I just thought I'd drop an update about my favorite Free Software project. :)

Today I got word from Steve (The production manager) from Openmoko Inc. that mass production of the Openmoko Freerunner - the long awaited GTA02 - will begin May 9th, 2008.

So you have 3 steps: build phone. test phone. ship phone.

Then we take orders. I was very adamament about having phones in the disty ready to ship before I opened the web shop.

This means soon, Openmoko Freerunner will be going on sale. :) More great news!

I'll certainly post again when it's on sale, and once I have mine.

"This man is one of the most honorable men of character," said Robert Wall, CEO and president of World Black Belt, a martial arts training firm.

Another witness described how [the man] had helped train personnel from 33 airlines on safety techniques after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, without seeking pay or media attention.

In 1999 an armed gang began demanding payment from a man in a fashion similar to the mafia. While not stated implicitly, the message was clear. Pay up or bad things will happen to you. Being a man of honor he refused to pay. In 2006 this armed gang decided enough was enough. They claimed that by living in their territory, the man had accruded a debt of roughly $15 million dollars, money that (in the hands of the gang) would be used to fund the slaughter of foreigners, train assassins, invade the privacy of innocent people and sustain a regime of brainwashing and intimidation.

Despite the man's offerings of $5 million dollars and pleas to "have mercy", the gang reacted.

[This] should send a loud and crystal clear message to all [..] defiers that if they engage in similar [...] conduct, they face joining him, said Nathan Hochman, a spokesman for the gang. There's no secret formula, he went on to say. Pay up in a timely manner of face their reaction.

***

It plays like a Hollywood movie and conjurs up images of smoky speakeasies and men with bad accents. Men concerned with the fear that the public has seen someone "get away with it".

But the sad, disgusting reality is that this scene didn't take place in a movie that one could get up and walk away from if they found it distasteful. This scene happend in a federal courtroom.

Wesley Snipes, a world-reknowned actor who stared in films such as "Murder at 1600" and the Blade trilogy, was sentenced to 3 years in prison today for refusal to pay taxes. Taxes which would go to fund the war in Iraq, wiretapping of American subjects and the "War on Drugs" which uses violence against people who set plants on fire.

The fact that the gang call themselves "the government" matters very little in the end. The threats, the violence and the intimidation are VERY real. Pay up, or suffer our wrath. The fact that they call their bribe money "taxes" matters little, for a man who harmed nobody will spend the next three years deprived of his livelyhood and seperated (by fear of being shot) from his family.

A crowd stood by as Mr. Snipes exited the court room and said "Wow!" but this crowd was not enough to change the situation. Letters from some of the nations social elite made recommendations to the court for leniency but the only think in the minds of the government thugs was the impression their actions would make on the populace.

On you.

What impression WILL it make? Will you sit by and doublethink this action away, calling the man a "criminal" for refusing to pay blood money? Will you quietly reflect on the fact that 'it wasn't me" and move on?

Will you take a stand and say "This isn't right!". Will you add your voice to that crowd, and do exactly what those goons feared?

Will you say 'You have no authority over me!"?

For the past several years, I've been a proud supporter of the Free Software Foundation. The ideals of Free Software have always rung true to me, and I've not only adopted Free Software solutions in my home (even my wife runs GNU/Linux) but advocated for others to evaluate what they find important and adopt free software themselves.

So when I pulled my funding last month from the FSF, I was asked "Why?" from some friends. "Do you not care about free software anymore?"

I still care deeply.

Free Software is, at it's most very basic for me, a matter of property rights. To me, it is an affront to property rights to sell or give something someone and enforce conditional restrictions upon them. If Oster sells you a toaster, they have NO right to prevent you from taking that toaster apart, studying it, adapting it and using those adaptations in the marketplace. Free Software then, has ALWAYS been about me holding my right to study that which is mine - and affirms that everything on my computer is in fact MINE.

Due only in part to Free Software, the activist nature within me has been awoken. Even more than with free software, I feel it's important to stand for what I beleive in and make decisions that reaffirm that believe. The newest belief if that government, in some way shape or form, is the cause of most of the day-to-day gripes I have. That isn't the point of this blog entry though...

What has become clear to me is that the Free Software Foundation is not truly comitted to user freedom. Furthermore, they're quite willing to use the guns of government to enforce their "freedom". Freedom is free market freedom. Freedom is, at it's very base, the right to choose. I'm still firmly comitted to the ideals of Free Software, but I stand against the Free Software Foundation, as I stand against anyone, who feels it's morally justifyable to use the guns of government to enforce compliance with ANYTHING.

