The Lost Openmoko Community

[Angus Ainslie]

On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 9:42 AM, <vasco.nevoa at sapo.pt> wrote:

> To all, but especially OM.
> I felt a little cheated when I saw the FR I had bought was not ready
> to be used as a daily phone. This had in fact been the publicity by OM
> at the time - GTA01 was for tinkerers, and GTA02 was for the public.
> Then people said "no, it was clear that GTA02 was also for tinkerers
> only"... well, whatever; I decided to ignore that, be positive, and


So the fact that you ignored it is OM's fault ?

OM (the company) should have only sold the GTA02 when the hardware and
> kernel and drivers where tested and ready.


Why there are plenty of people very happy to have a phone they can ssh into.


> Or, if that was not
> possible due to time-to-market constraints, then it should have called
> for the community's help for doing just that: getting the device to
> work. Instead, it went ahead telling us "the Neo is a blank slate, a
> canvas to paint on"... and the people who have painted, have lost many
> of their paintings, and even the will to paint. At least, they won't
> paint with OM brushes. It is too frustrating and time-consuming.


If what you paint ends up being useful to the community it'll get kept.


> Personally, I need a working device. Kernel, drivers, daemons, system
> scripts, all of this must be in place to allow the device's hardware
> to be controlled at the flick of a software switch. GPRS+GSM muxing
> must be included by default. WIFI must work correctly by default.
> Bluetooth must work as well as in any other distro by default. And for
> god's sake, AUDIO must work as intended by default (it IS a phone
> after all). Only after OM guarantees these minimum requirements can it
> ask the community to go ahead and innovate...  Don't waste your time
> on GUIs or eye-candy apps; give us a device with a rock solid
> subsystem and a command shell, and we will fill in the blanks and
> build from there.
>

Wifi is "working" as well as any basic distro install. You need to edit
/etc/network/interfaces and or wpa_supplicant.conf but it is working.

Bluetooth also has all of the tools to make it work like dbus and hcitool.
Again you need to edit a file here of there and do some reading.

Alsa is working a designed as well. You can use alsactl or alsamixer to
control every single part of the alsa subsystem. Again a little reading and
tinkering will get it to do what you want.

It sounds like you don't want to do any tinkering or reading. Why did you
get a phone where that is a requirement ?

Angus
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