http://www.lucid-cake.net/osx_qpe/index_en.html ?

- hns

6

General Discussion / Renaming The Forum

« on: October 18, 2009, 03:00:38 am »

Open Embedded Software Forums

+++

7

General Discussion / Renaming The Forum

« on: October 17, 2009, 01:20:28 pm »

We can change it as long as Ibiblio is willing to rehost us under the new name (which I don't foresee any problem with).

Not with ibiblio but with external links to 'www.oesf.org'...

I never thought this should only be a "Zaurus Forum" but should IMHO be open for all open and embedded devices...

-- hns

8

For Sale / Wanted / Wanted - Broken Zaurus C Series Within Eu

« on: September 27, 2009, 10:07:00 am »

I am looking to purchase a broken Zaurus for visual demonstration purposes. So I don't need accessories (have enough myself) and it may be (invisibly) damaged.
If you have such a device sitting unused around, please tell me which model (C7x0, C860, C1000, C3x00) and your expected price.
Please only offers from within the EU.

Thank you,
Nikolaus Schaller

9

Mer / Mer - A New Ubuntu-based Distro Derived From Maemo!

« on: May 22, 2009, 02:56:35 am »

The list of applications looks impressive.  I would also like to try this, but I do not see anything on the site regarding the Zaurus.  When I get a moment I will have to figure out how to build it.

Sounds cool.

But - not even thinking about installing on a Zaurus - where are instructions for installing on a N770 or N810? What I found is how to install and use all the impressive apps.

-- hns

10

PocketPenguin / Gta02-core Open Hardware Project

« on: May 19, 2009, 02:19:15 am »

Some folks might be interested in the GTA02-core project:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Gta02-core

From the Wiki:

"gta02-core is an experimental project to explore community involvement in the development of hardware for potential future open phones. The aim is to develop an incremental improvement on existing GTA02 designs, while replicating the necessary CAD files in a open format."

GTA02 being the Openmoko FreeRunner phone

Yes, that is very promising! And the good side is that there is some active support from Openmoko (e.g. providing some internal documents under GPL or Creative Commons).

Someone has already started to redraw the schematics in KiCad (an open source Electronis-CAD tool).

-- hns

BTW: there is already an Openmoko subforum on OESF

11

Open Embedded / About To Set Up Oe... Maybe

« on: May 04, 2009, 08:16:37 am »

QS supplies a cross compiler for Mac but no moc, uic, QT/e, Qtopia or gcc 2.95.
I need a Mac native binary of gcc 2.95.

Now I begin to understand your problem.

QS provides a cross-gcc 2.95.3 but you are looking for a non-cross-gcc? That runs on Darwin creates Darwin code? Apple did drop support in MacOS X 10.2 or so and moved to gcc-3.3 and 4.x. Usually, a newer gcc can be made compatible to gcc-2.95 (unless there are workarounds for bugs).

Creating that is quite complex and I don't know if it has ever been done since ar/as/ld needs a backend to write Mach-O binaries instead of ELF.

lucid-cake writes how to install the full development environment. But to do that you should start to download the sources from some ftp.trolltech - but that server appears to have disappeared and I have no idea where these files are.

BTW: if you want to build your own cross-toolchain, follow the instructions on lucid-cake. There is one tweak that is not described - how to patch that it is built on i386-apple-darwin (everything is described for powerpc-apple-darwin).

Here is an excerpt from one of my scripts:

Code: [Select]

                echo '#include "i386/xm-i386.h"' >gcc/config/i386/xm-openstep.h
                echo '#undef USG' >>gcc/config/i386/xm-openstep.h
Sorry that I got confused... all around gcc 2.95 is quite outdated.

-- hns

12

Open Embedded / About To Set Up Oe... Maybe

« on: May 03, 2009, 04:32:07 pm »

I have just incuded that as recommended by lucid-cake.net but never used it...

He wasn't recommending to include Linux binaries. He built QT using gcc 2.95 as a native Mac binary.

I can see now that what I need is gcc 2.95. I tried applying the
patches by Andre
to make it as a normal compiler, but I still can't build it,
the tm.h is looking for openstep.h but his patch introduces xm-openstep.h. It's not trivial to rename it as
that causes other problems.

I'd really have to dig into how to set up gcc for Mac properly to do this but afterwards it should be quite easy
to build a QT emulation environment. Unfortunately I am a complete beginner at Mac/BSD.

Strange. I can't follow you any more what you are trying to do.

The QuantumSTEP compilers are gcc 2.95.3 and they work well for (non-Qt) projects. And are built following the instructions from lucid-cake. And since everything is built on a Mac, I don't know where you get Linux binaries from? The only part are some i386-RPMs which are required to bootstrap glibc and linuxheaders.

