03.16.07
Posted in NSLU2, OpenMoko, Neo1973 at 6:39 pm by mhentges
First of all, the casing has an interesting smooth feel to it. It’s hard to describe but it makes for a good “wow” impression when you hold the Neo for the very first time.
The phone also features the best screen (almost 300DPI!) I’ve ever seen. And this comes from someone used to the very good SHARP Zaurus clamshell screens =)
The hot-looking OpenMoko splashscreen on power-on is the second big “wow” / “drool” effect for new Neo owners. Seriously, FIC (the manufacturer of Neo1973 and initiator of OpenMoko) should include cleenex with the phone to stop all the drooling heh. The phone has a mini-USB connector for host communication via usbnet (works out-of-the-box) and built-in bluetooth but (at least for now) no WIFI. Rod Whitby of nslu2-linux-fame is creating a distribution for the NSLU2 to act as a companion device to the Neo. It provides a painless BlueTooth < -> (W)LAN gateway. The built-in GPS module is not working yet so I couldn’t play with it. Also there is no working dialer for the GSM modem at this time. However, in true geek-fashion, one can control the modem directly with AT commands =)
I’ve been debating with myself if I should mention the current hardware / bootloader problems but I believe that would be pretty unfair as my Neo is one of the famous 36 “P0″ devices with known (hardware) defects.
On the software side there is really not much to tell at the moment as the software is mostly unwritten or non-working yet (however, the OM core-developers are working hard on this front).
All in all I’m eager to lay may hands on one of the next-gen “P1″ devices sold sometime next month.
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02.15.07
Posted in NSLU2 at 7:24 pm by mhentges
The day before yesterday I managed to setup my OE build environment again, thanks to the brilliant “openembedded-essential” Debian meta-package created by hrw.
Setting up the jail I use to safely run OE took several days in the past but hrw shortened the pain to just under 3 hours =)
Yesterday my first ever SlugOS OpenEmbedded build finished while I was at work.
When I came back home, I immediately flashed the shiny new image to my “virgin” slug ( with quite a bit of hand-olding by rwithby of course heh ).
After playing around for a while, I had to admit that SlugOS is an entirely different beast than OpenZaurus or Angstrom and there is a lot of fun to be had =)
Altboot will get a new frontend with which the user can configure the boot-partition while SlugOS is running ( the default slug doesn’t offer a monitor or console for on-boot configuration ).
The new frontend will do most of the work, while altboot itself plays the obedient slave in the background. Due to packaging differencies between the OpenZaurus and SlugOS version, the slug will get its very own altboot package called “altboot-slug”.
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02.13.07
Posted in NSLU2 at 9:59 pm by mhentges
Rod Whitby, aka rwhitby, from the nslu2-linux project was kind enough to donate
a NSLU2 to me so I can help him add user-friendly boot-from-USB / boot-from-HDD / boot-from-NFS options to OpenSlug, one of the popular alternative firmwares for the NSLU2.
After reading up on what a NSLU2 really is capable of, it became clear to me that it is so much more than just a simple NAS box. It is indeed a complete low-power Linux computer with 100MBit LAN and 2 integrated USB ports. Adding a powered USB hub enables sheer endless possibilities ( think WLAN, think Bluetooth, think GPS ) Oh, and it is a fine NAS box as well =)
Another goal of this project will be to integrate the NSLU2 with the upcoming neo1973 mobile as a Bluetooth Wireless Access Point.
As the neo does not have any built-in WLAN of its own , the NSLU2 will act as a Bluetooth internet gateway!
Did I mention that the possibilities are endless?
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Posted in OpenZaurus at 9:01 pm by mhentges
Due to personal circumstances all work on the Hentges ROM & OpenZaurus on my part has been halted for the time being.
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11.06.06
Posted in OpenZaurus at 5:12 pm by mhentges
Poodle, once OpenZaurus’ stepchild in every possible way, now shines in a new light.
A Poodle with kernel 2.6 is as responsive as a Clamshell and compatible to the latest and greatest from the OpenZaurus feeds. If it weren’t for its low amount of RAM (32Mb), it would be a better machine than Collie ever was.
However, only very few developers are still working on / for Poodle (or Collie for that matter) due to various reasons:
- The low-res screen
- The low RAM on Poodle
- The tiny rootfs (15Mb to 19Mb)
While the first two points can not be changed w/o serious hardware surgery (hehe) I’ve decided to do something against the last (and most annoying) point on that list.
