Which image

[Al Johnson]

On Monday 30 June 2008, Eildert Groeneveld wrote:
> Hello Folks
>
> so here it is the nice black box. It does boot and it could even connect to
> the Vodaphone network and got the LL phone ringing. great!
> But what now? The applications look rather skinny.
>
> What would be the best image to use currently. Is the FSO an option?
> Any advice?

What's best rather depends on what you want to do with it. I suggest you try 
them and see what work for you. The images are only a starting point though - 
you can use opkg to install packages from the repositories, or by URL as used 
for tangoGPS.

None of the images I've tried so far (up to builds via mokomakefile on the 
25th) will resume reliably if you go for the full power management (Dim 
first, then lock). If you look at the kernel mailing list it seems like good 
progress is being made increasing the speed and reliability of resumes, so 
with luck that'll hit the mainstream builds soon.

The FSO image does what it says on the wiki page. It will ask for your PIN 
then connect to the GSM network, and make and receive calls. That's about it. 
As I understand things this is intended for demonstration and development of 
the freesmartphone.org APIs rather than a usable image, though the usable 
image may be a happy byeproduct in the future milestone releases.

The ASU (openmoko-qtopia-x11-image) has the qtopia dialer, contacts and 
messaging apps with enlightenment-based apps for preferences, package 
management and basic mapping. I rather like it, but the qtopia apps don't 
start if I have the SIM in the phone. I'm about to look at this more closely. 
It also has a qwerty-style input method.

The GTK-based openmoko-devel-image is more or less what the phone came 
preloaded with. This is what I've used most so far, adding gpsd and tangogps, 
a couple of scripts to make it easier to start and stop the wifi, and adding 
useful characters to the multi-tap keyboard to make the terminal more usable.

There is also one ScaredyCat image for the Freerunner which is the GTK image 
with a bunch of config tweaks and handy extra apps. It mostly works on the 
Freerunner,  but bits of it are clearly set up for the Neo1973. It wouldn't 
take many changes to make it as usable on the Freerunner as it looks like it 
would be on the Neo1973. I can certainly see why siome have described it as 
the most usable image for the Neo1973.

Finally there's the qtopia image, or rather, as far as I can tell, there 
isn't. I expect Lorn will post an image as soon as Trolltech release the 
sources again. I certainly hope so as I was looking forward to trying it.

Many thanks to everyone involved in getting the hardware and software this 
far. It's a great start, and the FSO has great potential for simplifying some 
real GUI innovation.