early experince Freerunners w/ ASU load, vs. thousnads of Freeruners

David Murrell dmurrell at waikato.ac.nz
Mon May 26 05:18:36 CEST 2008


Since I'm a software guy, my list of nice to have's are:

*Some sort of example workingish software stack to hack on
*A documented way of unbricking it if/when I stuff up
*Hardware that works

I'm not seeing any problems at this stage...

Here's how I see this working:

Openmoko ships the phones with the old(er) firmware.
People get them, and get onto mailing lists. Technically competent users
figure how to update them, post instructions. Other people verify them,
write them up in easy to use fashion. Someone posts a script, someone
else codes it up into a GUI program for win32, downloadable as a msi
installer. Parallel to this process will be people hacking away after or
during work, generating custom builds, and scratching their personal
software itches. Some of this custom work will get picked up by the
mainline, and make it into the factory builds. 

This happens everywhere there is collaboration - we see it with PSPs,
DSLites, iPods and a whole bunch of other highly closed,
user-modification hostile platforms with no documentation publicly
available. The fact that this is an open platform means that the above
process is only going to occur faster from the point at which people
receive their phones.

So with all due respect, relax. I'm not a terribly good developer, and I
reckon I'm up for it.

Looking at this page:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Flashing_openmoko#Actually_flashing_things_into_the_device

Suggests that as long as one isn't messing with the uboot partition, its
actually pretty hard to properly brick the phone.

Cheers,
David

On Sun, 2008-05-25 at 17:47 -0700, Ron K. Jeffries wrote:
> Sebastian,
> 
> I am well aware that we are MANY months away from Freerunner
> being appropriate choice for an average "just a user."
> 
> But Steve has talked about "mass production" (starting soon...)
> which I'd assume implies OpenMoko building a few thousands of
> Freerunners.
> 
> I am not asking about the relatively few "early experience"
> Freerunners that
> Steve and Michael have evidently seeded out to a few trusted folks.
> 
> I may be misguided, but the quality of ASU load does not sound like 
> it's ready to flow out to a few thousand developers, 
> never mind how eager they are.
> 
> My guess:  OpenMoko is gathering feedback from the n=100 (???) early 
> experience Freerunner units, then they knocks down the nastiest bugs, 
> and THEN and only then open the spigot at the factory.
> 
> If it was me, I would only have built a few hundred so far, but they
> may 
> well have bigger balls than I do. ;)
> 
> -rj
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 
> 
> From: Sebastian Reichel <elektranox at gmail.com>
> To: List for Openmoko community discussion
> <community at lists.openmoko.org>
> Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 22:26:53 +0200
> Subject: Re: software load for first mfg run of Freerunner? Is ASU
> what ships?
> 
> hi,
> 
> it was said some days ago in the mailing list, that ASU is not the
> software which is shipped with the phone. But the first Freerunners,
> which are shipped are still not for the average user - they are for
> developers, which are able to update their phones.
> 
> Am Sonntag, den 25.05.2008, 12:35 -0700 schrieb Ron K. Jeffries:
> > I am NOT asking if mass production has started.
> >
> > I am asking if OpenMoko has frozen a release to
> > load into the microSD cards. It seems to me that the unit can come
> off
> > the line, and that one of the final steps before packing would be to
> > load the
> > software.
> >
> > Is ASU "the* ship[ping s/w load?
> >
> > yes I know people can and will download new s/w.
> > but you'd hope that the Freerunner as shipped would not
> > require an immediate s/w reload.
> >
> > Or maybe I'm being too "old skool" ???
> > --
> > Ron K. Jeffries 
> _______________________________________________
> Openmoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
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