
Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973 - richardboegli
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20170709-10years_openmoko/
======
mindcrime
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, DragonflyBSD, Solaris x86, OS/2 Warp, BeOS,
Minix, Netware, etc., etc? Sure, getting audio and accelerated graphics to
work could be a PITA for some combinations, and network card drivers were
kinda iffy on Linux a long time ago... but still, by and large, it was YOUR
machine and you could run whatever OS you wanted on it and do whatever you
wanted with it. The shortcomings w/r/t drivers and what-not were usually the
result of apathy (eg, manufacturers not shipping Linux drivers or OS/2 drivers
because of lack of perceived demand) rather than outright attempts to _stop_
you from running Linux, OS/2, etc.

Sadly, it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to build our own smartphones
from components, but it would be nice if we could at least get manufacturers
to stop actively blocking attempts to run alternate software and what-not. :-(

~~~
mozartoz
Mobile hardware is a nightmare. The best thing we have to cope with it, so
far, is libhybris. And I don't see things getting much better.

All we have is Pyra, the incoming Neo900 and semi-closed Jollas with Sailfish.

~~~
notspanishflu
There's a "collaborative project to unify the Hardware Abstraction Layer for
projects which run GNU/Linux on mobile devices with pre-installed Android"
called Halium.

[https://halium.org/](https://halium.org/)

~~~
subway
Complete with the device mfg's unpatched 3.10 kernel.

Thanks, but no thanks.

~~~
audi100quattro
I wouldn't write it off so easily, it makes sense as an open source
alternative to google's project treble albeit with parts of android still
running underneath. A stable linux HAL on a few widely used devices would make
all the upstream dev easier. Even if you are stuck on an older kernel because
of a blob driver, it's progress and similar to when you can't upgrade the
kernel on your laptop now because nvidia haven't updated their drivers.

------
vsviridov
It had vision but lacked constraints. The open source bazaar style development
delivered 9 projects completed to 10% instead of one completed to 90%. The
whole "enlightenment vs qt vs gtk" ui environment all half baked and with
spotty feature coverage...

But hey, they were the ones that tried.

~~~
emilsedgh
1) There are still ongoing efforts, including Plasma Mobile.

2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several
kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop.

3) What is preventing FOSS on phones is not software stacks. It's the closed
hardware.

~~~
mikekchar
> 2) The whole "Qt vs. GTK+" worked perfectly fine on desktop. We have several
> kickass graphical user interfaces on the desktop.

In fact, as person trying to avoid both KDE and GNOME, I am _so_ glad there
was not one concerted effort in desktop environments. It's the only reason I
still have choice. Had QT been GPLed originally, I wonder what the world of
free desktop software would look like now.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
The main problem with kde was the decision to rewrite everything for version 4
(and the same goes for gnome 2->3)

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

~~~
emilsedgh
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.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
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

~~~
audi100quattro
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.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
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)

~~~
audi100quattro
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.

~~~
mikekchar
I should say that I actually like quite a bit about GNOME. I'm even a fan of
mutter and GNOME shell (especially with gtile). I just wish I could decouple
it from the rest of GNOME.

I run xmonad at the moment. The learning curve is huge if you don't know
Haskell. It took me ages to get it set up and working. But after I learned
Haskell, it's really very nice.

~~~
audi100quattro
I do like the vim-ness of xmonad in this video, and the tabs, and context
awarness:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70IxjLEmomg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70IxjLEmomg)

Will need to work on getting these features through xmonad, or something else.
gtile itself seems to be js.

------
jghn
A friend of mine had one of those. He was making fun of my then fairly new
iPhone and was trying to show me how he could run X Windows on his device.
After about 30 minutes of trying to get it to work he gave up. I then sent him
a text message, which took him another long period of time to figure out.

He finally concluded his defense of the device by saying "Well, this isn't a
phone for people who like to get stuff done".

------
Rjevski
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 competitors.

~~~
Nursie
>> 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...

~~~
Rjevski
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.