If free software is better, free software will stand it's own ground, and hundreds of men with military weaponry can't part with it. Bad ideas, however, don't seen the threat of violence to be abandoned, as it makes no sense to continue with it. Free Software stands and fights it's own battles, using only consumer opinion to oppose Microsoft and Apple and Adobe. I'm quite content to leave it there, and in order to do that I found it necessary to pull my funding of the Free Software Foundation.

Viva Libre!

As a child going through the schools setup, administrated and funded by the US Government (which in turn gets it's money by taxes) I was taught to hate Nazi Germany. Not only did they burn Jews for being Jews but their police state laid waste to all of the values that people faught for and died to protect. Soldier-police could barge into a person's home to carry out searches under the guise of searching for closeted away Jews. This pretense, however, was abandoned as the soldier-police were granted the power to arrest on suspicion that someone had comitted a crime. Asking the solider-police "Why?" was forbidden and would put you on a list of "Enemies of the State".

This invasion of a person's home, lives and livelyhood was evil, something all vigilant Americans shouldn't tolerate.

On the flip side, we chanted the Pledge of Allegiance in a symbol of blind patriotic faith. Once done, we'd sit down and study about how the American patriots rose up against British tyranny to found "the best nation in history". Part of this indoctrination includes the premise that the checks and balances created a nation in which a police state couldn't form.

In that false sense of security, the majority of the population stopped being weary.

April 11th 2008 saw what some media outlets are calling the "largest regional crime crackdown ever taken". Large is an understatement. This undertaking, given the US Military-style name "Operation Sudden Impact" included agents from 53 federal, state, municipal and local agencies to apprehend terrorists.

Terrorism, huh?

Channel 5 News in Memphis, Tennessee reports Federal agencies raided several Memphis businesses in a coordinated effort to find information about possible terrorism ties.

The operation has been named known as "Sudden Impact."

At the same time, it is also being reported that The 100 sheriff's deputies working Saturday night and Sunday morning also recovered 12.2 grams of heroin.

What this says is pretty clear: Drugs are terrorism in the eyes of the police. Futhermore, with the police now working with the military (the National Guard was one of the 53 agencies involved) to "fight crime" AND "fight terrorism" it's pretty clear that under the eyes of the soldier-police crime itself it terrorism.

They issued citations for 202 traffic violations.

Speeders are now terrorists. If there was any doubt that the soldier-police were here in America, armed and ready to act, this should eliminate it all. Speeders are terrorists. "What we have found traditionally is that terrorists are involved in a number of lesser known type crimes," said Mark Luttrell, Shelby County sheriff.

Like the Nazi Ghestapo, all pretense of fighting a public enemy has even gone. The FBI along with hundreds of officers said they are looking for anything out of the ordinary. This statement from a national news outlet (CBS) has a two-fold impact. Firstly, doing something "out of the ordinary" itself constitutes police-soldier attention and secondly, but NOT attaching outrage and disgust to this statement, that it's already become common practice.

Welcome to America, with liberty and justice for all.

This way please.

Andy's blog said "everyone was doing it" so I have to too.

history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

On my work computer, as my non-root user (kevin) I get:

96 ssh
66 su
30 cd
29 sux
29 rm
23 screen
22 time
21 ls
17 /opt/cinderrat-2008-03-28/bin/firefox
15 apt-get

Also on my work machine, I get the following as root:

181 apt-get
84 /opt/dfu-util/bin/dfu-util
45 nano
32 ls
24 mount
19 cd
10 apt-spy
7 rm
7 modprobe
7 iptables

For those who don't know, dfu-util is the application used for flashing Openmoko images to the phone. Cinderrat is a CVS build of Mozilla's Firefox browser (which ends up being called Minefield anyway, defeating the point of rebranding).

What does your history say about you?

There's an adage that states "A picture is worth a thousand words". I've had many experiences before where I agreed, but today... Today, I have that experience in the way it was meant to be. I've seen a picture that brings to mind a thousand words that I can't possibly put to paper (so to speak).

This monument was made in New York, USA. It was shipped to the southwest United States and erected on a concrete circle to stand proudly as a symbol of the American friendship with the bordering nation of Mexico. Clearly, the monument was designed to stand tall and allow people to look at it from all sides, walking along the concrete circle and crossing into both the USA and Mexico to see it entirely.

There is another adage that springs to mind, shaded in tones of irony and disdain...

"Good fences make good neighbors."

I'm a Debian user. One of the strongest points in the Debian world is the package management system that is both binary and source based. In addition to the software, Debian maintains strict rules regarding the package management process to ensure high-quality packages with the minimum of conflicts.

Sometimes, however, those conflicts occur especially running the "rolling" testing or unstable distros. Frequently the issues come when updating "sets" that contain many packages, such as KDE or Gnome, when one piece didn't build but other chunks are there. Being able to pull down the source code and build it on your own system before it hits your mirror can be a lifesaver.

