Yelläks /ˈyæl•eks/

Finally, after so many months of consideration and thinking, I bought the Freerunner in India. Despite the fact that the price is quite high compared to the price in Europe due to the disadvantageous Dollar-Rupee exchange course, I could not resist any more.

After arrival the first illusion that the Freerunner is actually a phone passed away. Well, it is more a Linux box with a call ability. The Settings button did not work at all and when a call was placed, I was not able to hear anything. The next problem is: What can I do about it? I mean, it is well known, that everything can be changed on this phone, but the question raises: How?

Lot’s of reading followed and I found a nice webpage which guides step-by-step through the process to flash the internal NAND memory. For beginners it might be a good idea to consider this NAND as the internal hard disk drive of the Freerunner (to lessen the abstraction). This memory can be flashed uncountable number of times and nothing will happen, if e. g. the power supply is interrupted. Compared to flashing the BIOS or the firmware on a computer, flashing the Freerunner is more a copying of data which can be repeated in case of any problems. Always the same steps are performed regardless the distribution.

So I tried various distributions: FDOM, Debian, Om2008.12 and Om2008.12 blown up with Kustomizer. Currently and hopefully also finally I ended with SHR. I would like to describe shortly my experiences with the various distributions.

Distributions

• FDOM is based on Om2008.9 and brings a huge amount of software (as the name suggests). Most of the preinstalled packages are not needed and it took lots of time to remove the unnecessary stuff. It was nice to see what is possible and to get an idea, what programs are available. However this distributions was to fat for my personal taste.
• Om2008.12 is the latest version of Openmoko. Most of the things should work out of the box. However I experienced problems especially with the standby mode. Sometimes the Freerunner did not wake up anymore, when the power button was pressed. Or worse: It did not wake up, when a call arrived. From the outside it was not visible, if it will wake up or not. Only a reboot could bring it back to life. Beside the suspend issue, everything worked fine out of the box. Messing around with the Alsa settings produced quite audible conversations (though a little bit too low in the volume for my taste).
  If you want to have Om2008.12 with many preinstalled packages you should try out the Kustomizer mentioned above. It basically transforms the Om2008.12 into a FDOM based on the latest Openmoko kernel.
• I also tested Debian shortly. Most of the distributions support a Ethernet connection via the usb0 device. However Debian uses eth1 for whatever reason. It did not start into any graphical mode and after installation, a SSH connection via USB is mandatory. Despite the fact that I tried to start a graphical user interface I completely failed due to some errors in the python-evas package. Installing the older one as suggested did not help at all and after a day I gave up and removed it again.
• SHR is based on the freesmartphone.org (FSO) middleware which should make many things quite easy to access through the dBus system. SHR is in an early development status and e. g. lacks a manager that can store phone numbers, names, birthdays etc. It is at the moment purely based on the store capabilities of the SIM card which e.g. cannot store 2 different numbers (home, cell, or office) under one name. Fortunately a PIM (personal information manager) is in development. In my opinion it is currently the fastest distribution, but not the one with the flashy icons and beautiful theme. Crashes happen rarer than with Om2008.12. Of all distributions it has the best settings manager, although it is a little bit slow and the suspend mechanism works reliably.

What did I learn?

If you want to change things, it is almost always mandatory to read, read and read. E. g. changing the theme in enlightenment is not as trivial as somebody used to Windows or Ubuntu/Debian might think. The theme has to be programmed and compiled. It can be frustrating, annoying and time consuming. It took me several hours to change the theme in SHR to the one shown below using tango icons and in which the clock shows also the date and week day.

Screenshot of SHR running on Freerunner

Many packages on e.g. opkg.org are broken and an attempt to install them just gives error messages such as md5 hash mismatch or Terminated. It can be quite frustrating, if the packages are not maintained properly.

Conclusion

The Freerunner is a young and ambitious project and might never target the end consumer market, although it has the potential. People, who want to have a working phone with touch screen, etc should have a look at a phone based on Android (although this has also some unpleasant surprises). E. g. I had to get used to the Dialer, which is an application to dial a number. An application needs to be loaded and is not available instantly (applies to all tested distributions)

However people who want to have the option to dive into the complexity of a today’s phone and do not hesitate to learn about various things; people who are eager to dig around to solve a problem and do not get scared of text output in a console will have lot’s of fun with the phone (assuming they have also a good portion of patience). For two weeks I had my fun. Now I have to do some work for my employer….

Oh, btw, employer: Openmoko cancelled the development of the successor of the Freerunner (GTA03) and reduced the team size drastically. Maybe this is a last chance for a long time to get a real free phone.