Which image

Clare Johnstone clare at perth.dialix.com.au
Wed Jul 2 00:11:07 CEST 2008


Hi Folks,

I have tried a lot of images, and been frequently disappointed by
finding many Applications running on top of basic functionality
with obvious and longstanding bugs.

The latest image, the one called fso, is really exciting as it is simple
to start with, beautiful to look at and seems to be intended for steady 
improvement.
It has delightfully clear fonts for the big letters
and numbers and its very small ones  are still crystal clear.

I am apparently one of a small minority which sees the openmoko as
a little computer which can make phone calls. In addition I dont see the 
use of fingers as always appropriate on a screen with wonderful resolution
capable of displaying a lot of text.

Currently I have on the NAND side of the phone an interesting image
from ScaredyCat, well hidden on his site but still there (1)
which has
1. a qwerty keyboard, which is almost perfect (bug1270) being usable in
a "terminal" having control characters etc available.
2. The ability to detect all the partitions on my SD card which
enables me to write to it music, or text while it is in the phone,
AND to write to it images for loading from the SD card. Thus I can dual
boot the phone.

That latter ability I have not found on any recent images.
Whereas I have other images with those capabilities the one I refer to
has the extra advantage it is not cluttered with a lot of things
irrelevant to my really basic requirements and is thus a good basis
for experiment. (It can make and receive phone calls).

(1) Now I can't find it, the site seems to have been cleaned up.
It was called:
OpenMoko-minimal-openmoko-image-glibc-ipk-P1-Snapshot-20080227-fic-gta01.rootfs.jffs2
Please note that current bootloader does not dual boot for me and I am
still using another SCaredyCat special for that. I never did find out why
the one suggested in the wiki did not work for me.

This is all old history I suppose. The important point is that it would
be just marvellous if there was a group of people interested enough in
solid basic functionality so that the phone could actually be used, as
well as played with. This is one of the reasons for the importance
of dual boot.

clare


On Tue, 1 Jul 2008, Al Johnson wrote:

> 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?




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