In addition to building missing packages, Debian's source based repositories are the only "safe" and "easy" way to mix sources - something I've personally had to do to leverage the large number of packages in GetDeb that are designed for Ubuntu but will build and play nice with Debian systems.

I've been meaning for a LONG time to sit and write out a tutorial on how to easily use the tools, but someone else has done basically that so I'll merely link there and call it a day. :)

http://www.ducea.com/2008/03/06/howto-recompile-debian-packages/

Do you remember PogoBall?

Yeah. Me too. :(

Today I've done a new review of the 20 February 2008 snapshot of OpenMoko for the Neo1973.

The full review can be found http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Snapshot_review/2008-02-20

The major news is that today SD support has returned, which means I can recommend all users to upgrade to today's image and kernel. :) Today also saw decent (almost 50 seconds less!) improvement to boot time.

These reviews make me feel good. :) I got thanked by Sean Moss-Pultz (CEO of OpenMoko Inc.) himself, and have had developers give me info on changes, causes and plans for the distribution. It feels awesome to be able to help the project even though my coding skills are sorely lacking.

I'm a bit concerned about where to go from here. For the most part, my reviews cover the major functionality of the device. Phone calls, SMS messages and media capability. I don't touch GPS because it requires non-free.

There are applications that I don't review also because I consider them less than critical (like the fact that there are 4 sudoko games) but at this point I'm thinking that I have time to check the "less than critical" things. I also really want to begin moving into building a realistic, step-by-step wishlist. The audio system is in place now so the phone rings, but most people consider multiple ringtones a basic feature. Profiles are also pretty basic (phone in vibrate only mode, for instance) and don't exist.

I've asked the device-owners list to give input on how to improve the review and where to go from here. :)

Yesterday I forgot my USB cable so my phone died and I was unable to flash the 12 Feb 2008 image. No review. :)

Today's marked the first 2.6.24 kernel in the official OpenMoko snapshot pool. It also broke quite a bit because the rootfs contains the 2.6.22 kernel modules. :)

Phone functions didn't work, SMS didn't work and my 1GB media card didn't work so the ability to play music has been greatly decreased.

General users are urged to stay with the 11 Feb 2008 snapshots while moderate to advanced users are urged to test and report on the new snapshots.

The daily images were not built while the staff of OpenMoko Inc enjoyed the time off for the Chinese New Year. :) Now that the holidays are over, OpenMoko images have resumed.

The full review can be found at http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Snapshot_review/2008-02-11

The biggest change today comes in the form of improved sound. The review hits on this when I mentioned that ambient noise is echoed a LOT less, and that the "air" sound is gone. Another undocumented improvement is that sound volume of the ringtone is now good, meaning I can hear the ring of the phone while in my car with music up loud. :)

Erin Yueh of OpenMoko has also submitted instructions to the OpenMoko device-owners mailing list on how to remove the crappy multi-tap input and replace it with the matchbox keyboard. While neither solution is good (both are considered horrible and where one lacks features that makes it useable, the other has bugs that makes it unusable) I personally prefer the matchbox keyboard.

I've also ammended the review process in regard to GPS. On the Neo1973 GPS requires the use of a non-free driver, and efforts to reverse engineer it are horrifically understaffed. For this reason, GPS doesn't work out of the box. Despite some community members insisting on providing this information in the review, I consider the use of non-free software to be unethical AND contrary to the stated mission of OpenMoko - my reviews now reflect this by adding in three new critera for reviewing of GPS functionality.

For the record, the GTA02 (OpenMoko Freerunner) has corrected this problem, and the GPS on it "speaks" standard protocol so no driver is needed to make it work.

My recommendation is that Neo users upgrade to the 11 Feb 2008 image to reap benefit from the improved audio settings.

I've been obsessed for a while. Last night I finally did it: I bought an Element.

I ended up driving 8 hours to get him but I got him and that's all that matters to me. :D

The drive from New Jersey to Maryland got him quite dirty and today I gave him (and 'Bu) a bath but it was SO cold that the rinse water froze.

I've transfered all of my stuff from 'Bu to Bluebeard now and this image shows the servers in there.

I'm happy!

Lindsay (my wife, for those of you who don't know) has been without a car for almost a year now, since her last one, Patches, died.

This lack has been wearing on her and we began the hunt to find her the perfect car in the perfect price range. For a while, this hinged on the Honda Civic hatchback since being a hatchback was one of her requirements. We discovered over time that the Civic simply wouldn't work. Lindsay still wanted it, but her logical side told her no.

