OpenPhoenux at FOSDEM2014

Boudewijn wankelwankel at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 5 23:11:05 CET 2014


Hi List,

As you know, last weekend FOSDEM was held at the Brussels Free University. For 
the first time in years, OpenPhoenux didn't have its own stand. Luckily enough 
Michael from OpenPandora/Pyra offered to use part of their stand.

There were a GTA04 in Freerunner case and a Freerunner to admire, both running 
QtMoko (v58/56), and lacking a spare GTA04-board I put the old Freerunner 
board next to it for the idea (it had been nice if all visitors had recognized 
the imposter immediately, they didn't though ;-) )

Besides the hardware there were some flyers for the GTA04 as well as the 
Neo900. There were a couple of people dropping by thinking of their Openmoko 
in a drawer, pleasantly surprised by the looks of QtMoko and asking about the 
battery life of the new boards. I can get by, with about a day of battery life 
with light usage. That seemed reasonable to them, one of them got just six 
hours out of his Freerunner. 

There was quite a lot of interest in Neo900 as well, even though the flyers 
were not more than the specs page of neo900.org. 

OpenPandora's successor, DragonBox Pyra was on show. With OpenPandora being a 
sister project, running very similar hardware and production facilities, it 
would be nice if we can keep sharing hardware. The Pyra got a fast dual core 
A15 CPU, and it seems you can throw anything at it. We haven't spoken about 
power consumption though, I just know one of the strong points of OpenPandora 
is its huge battery. 

The stand next to us was about power savings in software (http://mageec.org/), 
such as optimization flags at compile time. Perhaps some of their findings are 
applicable in ARM as well. 

There were more than a few list members; Chris pointed me to the powersavers 
above and we had a general chat, PaulK came by to talk about Replicant and the 
kernel. I haven't had time to do much more than keeping up with the 
mailinglist, so there wasn't anything I could tell him first hand. GNUtoo was 
at the CoreBoot stand, I only spoke him shortly. 

Later on the day I got my new SIM for the Limesco network. Limesco is a MVNO 
in the Netherlands, run by hackers and activists for the same. In case you're 
in the Netherlands, give them a look (Disclosure: I'm involved in Limesco, so 
I'm a bit biased ;-) ) The nice thing is that this way you can run the whole 
mobile stack "in house": we got either our own hardware or firmware, our own 
printed case, on our own network, and perhaps we can use Sysmocoms 
programmable SIMs.

We ended with a dinner with members of different projects. I had a great time, 
enjoyed meeting old friends and telling people about our project. Thank you 
all for making it possible! 

Best regards,

Boudewijn


PS: I got some photos, I'll send an update when they're available online.
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