One or two SD cards / NetworkManager

[Andy Green]

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Moved to kernel.

Somebody in the thread at some point said:
| On Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:39:43 +0100
| Andy Green <andy at openmoko.com> wrote:
|
|> | when there is only something to loose, and nothing to win it doesnt
|> make | sense to start the war at all, does it? ;)
|>
|> Nothing to lose, huh.
|>
|> What we lose is designing a rocking breakout device that people will
|> buy in volume, that doesn't just dumbly copy what other devices do
|> without trying to understand the underlying functionality and try to
|> simplify and improve it.  I didn't notice removable storage in iPods.
|
| So you propose dumbly copying what iPods do? The GTA04 will be

What I propose is trying to make a "rocking breakout device", not
another boring middle-of-the-road phone amongst the hundreds.

Apple are closed anti-Buddhas (if desire is the root of all evil, Apple
exist to create evil), but even I have to give them that their devices
generally are well-designed and occupy the top slot of the markets they
aim for.  That is why I refer to the iPod, big success, form suited to
purpose, wannabees look sick because they didn't think it through in a
fresh and radical way.  Removable storage was not necessary in that
device to kick everyone else's ass.  Instead they provided a slick and
simple way to access the storage on the PC (rant about deliberately
nonstandard storage system to remain unwritten as not relevant).

|> ~ - Invest in implementing NetworkManager for all interfaces and not
|> just talk about it.  We need this anyway.
|
| I believe that is much more work than it seems like right now and
| wouldn't really work well with the "simplify what we do" approach...

I followed NM for a year or so in Fedora, at first it was a
machine-destroying piece of junk ("Notwork Mangler") but several months
ago it crossed over into something cool on this laptop.  The
architecture is nice too with the UI part separated cleanly from the
daemon part, it can fit our situation.  And it knows about VPNs which
can be important for us.

But the experience also suggests it can require work to interoperate
with the drivers; however our WLAN works with WPA already so that is the
worst of it.  And we have a fixed set of devices we target with it.

Considering we have a device with multiple network interfaces of
different technologies, we desperately need a technology to tie all that
together into nailed up "connectivity".  NetworkManager is the best bet
I heard about, but if you have a better plan I am all ears.

|> ~ - Use one or more existing server apps (samba, nfs, httpd) to expose
|> the storage in normal proven ways on the resulting nailed-up network
|> connection
|
| That would be nice. Still, I don't regard this a replacement for the
| externally available SD card slot. ssh is working for me fine already.

Well it looks like we have one internal SD card slot to work with.  So
let's figure out how to really leverage that and expose it over the
network while still mounted.

|> ~ - Drag and drop on Windows or Linux over USB, Wifi or bluetooth
|
| ?

It means if we come up on samba over UPnP, the Windows user can do file
management live on the device using drag and drop.

|> | i like it. a lot. solves a lot of tricky questions while still being
|> | simple and sexy. ++
|>
|> Hey let's solve the tricky questions in a smarter way than ejecting
|> storage devices and carrying them around like it is 1990.  Sure it's a
|> tougher game to actually implement NetworkManager instead of talk
|> about it, then leverage it in a novel way... but what are we here on
|> this project for?

| I agree, though, that we should start doing less and do that well. What

Gre-

| I don't agree is that your NM plan will actually accomplish this goal.

- -bleargh.  OK, what's your plan to deal with the connectivity problem,
that there is nothing nailed up or even auto-acquired between the
multiple interfaces?  No UI for WPA passphrase?  We're heading towards a
consumer device, this isn't acceptable.  Particularly as we need Wifi to
be an automatic experience.

- -Andy
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