Great article! [LWN.net]

Great article!

Posted Feb 19, 2009 8:54 UTC (Thu) by ftclausen (subscriber, #23228)
Parent article: How (not) to brick the Android Developer Phone

Hello,

I totally agree that attaining the freedom to run what we want on our phone is important. And, as tajyrink pointed out, Android and the ADP1 have some "freedom issues" (for lack of a better way of putting it) I think it is still a good starting point.

I myself use an OpenMoko Neo Freerunner running QTextended. This is working reasonable well as a daily phone (since my last one is being used by my girlfriend after her phone broke) but once the Openmoko FSO based images are stable then I will give them a try. Also, the Openmoko Wiki is a great resource.

I also ran Android on my Neo but I could not answer calls since Android assumed the presence of a physical button - which was not there. However, I will try Android again once the Neo version has matured a bit more.

All in all the fact that we can SSH into our phones is already a major milestone.

Happy adventuring!

(Log in to post comments)

Openmoko already kind of there

Posted Feb 19, 2009 10:50 UTC (Thu) by madhatter (subscriber, #4665) [Link]

i know "me too"s are by definition grim, but as another person happily using an openmoko as his daily phone, i'm a bit sad reading this excellent analysis of all the problems that freely using the android presents while thinking "we've solved that... we've solved that... we've solved that" about the 'moko:

> the decidedly non-free Android SDK ... contains [the] (adb) tool, which
> is essential for working with the phone over a USB connection. With adb,
> one can connect to a shell running on the phone
ssh
> move files back and forth
scp / rsync over ssh
> forward network ports to and from the phone
iptables

> The idea of turning this nice device into an expensive brick lacks appeal
two boot firmwares, one writeable and one not, so the latter can always be used to rescue the freerunner from bad overwrite of the former (does *not* apply to neo 1973).

backups? dfu-util and/or mkfs.jffs2

> Of course, said "manual" is a single slip of paper
the openmoko wiki is a bit chaotic, but there's a lot of stuff in it. more by the day, i find.

> The ADP1 can report its orientation to an application, but almost no
> applications make use of that information.
openmookow (really!), and many others

i'm *glad* there are more and more free GSM devices; many is good. a plurality of free OSes and dev environments is good. but it makes me a little sad that so much enthusiasm is being put into this platform which doesn't seem to be designed primarily for freedom, when there are designed-free platforms that could do with being better still.

doubtless there are good things about the G1. but it's not a great product merely because google made it and apple didn't.

(disclaimer: i have no commercial connection with any part of openmoko except that i bought two full-price phones from a distributor.)