Even more, it told her she wouldn't be happy with any purchase since she was still undecided with exactly what she wanted.

Last week Lindsay gave me the directive "Find an Element". If you know I am an Element fanatic. Don't ask my why but I've been in love with that vehicle since I test drove it on a whim looking for cars for big guys. Since then, I've been a memeber of the Element Owners Club and I've even got an Element section of my photo gallery.

Come Thursday evening I was informed I'd been approved for financing on an Element and I'm THRILLED! After SO long not having one, I am gonna get one. Yay!

The fact that I'm getting an Element is awesome, to the point where it even overshadows what SHOULD be better news... I paid off 'Bu. :) I felt pressured into buying Bu many years ago and have come, for the most part, to resent that car. On Friday, I did an early payoff on it and it is MINE. This makes room in the budget for the Element, and gives Lindsay a car to drive.

I haven't really slept a whole night since being told I was approved. :)

I finished my OpenMoko review today. In general, this image is good.

The full review can be read at http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Snapshot_review/2008-01-31

Boot time is back in line.

SMS works.

Calls work (but still require "the fix" for good sound quality on my side).

Media player works for audio, still no video (and it may never happen on GTA01)

Battery life seems decently improved but still not "good". No hard and fast tests done there.

My recommendation is for all Neo users to use this image, it's the best thus far. :)

Today I reviewed the 30 January 2008 rootfs and kernel images.

Overall, this was a giant leap backwards. Stability has suffered which prevents the use of SMS to the fullest and prevents the use of media playback.

In addition, I found and reported a bug where missed calls were reported twice.

Bootup time jumped up by about 40 seconds.

In general, I suggest NOT flashing the 30 January image, preferring the 29th. The kernel is, as far as I can tell from the filenames, unchanged.

I've noticed that many people who own Neo1973 devices simply don't update every day. There are several ways to do this, one being the apt-get reminiscent application called ipkg (or opkg, the official OpenMoko fork). Another way, particularly useful in rolling distros (like Debian or OpenMoko) is to install a new image.

I choose to install fresh Debian images every weekend and I choose to install fresh OpenMoko images every day. Since people are reluctant to flash a non-working image (which would erase all of their contacts, scripts and hacks) frequently I decided I'd begin documenting it when I do.

Today, I published my first review of the OpenMoko snapshots, since it's finally good enough for me to use daily as a phone and SMS device.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Snapshot_review/2008-01-29

I'll summarize them here, but the real good stuff is in the wiki. :)

Summary:

Sound quality on the phone sucks because it picks up ambient noise, luckily a fix has been identitifed!

The multi-touch input method sucks, I think.

Video playback is half-there, i.e. Audio only.

Music playback is better and improving, a LOT less skipping versus a week ago. There's a hack to do even more.

Calendar mostly works.

SMS works.

There seems to be some confusion with exactly what OpenMoko is.

The most simple explanation is that OpenMoko is a software framework designed to empower users of mobile devices. OpenMoko is to the Neo1973 what Gnome is to a PC. The analogy is particularly fitting, since Gnome and OpenMoko are both GTK based.

Keeping with this analogy, another "environment" that can be found on the Neo1973 is Trolltech's QTopia which is, like KDE, based on QT.

Most of the hype around the Neo is because of OpenMoko (or perhaps the other way, without OpenMoko the Neo would be ignored) and OpenMoko is what my personal interest is in so I will begin today by explaining just what is "in" an OpenMoko application from the perspective of a user.

Below is an image of the "home" screen, the starting point for all OpenMoko adventures.

The very top of this image is the "taskbar". A closer examination is below.

In the section that displays the words T-Mobile" is the name of the application you're using. On the home page, this displays the name of the GSM network you're connected to. In this case you see "T-Mobile" since that is my cellular carrier. When the phone is first booted (or when GSM is first turned on) this may say “Registering...” as the phone searches for your network.

To the right of the words "T-Mobile" is a kind of dashboard or system tray. The first icon is of a small keyboard, clicking this brings up the matchbox keyboard, used for entering text. If the keyboard is open, clicking this icon will close it.

The icon directly to the right of the keyboard is the Bluetooth Logo. Clicking this icon brings up a menu allowing you to "Power up Bluetooth radio", "Power off Bluetooth radio" or check "Bluetooth Status". This allows you to shut off unneeded Bluetooth capability for added security or to preserve battery life.

To the right of the Bluetooth logo is a USB icon. This icon indicates that a USB cable has been plugged in that is capable of transmitting data. This icon does not appear when “dumb” USB-style cables, such as car chargers, have been plugged in. Tapping on this icon does not present the user with options, it is there only as an indicator.

