September 2007 Archives

For quite a long time I was complaining (in person) how nice and half-usable my OpenMoko is. However, thanks to few great hints I'm now make a dial out and dial in.

First, you will really want to install cu package. It contains old UUCP serial tool which will be much more unseful than you might think! Think of cu as cat for console.

Turn on your OpenMoko (while holding AUX button) and type following:

chown uucp:uucp /dev/ttyACM0 ; cu -l /dev/ttyACM0

You might try to just run cu as root, but it still doesn't work (for me) without chown first. If someone could say me to make this automatic, I would be grateful. So, dear lazyweb, I'm quite sure that there is some udev option for that, and if you know what, drop me a note. If not, this might become topic for another post.

Then, change boot parametars:

GTA01Bv4 # setenv bootargs_base rootfstype=jffs2 root=/dev/mtdblock4 console=tty0 loglevel=8
GTA01Bv4 # saveenv                
Saving Environment to NAND...
Erasing Nand...Writing to Nand... done
GTA01Bv4 # boot               

NAND read: device 0 offset 0x44000, size 0x1fc000

 2080768 bytes read: OK                          

## Booting image at 32000000 ...

   Image Name:   OpenMoko Kernel Image Neo1973(GT

   Created:      2007-08-31  11:29:10 UTC        

   Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (gzip compressed)

   Data Size:    1637653 Bytes =  1.6 MB                 

   Load Address: 30008000               

   Entry Point:  30008000

   Verifying Checksum ... OK

This will disable output on serial console which in interfering with gsmd that tries to open serial port to communicate with GSM part.

This is my journey so far... Now I have to wait for my poor old desktop to compile all packages to get freshest copies on my Neo...

I have returned from YAXWE with very good impressions about mash networking. I did some reading and in theory I already knew how this works, but to see actual implementation of idea in form of Freifunk Firmware was both useful and impressive :-)

On the other hand, installing OLSR on Debian boxes is so easy that there is no excuse in becoming local mash node:

1. Install packages

   $ apt-get install olsrd olsrd-plugins
   

2. Put your card in adhoc mode
   
   This part might be specific to your card, but for my atheros card it's something like:
   

   
   
   $ wlanconfig ath1 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode adhoc
   
   $ iwconfig ath1 essid olsr.example.com
   
   

   
   You should also probably run dhclient or ifconfig to setup your IP adress depending of configuration of your local mash network
   
3. Change network interface in configuration
   

   
   
   $ vi /etc/olsrd/olsrd.conf
   
   

   
   
   Something like: Interface "ath1"
   
4. Start it automatically
   

   
   
   $ vi /etc/default/olsrd
   
   

   
   Change line to START_OLSRD="YES"
   
5. Start daemon
   

   
   
   $ /etc/init.d/olsrd start
   
   

   And that's it!. You are now part of mash network.

In an effort to continue my hack-of-the-week series, here is a quick overview of few subversion hacks I have worked on lately:

• svn-ignore.sh is a tiny shell script which will bring all unversioned files in current svn or svk repository in your $EDITOR and add result of your edit to svn:ignore
• svndump-move.pl is more complex perl script which will allow you to reorganize directory layout in your repository while preserving revision history -- it solved problems like: oh, if I only had root of my repository is subdirectory foo...
• svn2cvs is a bit older tool which received attention when Bartek Teodorczyk very patiently started to report problems with it. As a result, it now has test suite, and it's much more robust

Most of documentation for those tools is hidden in subversion commit messages. If you think they are useful, take a peek there...