Newbie: Converting a brick to a phone
Roland Whitehead
roland at quru.com
Mon Dec 8 17:23:03 CET 2008
I, like a great many others I suspect, have a NeoFreerunner doing its
best impression of a brick on the shelf because I just don't have the
time to get it to the point where it works as a phone before I start
doing what I got it for - developing additional software. Monitoring
these lists and the wiki periodically produces an impetus for dusting
it off and giving it another go (like this past week-end's claim that
WSOD was gone) before reality sinks home and either the Neo white
screens or my trusty Mac grey screens.
Yes there are many different distributions out there but what is very
clearly missing are simple, obvious instructions on how to go from a
brick to a working device - just a machine that will turn on and off,
will ring, answer and make calls, not hang and not have buzzing when
on a call. After that, the user should be left to get on with it but
I've completely failed to get to that stage despite trying 4 different
distributions. I'm really talking basic here - if you have a machine
that works for you, what Bootloader, Kernel and RootFS are you using
and where did you get them from? What were the core applications that
you loaded to make it work, where did you get them from and which
versions? What were the modifications that you made to various
settings files. If you have a working machine, could you blat it and
rebuild it to get to the same position as you are in now? If so, would
you document your process and share it with us? I don't really care
which distribution at the moment - I just want one that could claim to
work that I can then start developing with. I've got my Python books
out ready...
I have searched high and low through the wiki and list archives for
over a month with no joy. If I've missed something blindingly obvious
then perhaps you'd point me in the right direction. I guess the issue
is that I'm neither a hardware hacker nor a kernel hacker but an
application hacker - I'm certainly not an "end user" in the normal
mobile phone sense but I still can't get anywhere.
The temptation is just to say "oh well, I'll just leave it and go and
play with Android or get an iPhone" but that is not what I got onto
this for...
Roland
--
QURU Ltd, London
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