The next icon represents the GPS menu. As of today this icon does nothing and is not representitive of the GPS's status.

Next to the GPS icon is a GSM signal meter. Most mobile phones have an indicator like this, showing the relative strength of the cellular signal they have. Typically, the more bars you have, the stronger your signal and the more clear and stable your phone conversations would be.

To the right of the signal meter is the battery indicator. This indicator shows roughly how much power your battery has remaining to power your device. A fully filled green battery icon indicates full charge where an icon that is not filled would be almost powerless. This icon can indicate various intermittent states. When connected to a powered USB cable the phone enters “Quick Charge” mode and this icon displays a white zig-zag lightening bolt image.

Below the taskbar is an action panel. This panel varies from application to application but in general it indicates actions a user may take. On the home screen, these actions are, from left-to-right:

Launch the “Dialer” application (Make a call) Launch the “Contacts” application (View your address book) Launch the “Messages” application (Send and read SMS Messages) Launch the “Tasks” application (Set or view important events)

Below the launcher is the main body which contains a digital clock and the date.

In addition to displaying the time and date, this pane will display notification of missed calls below the date. This is the main area to present information to the user – what this section of the screen displays is highly dependent on the application that is currently running.

Tabs for your currently running application appear below this pane. These tabs are different depending on the running application but the concept behind them is uniform to all OpenMoko applications. For instance, the Dialer application has two modes, a keypad mode and a list of all past calls. This section has two buttons in the tabs panel to switch between these modes. I will go in-depth regarding options with each specific application later.

Today is day three with my Neo1973. It is well know by owners of the Neo and members of the OpenMoko development community that the GTA01 suffers many power management issues. Today, I got the first taste of those issues myself when I forgot my USB cable.

The Neo runs on a "basic" mobile battery and it packs a devent punch. A sharp touch screen, GPS, GSM, Bluetooth, speakers and a backlight. In addition, the CPU and memory consume power as they're used. This means, without proper power management systems on the OpenMoko platform, the Neo's battery life is rather short - in my case, about 5 hours.

There's another problem - the power controller firmware doesn't flag "critical" use - what this means is rather than shutting down when the phone's power gets to 5% it will continue to draw power, right until the battery is 100% drained and the system dies - or as SpeedEvil says, "rests" - mercilessly. Why is this so important? Because the Neo has an advantage called "Quick Charge" - when powered on (i.e. running the Linux kernel) it is able to tap the full power it recieves in the USB charging port resulting in a faster charge. However, when the phone is NOT running Linux (dead or running the bootloader, u-boot) it draws about 1/5th of that power resulting in painfully slow charges. So a phone that has "rested" totally need to be slow charged for about an hour before it has enough power to boot into Linux and enable quick charge.

The promising part is the reasons for the total battery death are know and can and will be fixed over time. That's not so much of an important thing.

What IS important to me is that pondering on this caused a paradigm shift. Having been a GNU/Linux user for the past several years (almost a half decade now?) I've seen several Linux kernel release announcements from the exciting release of KVM to things I considered mundane - drive I/O improvements or some such.

One specific area I've always deemed unimportant - power management. Up until recently, it never mattered to me as I'm a full-time desktop user. I hate laptops and have always found them to be novelties. Now, having really looked at how dramatic this is on my Neo, I have a new appreciation for the time and energy that kernel hackers put into these things - and I realize that every patch submittited is someone else's "power management"; their issues that everyone else is oblivious to.

Taking this track along a bit more, I realized just how powerful the Free Software community is. Until today, I've never thought about power on my computer before. The more CPU speed needed, the more power it consumes. The more memory swaps, the more power. More HD? Bright screen? MORE POWER!

My friend Danijel finds a connect between being a geek and "being green" - I do not. Personally, I feel that the concept of Global Warming (implying it's our 'fault' and that we actually have the capacity to screw a planet over in under a hundred years - or more crazily, that we have the capacity to "fix" it if such things were true) to be laughable. I don't, however, think we can ignore issues of pollution, energy consumption and waste - just the opposite in fact. I think these issues are SO important that, like Freedom, they should be addressed on their merits alone, without propaganda scare tactics of an impending global catastrophy to motivate people to do something about it.

That said, until today, my eyes were closed to the sheer about of waste generated by shitty code. The FSF has been pushing that angle for a little while with the Bad Vista campaign, but this isn't an attack on Vista because it applies to us - users of software libre - just as much. How much electricity are we wasting because of crappily optimized code?

Think about this for a moment... There are datacenters FULL of servers on redundant power systems. Each of these servers is running some sort of AMP stack, spinning hard drives and swapping bits around in memory. If Apache itself has a bug that causes just a bit of unneeded movement it has a cascading effect running 24 hours a day on hundreds of machines. How much energy is being consumed because a developer didn't think about being efficient while writing his code?

