What to do with FreeRunner / Neo 1973?

[Alishams Hassam]

On Sun, 2010-03-07 at 16:20 -0800, Brolin Empey wrote:
> Jay Vaughan wrote:
> >I'd really like to
> > catch up with you guys that are getting some value out of these
> > devices and what you're doing with them .. so how about telling us old-
> > timers just waking up what the current 'nicest OS' for the Freerunner
> > is?
> 
> I vote for QtMoko! :)
> 
Overall Qtmoko has my vote too. Doesn't crash and all of debian. V18 has
never missed an sms and is the fastest yet, but X applications are
unusable. Most of the time it's desktop linux on my phone + pretty phone
ui. SHR if you want very finger friendly and smartphone centric type
apps, www.opkg.org has a nice collection. Ofcourse plain Debian if you
literally want the desktop linux experience on your phone (though I
heared E/Illume was working but can't verify atm). Android is good for
cool factor, I don't like it much (I like X applications) and haven't
used it in weeks, but it impresses a certain crowd of geek :) The
project also pulls in updates pushed out by google. The faux appstore is
interesting, nothing particulary great IMO. One of my favourite ones was
a distro with a gui written in QT, very pretty and based on FSO but I
can't remember the name now. 

Whatever you decide to try, it's going to be easier to have a bootmenu.
On your GTA01 i hope you have a debug board or someway to modify the
bootloader if you throw on QI. Some fellow released a graphical bootmenu
for it a few weeks back and it makes distro selecting very convienient.
I've learned to hate U-boot. 

As for uses: my favourite thing to do with the FR- I can be out and
about, someone will mention a good movie/song and I'll download the
torrent and scp it to my box at home (which starts the download). Orrery
has been a personal favourite, nothing like looking at the stars and
actually knowing the constellations! There was an app in opkg.org that
listend for a secret sms and would lockout the phone (or something to
that effect, haven't used SHR in a bit). Navit is great for directions
(on versions where inputing works) with gps, but just having a map of
the city when I need it is fine. I haven't done this since the first few
months debian was available, but scanning with nmap (well zenmap cause I
don't have a hw keyboard) on the go was pretty fantastic. 

That should keep you entertained for a while ;)