Qtopia / Qt Extended on FreeRunner

Revision as of 01:12, 24 July 2008

This page provides instructions on how to install Qtopia (proper, not the ASU or QtopiaOnX11 efforts) on the GTA02 (Freerunner) phone. It is similar to the Qtopia on Neo1973 page.

Current status

On 18 July 2008, Qtopia released the latest flash image for the FIC Neo Freerunner (gta02) containing the Qtopia 4.3.2 snapshot of 17 July 2008 (GPL version).

This image can successfully make and receive calls and text messages. It can read all contacts from the SIM card (which the updated 2007.2 does not appear to be able to do). It contains apps that appear to be more stable than the ones found in the 2007.2 image. It has multiple input methods that appear to be more mature.

Dual-Booting between Qtopia and 2007.2 (Qtopia boots from MicroSD card)

Installation Requirements:

1. SSH shell access to 2007.2 based image of the FreeRunner through USB interface or WLAN.
2. A Desktop Linux distro (to unpack the .jffs2 image, I ran Ubuntu under VMWare)

Preparing the SD card

See the Preparing the SD Card section of the Booting from SD page for partitioning and formatting instructions.

Installing Qtopia

Unpacking the Qtopia Root Filesystem Image

Download the Qtopia FLASH image from http://www.qtopia.net/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?lid=72 to your Linux box and extract its contents:

 tar xzf qtopia-4.3.2-gta02-flash-07172049.tgz

You should now have two files: uImage-2.6.24+git18+9c058ff0d2641df3c36fc3300acb72078d2c41d4-r0-om-gta02.bin, and qtopia-4.3.2-gta02-rootfs-07172049.jffs2. Now extract the root file system from the jffs2 using the following commands (these instructions come from Userspace root image, and you may have to "sudo" these commands):

 export loop=$(losetup -f)
 losetup $loop <path>/qtopia-4.3.2-gta02-rootfs-07172049.jffs2
 modprobe block2mtd block2mtd=$loop,131072
 modprobe jffs2
 modprobe mtdblock
 mkdir <mountpoint>
 mount -t jffs2 -o ro /dev/mtdblock0 <mountpoint>
 

Now, tar up the root filesystem:

 tar czf qtopia-4.3.2-gta02-rootfs-07172049.tar.gz -C <mountpoint> .

Installing Root Filesystem

Transfer this compressed tarball to the second partition of the MicroSD that is mounted on the FreeRunner:

 scp qtopia-4.3.2-gta02-rootfs-07172049.tar.gz root@192.168.0.202:/media/mmcblk0p2/

Log in to your FreeRunner and unpack the root filesystem:

 cd /media/mmcblk0p2
 tar xzf qtopia-4.3.2-gta02-rootfs-07172049.tar.gz
 rm qtopia-4.3.2-gta02-rootfs-07172049.tar.gz
 rm -f /media/mmcblk0p2/boot/*

Note: the last step removes the kernel image from the second partition. For some reason, U-Boot cannot find the uImage.bin file in the first partition if a kernel image exists in the second partition boot/ directory.

Installing Kernel

From your Linux box, rename uImage-2.6.24+git18+9c058ff0d2641df3c36fc3300acb72078d2c41d4-r0-om-gta02.bin to uImage.bin and copy it to the boot/ on the first partition of the MicroSD card.

 mv uImage-2.6.24+git18+9c058ff0d2641df3c36fc3300acb72078d2c41d4-r0-om-gta02.bin uImage.bin
 scp uImage.bin root@192.168.0.202:/media/card/boot/
 

Booting into Qtopia

Now shutdown the FreeRunner

 shutdown -h now

Log into U-Boot in the NOR Flash to boot from the MicroSD card: (instructions from Booting the Neo FreeRunner)

• Press and hold Power button
• Then while still pressing the Power button, press and hold AUX button for 5 to 8 seconds.
• A boot menu will appear.
• Press the AUX button to select "Boot from MicroSD" and then press the Power button to execute.

Qtopia should now boot.

Note: you may get a kernel panic which says that "optional features not supported". If this is the case, boot back into 2007.2 and run

 umount /dev/mmcblk0p2
 fsck.ext3.e2fsprogs /dev/mmcblk0p2

This will clean up the file system and clear recovery flags in ext3 that ext2 does not support, then try booting from the MicroSD again.