Free Software users and developers have an added kind of power, the power to consume less. The amount of waste generated by that hypothetical Apache bug is decently large, but imagine now if the bug was in Linux itself - now it's affecting desktop users and laptop users as well as a lot of servers. This isn't merely a case of "bloat" because even on very slim, "minimal" systems it's possible to be doing more than is strictly needed.

We all need to expand our horizons sometimes and I'm glad for having the chance to have done it here with the Neo - it makes me feel powerful. :) Pun intended, unless it's tacky. Then I won't own up to it.

On January 2nd, I purchased a Neo1973 Base from direct.openmoko.com.

My first interaction with FIC, the company that manufactures the Neo, was that of excitement. They have a decently beautiful site that highlights exactly why one would want the Neo – freedom, hackability, being on the cutting edge and having a sexy looking device. I felt no qualms at all with inputting my credit card number and shipping info. Immediately I got a confirmation via e-mail and everything was good.

As I waited excitedly the next day, checking my e-mail every few minutes to see if the confirmation had arrived (did I mention I was excited?) I began to get a bit annoyed by the end of the day. I then checked out the OpenMoko Wiki and found some information regarding the shipping procedure. I found there two things of interest:

Firstly, the price listed on direct.openmoko.com is an estimate. FIC is based in Taiwan, not the USA, so the USD amount I saw was the “target” - they would actually charge my debit card in New Taiwan Dollars in an amount equal to the current exchange rate.

The second thing I learned was that order processing took 3 to 5 days. Okay, “fine” I told myself. I could restrain my excitement.

It wasn't until January 8th my debit card was actually charged and I received confirmation that my order was processing. Perhaps I'm spoiled by NewEgg's wonderful shipping procedure but I consider a 6 day turn-around to be horrific. In addition to being a software libre geek, I am also a home brewer. In home brewing I deal with specialty supply shops to purchase my hops, grains and yeast. Some of these shops are run by retired military vets with little internet experience and some are decently skilled in the internet but in any case they can still manage to have my order packaged, shipped and at my door in a week – I fully expect a company called FIC (First International Computer) to have their order system automated enough to process orders efficiently. I console myself with the notion that they've got a room full of hackers plugging away to get the GTA02 “mass market ready” who simply can't be bothered to check e-mail and fill out UPS invoices.

Later that night I got confirmation that my package had shipped via UPS and included was a tracking number. I excitedly (again, did I mention how excited I was?) plugged the tracking number in to UPS's site and found that my package would be delivered on... the 14th! Have I really been THAT spoiled by NewEgg? I had debated over getting “expedited” shipping on one of many forms, but I decided against it - “standard” UPS shipping was decently fast, I reasoned. I guess not – this package was going to take almost a week more to get to me from California (for the record, NewEgg ships from Whittier, CA most of the time too). It seems NewEgg's “standard” shipping is NOT UPS's “standard” - lesson learned.

The weekend wait for the Neo was pretty easy, I managed to brew a beer on Sunday using my new Barley Crusher, so time went by rather quickly. Sunday night I decided that I was going to drive my wife to work, and rather than go to work myself immediately, I would drive BACK home and await the Neo's arrival. Luckily, my job offers enough flexibility that I'm able to do that without much issue.

At 11:09 am, my Neo arrived. My decision to return home was a good one – FIC ordered a signature before delivery. I normally HATE when companies do that (With 6 hour long delivery windows I can't afford to take a day off work to sign for a package. I work 55 miles from home so picking up my package from a UPS facility ALSO requires I miss work. Sign for packages = bad). In this case, however, I was a bit happy, since it was a rather expensive shipment – and I was pretty sure insurance wasn't part of UPS's “standard” shipping either.

Above is the box that arrived at my door. It was a pretty plain box, no fancy buzzers or bells (I truly didn't expect them but I have to make this dramatic – did I mentioned I was EXCITED?) and attached to the top was a packaging slip. I opened the box with my keys to find that there were blocks of very thick black foam covering packing peanuts. Buried beneath the peanuts was a bubble-wrap packed white box. This foam was very thick and in general the whole thing was well packed.

Inside the bubble wrap was a clamshell box that I thought was inventive. My wife has been in the printing industry since high-school so printing and packaging are her passions, I suppose it's rubbed off on me.

Once opened the clamshell splits again (once each way) to reveal the “goodies” that I've been so long awaiting.

I won't go over every piece in the box but every piece has been photographed by me, if you're interested in seeing those images please check out the OpenMoko album of my image gallery. The Neo handset itself was enshrined in the familiar anti-static anti-UV bags but it was the first time I'd personally seen self-adhesive anti-static bag – it was kind of neat.

