User:Radagast
From Openmoko
Contents |
Total Newbie's Getting Started Guide
Introduction
This guide is intended for people who just want to get their Freerunner working as a phone. I tried every distribution available in Jan 2009 and I will summarize my results for anyone who is interested.
Getting the Freerunner working as a Phone
First, make sure that your SIM card works with the Freerunner. Go to the Carriers page, find your country and carrier, and check what people have said about their SIM cards. My original SIM card did not work (Canada/Rogers) but Rogers kindly replaced it with a supported SIM.
Next is your choice of distribution. The great thing about the Freerunner is that you have lots of choices. The bad thing is that some choices are better than others for certain tasks, and it is not always clear which is which. I have tested every distribution available in January 2009, and in my opinion the best distribution for using your Freerunner as a phone is Qt Extended, which is the Free version of Trolltech's QTopia (used on the Sharp Zaurus).
Installing Qt Extended
You must download the kernel and rootfs and flash them to your Freerunner. First read throughFlashing_the_Neo_FreeRunner page. Whatever OS you use on your desktop/laptop, you will need the dfu command line utility to copy the kernel and rootfs to your Freerunner. For most of my coding work I use Mac OS X, but for FreeRunner hacking I find it much easier to reboot into Ubuntu.
Next download the kernel and rootfs to your workstation. Here's a link to the rootfs created by Hypnotize. And here's the mwebster flash image containing the kernel. Boot your FreeRunner in dfu mode and use the dfu commands:
bash# dfu-util -d 0x1d50:0x5119 -a kernel -R -D uImage-gta02-mwester-stable-d6f9fd270943fb22.bin
... stuff ...
bash# dfu-util -d 0x1d50:0x5119 -a rootfs -R -D qtextended-4.4.2-gta02-rootfs-release-working-with-SystemRingTones.jffs2
... more stuff ...
Qt Extended Stuff
Booting Qt Extended
Disconnect the USB cable before booting Qt Extended. Don't know why, but my FreeRunner often hangs if I boot with the USB cable plugged in.
Power Management
Some people claim that Suspend/Resume works on their FreeRunner running Qt Extended. My testing shows that my FreeRunner sometimes does not wake for incoming calls. My solution for the moment is to disable suspend.
Adding New Media
Secure shell to the FreeRunner and create a Documents directory in /home/root. Then secure copy media files to /home/root/Documents. In Qt Extended use the File Manager to browse your Documents directory (might have to do a rescan from the options menu).
As far as I can tell, Qt Extended plays ogg, wav, wmv and some mp3.
Networking
Changing the Default Route
Every time I connect the USB cable FreeRunner changes the default route to 192.168.0.200 interface usb0. Which is a pain in the butt, because I prefer to keep the wifi as my default gateway. Here are the commands to fix it:
bash# route delete default gateway 192.168.0.200 bash# route add default gateway 192.168.3.1