~~~
Nursie
>> I was talking about a complete open-source OS, like a Linux distro

Linux distros are huge in the datacentre and server farm, and AFAICT Android
is open source....

But I do know what you're getting at, and Openmoko had a huge problem with
UI/UX - it's not even that it was a bad UX, it's that the underlying platform
was constantly shifting so radically that there wasn't a good base to build UX
on!

------
chriswarbo
I still use a Freerunner (the successor to the Neo1973) as my only 'phone.

The GTK-based om2007 it came with was a joke, and had already been ditched for
EFL (Enlightenment) in om2008 when it arrived. The EFL UI got the job done,
but all of the actual 'phone applications (contacts, SMS, calls, etc.) came
from QtMobile (QtExtended), so I ended up installing QtMoko (Debian +
QtMobile) and have been using it like that for years.

Some annoyances I've had:

\- The mic volume inexplicably getting set really low; I seem to remember
fixing it via alsa.conf

\- WPA WiFi doesn't seem to work in the GUI; running wicd-curses in a console
is fine

\- Can't manage to get audio out of a bluetooth headset

\- The excellent predictive keyboard was ditched in an OS update in favour of
a clunky non-predictive one. Apparently this was due to prediction only
working well for English; as an Englishman, I was fine with that, but haven't
been able to reinstate the old one :(

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

~~~
syedkarim
Were you working for Sean and Harold?

~~~
zphds
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.

~~~
DrMickeyLauer
And you did a really good job! :-)

~~~
zphds
Haha! Thanks Mickey! Was a fun summer.

------
nullc
I had a Openmoko Neo1973, I managed to make a call on it once!

------
Nursie
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 have been
stabilising so folks at other layers could build on it. Instead we were told
over and over not to get too comfortable as it was all going to change (again)
any day now. Eventually I had to buy a dumbphone to make calls, and switched
out entirely to the Nokia N900 when it turned up.

~~~
moepstar
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.

~~~
Nursie
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....

------
throw7
My freerunner is somewhere in my old computerstuff bin, but the idea of having
a completely open phone is still something I'm interested in.

They had grandiose visions (mesh networking), but all I really wanted was rock
solid calling and wifi. It's actually only recently (last year) that I moved
to a smart phone, otherwise I'd happily support an open phone.

Also, I believe the freerunner was not 100% open. My recollection was that
both the GSM driver (either firmware or device driver) and the graphics driver
(openmoko was unable to open up the source to the device driver although they
tried) were closed.

------
BenoitEssiambre
You have to give attribution of some of the concepts behind the first iPhone
to this project. I remember when the iPhone was unveiled, I immediately
thought it was a better funded, better polished clone of Openmoko.

Apple even stole some of the visual design elements. The speaker grill was
almost identical: [http://gizmodo.com/229243/openmoko-smartphone-did-they-
have-...](http://gizmodo.com/229243/openmoko-smartphone-did-they-have-a-time-
machine-or-what)

Openmoko was also promoting the "app store" concept much earlier than Apple,
which tried to prevent third party native apps the first year of the iPhone.

From a 2006 linuxfordevices.com article about openmoko (remember this was
before the iPhone was unveiled):

"The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application
processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of
flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card. Typical of Chinese phone
designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this
case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps
look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said. The phone features an A-GPS
(assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a
pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is
apparently open. Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by
FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered
by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard
"AT" modem commands. The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB.
It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a
connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection. [...] Moss-Pultz
adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future." [...] As for additional
software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot
is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer,
phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely
include the Minimo browser [...] He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the
21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. "

------
audi100quattro
If contracts weren't around in 2007, the Neo 1973 might have done better, but
the price point was still high and is too high today compared to a $50 phone
from amazon. Wanted one, but never got one..

------
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/](http://goldelico.de/)) They're also involved in the
Pyra and the Neo900. They are quite in need of support. ;)

------
mithron
Still got one somewhere deep on the shelves and the last revisions of software
in the cloud awaiting for some spare time to make it working.

------
mithron
Still got one of those somewhere deep on the shelves.