All of the contents of the clamshell unpacked. There's the carrying case, lanyard, headset, spare ear buds, USB cable, stylus, battery, memory card and Neo handset.

While photographing the handset, I noticed that the screen itself seemed very reflective and I often saw myself in my own shots. This worried me, since I figured if it reflected my image it would also have horrible issues with glare when in normal use.

Eager to “get on with it” I held down the POWER button for about 4 seconds and the phone gave the smallest of shudders as the vibrator pulsed for a moment and the screen flickered to life. For anyone who has read articles about OpenMoko on the Neo you've heard “the screen is nice” but it's impossible to take a picture that shows exactly how sharp this screen is. When the backlight came on I was greeted with a black and orange splash screen which quickly gave way to a “typical” Linux boot up – Tux at top and white text on a black background. As small as the text was it was still remarkably clear – just so small it's hard to read.

The Wiki explains this very clearly, so I wasn't alarmed by it, but the very first boot ends in a kernel panic. The “simple” answer is that there's no software other than the Linux kernel and the boot loader (u-boot) itself, so it fails to load anything. End users won't have this happen to them (OpenMoko will be DOA if it's required) but developers will have to flash their own kernel, root file system (rootfs) and (potentially) u-boot image.

At this point, I realized I was “pushing it” by not going to work, so I packed up my Neo and accessories, uploaded my pictures to my wife's Ubuntu system, crashed it and then went over to my Debian system to burn my newly taken Moko images to CD and then went to work.

At work I began my “flashing” after reading up on the Wiki. What was slightly confusing for me was the out-of-date nature of the Wiki. While it's pretty clear once you understand some terminology for someone “new” it can be quite scary – the term “bricking your device” is used enough to scare the hell out of me and I'm fairly comfortable tinkering with “internals”. A quick post to #openmoko on Freenode led me to a how to find daily build images page which kicked me over to buildhost. The recommendation I got was pretty much “Use the newest images” - this makes a TON of sense since the software is rapidly changing.

Flashing the Neo itself was a trivial task and I suppose it will get even easier once the OpenMoko build tools become packaged for popular distros like Debian and Ubuntu. In my case, it meant plugging in the USB cable to my computer and my Neo, downloading dfu-util and compiling it – the whole process took about 30 second so it's a FAST compile as well as simple. I then downloaded the uImage file and the rootfs image for the GTA01 (about 48 MB combined), launched u-boot (hold AUX, power the Neo on) and issued one command to flash the kernel to the Neo. The second command flashed the rootfs to the Neo – a slightly longer process that took about 13 minutes. The downside to this flash is that once the phone enters u-Boot mode it will power down after 60 seconds of inactivity and it doesn't consider USB transfer to be “activity”. This means every 45 seconds or so I pressed the AUX button to keep things “alive”. I'm sure I looked stupid to my office mate, but oh well. (For the record, there IS a solution for this but I was excited and just wanted the thing to work). Once the flashing was complete I restarted the Neo and it booted without problems (no kernel panic!). This time, once the splash screen was done I was greeted with a whimsical sounding chime (audio works!) and the phone proceeded to load my home page.

At this point I hadn't charged the device or installed the SIM or microSD cards, so I powered down, installed them and powered back up. The Neo doesn't do a “quick charge” unless the device is powered on so unless it's totally dead, it needs to be on to charge.

I worked on “work stuff” for a few hours before turning my attention back to my Neo. This time I decided I'd play with GSM and attempt to make a phone call. This entire time the top toolbar was saying “Registering...” which alarmed me – was my SIM card incompatible? There is currently an open bug pertaining to 3G SIM cards (mainly AT&T ones, but possibly others) and I was afraid mine was affected. I pulled opened the GSM quick menu (at the top of the screen it looks like a Triforce-on-a-stick) and clicked “Auto-register with network” which I assumed it would have already done. The phone sat there, still displaying “Registering” while I went into the applications menu and fired up a terminal (ain't it sweet? CLI on my phone!). To see what was happening, I issues a “dmesg” and almost immediately I got a popup (it looks very “Gnome”-like) indicating I was connected to my T-Mobile network.

At this point, I opened up the dialer and punched in what I thought was my phone number (to check my voice mail ) and was a bit shocked... Someone answered! It happened to be my wife (my phone number ends in 7446, hers 7445) and we both chuckled. I noticed two things about the call. Firstly, I can very much hear “air” through the ear piece. It is my understanding that as of this moment there's no noise-canceling software of the phone so the microphone picks up (and sends) everything. The second was that even without noise canceling software, the call quality was comparable to a “regular” phone – at least in the mid-range phones I'm used to dealing with.

