T-Mobile with ASU on GTA01?

Marcus Bauer marcus.bauer at gmail.com
Wed Jul 9 10:23:51 CEST 2008


On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 09:25 +0200, thomasg wrote:
> ASU works basically, but getting telephony work with it is a matter of
> luck.
> Mostly it doesn't work at all, mostly the qtopia phoneserver eats 90%
> CPU..

You may have one of the broken GSM modems. From my four phones two have
a broken GSM - that's 50%.

They constantly reconnect to the cell tower and inbetween the can't make
phone calls and loose the GPRS connection but without notifying the
pppd.

This is the same with the mature OM2007.2 images as well as with the
professionally by Trolltech developed pure qtopia images, the ASU images
the the new hyped FSO images. 


This is another hardware problem which is shared with the Neo 1973 and
thus known since a year. The answer by Dr. Michael Lauer was "Guys, this
is a Heisenbug. We pray that it does not occur too often in the field.".

That is a very interesting engineering approach...


The bug in question is:
http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1024


The big problem with Openmoko is this "not invented here" mentality. The
OM2007.2 images were working well, GTK is a valid platform for mobile
gadgets (see Nokia N700, N800, N810), you can add "bling" (see clutter)
and there is a huge developer base. The qtopia port to X adds a second
huge developer base.

But instead of going on and having a base for testing the hardware,
there came this change to ASU and etk which probably 0.1% of Linux
developers use. And despite what Lauer & Co try to make us believe, this
alienates GTK and qt developers. Just look on the planets of KDE and
GNOME - nearly no mentionings. The developer mailing list: a big void.

But the real problem here is that basically due to this reinventing the
wheel with ASU nobody inside Openmoko has ever really used the phones
thus plenty of things which could have come up simply got lost. If Sean,
Wolfgang and Steve would have started to exclusivly eat their own
dogfood, i.e. using the Neo as their daily phone, things like
oszillating GSM modems, non working GPS, SIM cards, deep discharge
batteries, noisy headsets would have been since long ironed out.

Before now all the fanbois jump onto me and accuse me of trolling:
in order to come to some lifestyle competitor of Apple the important
thing is that the basics work and that they work reliably. Accepting
brokeness as part of freedom is doing a disservice to the free software
world.

And it is even more unacceptable as there were 5000 people buying a Neo
1973 more or less for nothing. They all would have been more than happy
to participate in advancing the Neo.

The point being: the Neo *is* a fantastic concept. Bring it there. Stop
ASU, concentrate on the basics, get the gtk and qt communities in.












More information about the community mailing list