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Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

laforge.gnumonks.org

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Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#41

Post by Nursie »

moepstar wrote: post #40
Nursie wrote: post #30

I had a freerunner. It was great if you wanted to show someone the linux bootup text on a tiny screen. It was kinda fun to play with raw GPS data, running xterms and stuff onscreen, and various toy things. But IMHO the change of "desktop" environment about three times during the first year of release was a killer. The platform devs seemed to be switching around massive parts of the lower stack at the time they should…

Also, i recall the hardware being less than great (or even average), not even getting into the build quality... Getting a GPS fix? Why yes, wait for 2-5 minutes and be ready to lose it at the sight of a building in a far distance... Call/voice quality was abysmal - short: it was a nice gimmick with big ambitions, but it was not ready for prime time.

Yeah, I remember that, GPS fixes took aaaaaaaages!

Definitely wasn't ready for prime-time, but that wasn't a surprise. It's that it wasn't even ready for as FOSS loving geek who would have put up with a lot of unfinished, rough edges if it had been anywhere close to having a coherent platform. Instead the stack got changed every few weeks and the "star" developers seemed to be determined to churn out a new keyboard every release....

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#42

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

emilsedgh wrote: post #36
digi_owl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They went chasing the eyecandy, but ignored that what really cements a platform's utility is API stability...

That's just not true. Most of KDE's 3->4 rewrite was about rewriting from Qt3 to Qt4 for better API and also introducing abstraction layers like Solid and Phonon only and only for the sake of API stability.

Yeah, I wish they had gone from Qt3 to Qt4 without redoing the entire UI at the same time. This is doubly true of the apps: Amarok 1.4 was, imo, the best music player I've used while Amarok 2.0 was buggy and slow and had none of the things I liked about 1.4

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#43

Post by dTal »

ekianjo wrote: post #28
subway wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pyra is a helluva lot closer to shipping than the Neo900. A great many of the components have seen production runs already. I'm not sure Neo900 has even figured out how competently handle their donated funds, let alone how to get a device to production. ( https://neo900.org/funds-transfer )

The Pyra s overheating problems on the sandwhiched SOC have not been resolved at all and now they are even considering adding a fan so late in dev stage. Far from finished I tell you.

The Pyra cannot thermally sustain unthrottled operation indefinitely. Neither can any modern smartphone. This isn't regarded as a problem and definitely no one is considering adding a fan (in fact the cases are slated for mass-production this month).

Where did you get this idea?

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#44

Post by some-username »

If you're no big company, it's quite hard to build a device that is somewhat free, has current hardware specs and is cheap. There's a small company that is trying to continue the openmoko phones: GolDelico (http://goldelico.de/) They're also involved in the Pyra and the Neo900. They are quite in need of support. ;)

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#45

Post by dTal »

mindcrime wrote: post #5

The thing is, the world still needs a genuinely open smart-phone. OK, you can pull teeth to root your Android phone and install that successor-to-Cyanogenmod-thing, but we're still far from the openness of the PC ecosystem. Remember being able to build a PC from parts bought piecemeal from ads in Computer Shopper, then install your choice of Microsoft DOS, FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyB…

It's true that the mobile landscape is more a more challenging target (device tree is changing this). But I think the embarrassing truth is that the free software community has failed to deliver a decent software offering. Even if I had a phone with all of the drivers (which isn't that uncommon, actually - proprietary firmware and protocols are a problem, as is 3d acceleration special sauce, but most actual drivers are in kernel tree and free) ... what would I run on it? FirefoxOS? Discontinued. Ubuntu Phone? Discontinued. SailfishOS? Closed-source!

Hell, even if I wanted to run straight Debian (let's be honest, I do) - where's the dialer program? It's actually pretty straightforward to plug a GSM dongle into a regular desktop machine and get a perfectly functioning modem TTY that does calls and SMS and all the rest of it. Where's the friendly interface? There isn't really one.

This is something I hope that the Pyra will help with. We'll have regular Debian "desktops" with GSM modems in peoples pockets being used as phones. That's bound to spur some development effort.

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#46

Post by audi100quattro »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #42
emilsedgh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. Most of KDE's 3->4 rewrite was about rewriting from Qt3 to Qt4 for better API and also introducing abstraction layers like Solid and Phonon only and only for the sake of API stability.

Yeah, I wish they had gone from Qt3 to Qt4 without redoing the entire UI at the same time. This is doubly true of the apps: Amarok 1.4 was, imo, the best music player I've used while Amarok 2.0 was buggy and slow and had none of the things I liked about 1.4

I was looking forward to kde4 until the slow/buggy reality hit. Maybe it was my graphics drivers, but the kicker successor never delivered for me. I switched to fluxbox for a while, and then gnome as it was and has stayed in a better state thanks to the install base on Ubuntu. Haven't looked again at kde since.

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#47

Post by Rjevski »

Nursie wrote: post #38
Rjevski wrote: post #19

One of the issues in the open-source movement is the complete disregard for UX. Freedom is a noble goal, but I don't care how free your software/device is if I need to be an engineer and spend hours in the command line to accomplish a simple task. Until this changes we won't see much progress of open-source in the real world. For such a phone to succeed it needs to be as easy to use (if not more) as its proprietary c…

>> Until this changes we won't see much progress of open-source in the real world. What's the "real world" here? Open Source software has made great strides in the mobile and server/datacentre space. Open source UIs used by the general public, less so sure. But then one could argue that most of the UI frameworks people use these days are open source and written in JS...

Real world, as in non-technical users.

Yes, open-source libraries are indeed everywhere - I was talking about a complete open-source OS, like a Linux distro. Sorry for the confusion.

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#48

Post by zphds »

syedkarim wrote: post #20
zphds wrote: post #6

As a Google Summer of Code student way back in 2008 for Openmoko, this brought a lot of memories :).

Were you working for Sean and Harold?

Mickey was my mentor and didn't get a chance to directly work with Sean and Harold. My project was to build APIs in Vala to control the hardware (volume, screen brightness, etc) through DBus. Was a great learning experience but could see the ominous signs towards the end of my summer.

Got a device to hack on and the fact that I could SSH into a phone and have a shell to goof around was exciting back then. Android was just announced IIRC and getting it work on Freerunner was so much fun.

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#49

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

audi100quattro wrote: post #46
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I wish they had gone from Qt3 to Qt4 without redoing the entire UI at the same time. This is doubly true of the apps: Amarok 1.4 was, imo, the best music player I've used while Amarok 2.0 was buggy and slow and had none of the things I liked about 1.4

I was looking forward to kde4 until the slow/buggy reality hit. Maybe it was my graphics drivers, but the kicker successor never delivered for me. I switched to fluxbox for a while, and then gnome as it was and has stayed in a better state thanks to the install base on Ubuntu. Haven't looked again at kde since.

That sounds like me, although I eventually found my way to tiling window managers (xmonad for a while, now stumpwm as it's written in my favorite language)

Re: Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

#50

Post by audi100quattro »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #49
audi100quattro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking forward to kde4 until the slow/buggy reality hit. Maybe it was my graphics drivers, but the kicker successor never delivered for me. I switched to fluxbox for a while, and then gnome as it was and has stayed in a better state thanks to the install base on Ubuntu. Haven't looked again at kde since.

That sounds like me, although I eventually found my way to tiling window managers (xmonad for a while, now stumpwm as it's written in my favorite language)

Once I had compiz working, it's been gnome exclusively.

Fluxbox was easy to configure with multiple monitors and customize in general. Just tried xmonad with xmonad --replace, and crashed X. Which has been my only experience with xmonad honestly.

Edit: I do like gtile and some other gnome extensions.

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