On the ride home from work, I excitedly showed my wife the Neo. She's super supportive of me and my obsessions with brewing, computers and freedom, so she was poking at it inquisitively rather than finding “broken” things to criticize like some people would (especially after what I paid for it). While I had focused on the phone, the interface and the hardware the first thing she did was find the games menu. I have to hand it to the interface designers on this one – either I've been clueless or they did their research. While I have to poke and prod to find a “rhythm” to menus my wife was able to find and launch some games so fast I was amazed – and even remarked on it.

She played several games like the Mastermind clone, a game called “Maps” which seems like fun where you fill in oddly-shaped tiles so that no two touching tiles are the same color. Her initial impressions were very good, actually. Her complaint was that some of the games are horribly optimized for the device. Sudoku, for example, is almost useless without the stylus (Input options are 0-9, a keypad would work MUCH better than a matchbox keyboard).

Once home I hit my computer with the Neo and began “playing” with it. I pulled up my address book from my old phone and began inputting my contacts and phone numbers. This is where I found the most “buggy” functionality. I then moved to trying to send an SMS message to a friend which didn't fail, but didn't work either.

Having those two things fail (after some prodding, too) I decided to see what this thing could do in terms of media. I transfered a song, via netcat, to the memory card and launched the Media Player app. Playing the song failed at first, so I rebooted the device (certainly not needed, like any GNU/Linux system I could have restarted the sound system or investigated WHY it wasn't playing but this was a learning exercise more than a troubleshooting one) and relaunched the media player, this time “Turn On, Switch Off” played from my Neo. I attached the headphones and the sound switched with a 1 second delay. The headphones crackle. I believe this is a manufacturing issue and NOT a software one, it sounds as if my cord is frayed and introducing signal-noise. I recall reading another complaint of this. I very much plan on replacing the headphones this week for that reason but since it doesn't “crackle” unless I move I can use them for learning over the next few days.

Applications began crashing at that point and my brain's “troubleshooting” mode kicked in. About a minute later I found that I was using 100% disk space – somehow my microSD card WASN'T detected or mounted and I'd copied a 13 MB file to a space-limited filesystem. Oops.

I deleted my music file and proceeded to set up USB networking (well documented in the Wiki). I immediately installed nano, my text editor of choice, and then SSHed into the Neo from my Debian system. This is much easier than typing on the on screen keyboard, but mainly because it's more familiar. Then, using the Neo handset I launched the web browser to see how well it worked.

The browser is WebKit based which is pretty cool. It renders my site pretty well and renders MOST sites pretty well. Some sites, however, look a little smooshed. In time people will be forced to design sites for "the mobile web" as well - and standards compliance makes this easier - but for the most part, the internet will still be usable on the Neo's browser. I haven't figured out how to do it yet but tilting the phone into landcape mode may help a lot. This should be done automatically on the Freerunner, kind of like the iPhone does, with a simple tilt of the device. The GTA01, however, doesn't have accelerometers so switching orientation is a manual process.

Over all, my first day with my Neo was fantastic. The phone works at least as good as my old Motorola RAZR did after a year and it's powered by Free Software – it's already a winner. Over time, this system will improve and I plan on watching it while it does, sticking my hand in where possible. The excitement hasn't left me yet, but my desire to “make it my own” is growing now and I've already found some “issues” I can investigate. :)

I'll have plenty of happy hacking ahead of me. During this time, I'll review OpenMoko software more completely, breaking down individual applications at a time. I'll hopefully be able to write some "official" documentation as well as fix simple things in the source as my skill with programming improves (my second reason for buying the Neo).

Having "played" with the Openmoko development images in QEMU for a while, I finally decided to "pull the trigger" on a first-generation, "developer only" Neo1973. What makes this purchase so exciting to me is that I'm finally able to support a group of people working for Freedom and openness that try to meet that goal with a tangible product. The OpenMoko community is very supportive of Free Software and FIC itself, the company behind the Neo phone, considers, to it's core, Freedom to be crucial to a sane mobile world.

The Neo isn't ready for "everyone" yet and as of today there's no real idea when it will be ready. The next generation phone being "ready" is determined quite a bit by how well the software is polished on existing Neo phones. The plan is to release the GTA02 and the first "stable" OpenMoko software together: a respectable goal but one that won't come to fruitation until the GTA01 gets enough polish and I hope I can be of assistance to that.

You can certainly expect me to do reviews and provide information about the Neo1973 and OpenMoko itself as I get the device, use it and hack on it. I'm expecting problems with it, and gaps in the feature-set. "It's not ready" they say. Hrm... Where have I heard THAT one before?