Michael Sheldon's OpenMoko Stuff

For the past few months I’ve been working on the Libre.fm music service. It provides Last.fm compatible APIs, allowing you to submit your listening habits and to stream creative commons music.

Over the past week I’ve put together an Android application called Libre Droid, allowing people to stream music from libre.fm directly to their Android mobile phones. Here’s a short video of it in action:

It’s now available for download (for free) from the Android marketplace, scan the image below with your phone (or click it in your phone’s browser) to download it:

Alternatively if you don’t have access to the marketplace (e.g. if you’re using Android on an unofficial platform like the OpenMoko phones) you can download the package directly from: http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/libredroid-1.2.apk

With only my EeePC available (and so no real work to distract me) on the way back from FOSDEM I decided to pass the time by hacking together a little web interface to TangoGPS’s public friends server, which allows TangoGPS users to share their location with other Tango users. So now you can stalk your OpenMoko toting friends even easier from any internet enabled computer. It uses OpenStreetMap for the maps and automatically queries the tango friends sever every 10 minutes.

It can be found at http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/tangofriends.

I’ve just spent the day hacking on FBReader to make it work correctly under OpenMoko (OM2008.*). Until now it’s been pretty much unusable due to the GPE version of FBReader expecting you to be using a device that has some physical buttons which then get bound to vital functions like turning the page. The changes I’ve made are as follows:

• Add scroll forward/backward buttons to the toolbar
• Add fullscreen mode button to the toolbar (doesn’t have an icon at the moment, it’s the third button from the right)
• Change fullscreen mode so that it doesn’t hide the toolbar (otherwise there’s no way to get back from fullscreen mode)
• Switch to using the much prettier blue tango icons
• Make the line separation larger so the text doesn’t overlap
• Reduce the font size
• Change the default colours to match openmoko’s colour scheme better (and so it’s a little easier on the eyes)

And most importantly…

• Make it so that tapping the sides of the screen turns the book’s pages (left = backwards, right = forwards)

Here’s a screenshot of what it used to look like:

And what it looks like with my patches:

To install it simply run:

opkg install http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/enca_1.9-r3_armv4t.ipk http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/fbreader_0.8.2a-r7+elleopatches_om-gta02.ipk


For those interested the patch can also be downloaded from http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/openmoko/fbreader-openmoko.patch.

Bonus points for anyone who knows what book I’m testing it with in the screenshots (without googling) ;).

Just for a bit of fun I thought I’d see how well Jokosher runs on the Neo FreeRunner mobile phone. It actually seems to be almost usable, I might see about finally looking at bug #228035 (making Jokosher more usable on small screen devices) to make it a bit easier to use.

Once some of the other more important tasks are completed I might also go back and take a look at implementing the Jokosher remote that we’ve had planned for a few years.

Following on from yesterday’s post I now have have OpenMoko running on my Treo.

When I next have some time to spare I’ll have a go at hacking support for the Treo’s GSM chip into OpenMoko’s gsmd, then it’ll be possible to make phone calls through OpenMoko’s phone application :).

With much help from the chaps in #hackndev I managed to get Linux installed on my Treo 650:

You can see a video of it booting and running a few applications here:

http://elleo.blip.tv/file/get/Elleo-LinuxOnATreo650996.ogg (Ogg Theora)

For anyone else wanting to do this, the steps are as follows:

1. Download and unpack P3t3’s Treo image.
2. Overwrite the zImage with my version. This is a more up-to-date kernel and has the initramfs built in to the kernel image (because of some buggyness in the MMC driver loading an initrd image from an SD card can be unreliable).
3. Copy AngstromOPIE_t650-v01.ext2, linux.boot.cfg and zImage to the root of your SD card (make sure you unmount it cleanly after you’ve finished).
4. Download P3t3’s Treo version of cocoboot and install it to your Treo.
5. Run Cocoboot on your Treo, replace the line saying “init=/linuxrc” with “mem=32M”, then hit “Boot”.
6. Enjoy the geeky goodness :).

For people asking about the 680, I don’t own one but you could try using the latest zImage and cocoboot version from: http://www.palmlinux.cz/p3t3/treo680/.

It’s still not amazingly fast, but adding the swap makes it just about usable (see update), and there’s still a lot of work needs doing before it can actually be used as a phone. I believe P3t3 has worked out how to switch the GSM chip in to AT mode (PalmOS uses some odd binary mode for talking to the chip), but I don’t think things have gone much further than that yet.

To get back in to PalmOS just hit the reset button. It shouldn’t touch any of your files in any way, but it might be a good idea to backup first just in case ;).

Update: The speed can be increased greatly by passing the parameter mem=32M in Cocoboot, for some reason without this the kernel only makes use of about 16MB of RAM.

Update 2: Fixed dead links, added links for Treo 680, removed swap info (not needed with the mem=32M parameter).