Maybe, can you better describe which Linux binaries you did find within the QuantumSTEP compiler package.

Nikolaus

13

Open Embedded / About To Set Up Oe... Maybe

« on: May 01, 2009, 06:42:39 am »

Hi Nikolaus,

I am assuming that you are the person who has kindly provided the Quantum Step tool chain. Please let me know if I am wrong. I want to use QS to develop Zaurus apps but there are a few things missing.

Yes... Approx. 3 or 4 years ago since gcc 2.95.3 is really old technology.

As you suggest, I think I have to compile my own QT/embedded and Qtopia for emulation.

To develop apps I need:

• Cross compiler toolchain (Mac)
• OS libraries (ARM)
• QT embedded libraries (ARM)
• Qtopia libraries (ARM)
• Sharp support library: libsl (ARM)
• QT build tools, such as moc and maybe others (Mac)
• Include files for above (system, QT, Qtopia, Sharp)
• tmake (Perl script with configuration for Zaurus)
• dev-arm-qpe.sh (Shell script to set paths)

QS only has the toolchain, OS libraries and system include files. I have found a suitable tmake configuration, written a dev-arm-qpe.sh script and found some of the Sharp specific includes.

Qtopia is supplied by QS, but as you can see from my post above, it is compiled for Linux i386. I can't use this to emulate on Mac and I can't use it for linking when cross compiling because it is not ARM. To be honest, I'm a bit confused about why it is included in the archive because I can't see how I can use it.

I have just incuded that as recommended by lucid-cake.net but never used it...

So I can't help you there with any experience.

I think you should either offer the toolchain plus system includes only, or package everything in the list above plus QT embedded (Mac) and Qtopia (Mac) for emulation. If you package everything then that would be a very nice set up.

A final point: the layout of QS is confusing! Especially arm-quantumstep-linux-gnu/arm-quantumstep-linux-gnu

That is quite normal for gcc to have such strange looking subdirectory structures. The main reason is to provide to install several toolchains in parallel. If you write a script that defines a "TOOCHAIN=..." shell variable it becomes quite easy to use $TOOLCHAIN/bin.

Nikolaus

14

Open Embedded / About To Set Up Oe... Maybe

« on: April 29, 2009, 11:38:23 am »

Unless you're trying to build them for the Mac, they SHOULD be ARM libraries/binaries, since that's the architecture that's going to link to them.

I might be way off, though, as I haven't looked at the link or anything.

If you want to build QT/Qtopia apps, you need the moc (meta object compiler) to be a Mac binary.

If you want to emulate, you need qvfb and qpe to be Mac binaries. It's also nice to have all the other Qtopia apps as Mac binaries so you can see a full Qtopia environment. Qtopia is supplied with QuantumStep tools but the files are compiled
for Linux, which seems to be a mistake to me:

Code: [Select]

$ file Qtopia/bin/qpe
bin/qpe: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.0.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.0.0, not stripped
You don't need ARM binaries - they are already on the Zaurus and can be produced by the cross compiler.

Well, yes and no.

You certainly need some tools to run on the Mac to develop Qt applications. These are gcc and the tools you mention.

And, some libraries/tools need to be available in ARM-ELF version on the Mac so that gcc can properly link against them. To do that, it reads the symbol table of the ELF objects.

Maybe, you also need to install the native Qt development tools and then take whichever part you need.

One more hint for cross-compiling Linux packages: sometimes, they build their own host-tools. In that case make sure that the makefiles can distinguish between (darwin-)gcc and arm-linux-gcc. This can usually be done by setting $PATH and/or some flags to ./configure or the makefile

Maybe, this page also helps (I am not at all a Qt expert):
http://www.lucid-cake.net/osx_qpe/index_en.html
http://www.lucid-cake.net/osx_qpe_tutorial/index_en.html

-- hns

15

Open Embedded / About To Set Up Oe... Maybe

« on: April 24, 2009, 01:58:29 am »

Hi

I want to set up a Zaurus dev environment on my Intel Mac (10.5, Leopard).
I need to target the Sharp ROM and would prefer to be able to target any distribution.

OE seems like a good solution but the instructions on the OE website say that
few people (if any) have set it up for Mac. I am new to Mac and I am not a Linux wizard;
I can't afford to spend a long time fixing problems but I'm willing to give it a go if
the problems are small.

Is OE the way or should I be looking at another method ?

Thanks

I don't know if OE has now been fixed but approx. 2 years ago there was no chance to run it natively on Mac OS since it has tons of assumptions about system tools and command line options that only exist on Linux.

So the easiest way is to install some virtualization (Virtual Box) and install e.g. Debain in that box. Works quite smooth.

Another option is to use the SharpROM compatible toolchain from here:

http://www.quantum-step.com/wiki.php?page=Compiler

Nikolaus