A few days ago I’ve moved my Poodle to a native root-on-SD installation similar to the spitz machines which have their rootfs on a MicroDrive.
The switch was surprisingly painless. First I changed OE to no longer produce JFFS2 images for poodle, but tarballs instead, then I hacked a new updater.sh which can install said rootfs tarballs onto an SD partition. The last step was changing Poodles kernel to use the SD card as root.
The result is a very responsive Poodle with a large rootfs. The full hentges suite has room in / now, there is no more need for cardfs =) Believe it or not, but Poodle feels like a completely new machine!
There are still some small problems to overcome but I believe this to be Poodles best bet for the future.
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10.30.06
Posted in OpenZaurus at 9:12 pm by mhentges
It’s been some time since my last post so I have some catching up to do.
Some people may have noticed that Hentges moved to a new versioning system. This was required due to a growing confusion between Hentges and OpenZaurus releases.
While it is true that Hentges is closely based on OpenZaurus, there are quite a few differences.
All Hentges ROMs will use kernel 2.4 for Collie for example (at least until someone writes a working SD driver for Collie/2.6) while the latest OpenZaurus (3.5.4.2) is likely to use kernel 2.6.
Also Hentges makes some changes to the core system which may or may not be sanctioned by OpenZaurus (async SD mounts come to mind, speeds up SD writes a lot).
The next stable Hentges release will carry the version number “1.0.0″. In between you’ll see snapshots of my ongoing work (wip - work-in-progress) labeled 1.0.0-wip-$DATE
Also, Hentges 1.0.0 will be the first release to offer a true upgrade feed. If everything works out as planned, flashing will be optional in the future. Instead, users will be able to “ipkg upgrade” their installations to the latest release. There of course still may be some situation where flashing will be required (think kernel upgrade) but the utlimate goal is to provide a working upgrade feed along the application feeds offered by OpenZaurus.
Speaking of feeds: I took the liberty to move the feed URLs of the upcoming 3.5.4.2 release ( and any future hentges release ) to point to feeds.openzaurus.org. This address selects a mirror server at random. If one mirror (think: ewi) goes down, the feeds won’t be affected if at least one mirror stays online.
This round-robin approach is the brain-child of hrw, koen and me and has been implemented on hentges.net. Thanks also goes to kergoth who configured the URL alias feeds.openzaurus.org.
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07.25.06
Posted in OpenZaurus at 12:03 pm by Administrator
Over the past few days OE moved to a newer version of monotone to manage it’s meta-data.
Every developer had to download a new database and do fresh checkouts of their working copies.
Sounds easy enough huh? Well, let’s just say that it took me 4 days just to get Poodle to compile again :\
Since officially Poodle is still a kernel 2.4 device, it requires quite a bit of tweaking to make it use kernel 2.6.17. Also poodle-2.6.conf was in for an overhaul based on the .dev stuff.
On the upside, Poodle now ships most kernel-modules which were missing in the previous test images.
I will upload new images in a few days, so stay tuned 
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07.03.06
Posted in OpenZaurus at 12:33 pm by mhentges
I’ve been playing again with GPE on Akita =)
The changes over T1-final:
- A new bootsplash
- XScreensaver
- GPE now uses Fluxbox as windowmanager
I’m not too sure about the fluxbox thingy, but let’s see how this works out. It enables virtual desktops, you can now minimize windows and minimized windows appear in the fluxbox toolbar to uniconify them.
Note: Alt+”Click” drags a window w/o using the taskbar.
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06.30.06
Posted in OpenZaurus at 4:50 pm by mhentges
Hrw is busy these days building the 3.5.4.1 feeds.
A few last-minute changes were introduced into the base images such as a new bootsplash for Opie and GPE which requires a lot less space then the older (but more elegant) gpe-bootsplash implementation. This is especially true for Opie images but saves a few K on GPE as well.
The second change (which may or may not make it into 3.5.4.1) is the switch to a new mirroring system to avoid future problems when one mirror goes down.
If everything goes well, the user won’t even notice an offline mirror anymore =)
No ipkg.conf editing required of course.
After asking for more mirrors on oesf.org and openzaurus-devel, two volunteers contacted me and at least one of the mirrors should be online very soon.
A total of 4 mirrors will be available for all your OpenZaurus needs. Since the traffic will be spread evenly across all mirrors, I think we are well prepared for any onslaught of downloading frenzy our users can come up with =)
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06.22.06
Posted in OpenZaurus at 8:15 am by mhentges
Hey there!
T1-final has been released =)
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