January 2009 Archives

Ainulindale has asked me to collect a laundry list of open issues that need fixing before we release, as I have been browing the SHR trac during the last 2 days. Here is a list of issues that I have found important and which probably should be discussed or even better fixed.
 

• usbnet seems broken for many in latest unstable. First reboot fixes for some (apparently), others have to "ifdown usb0;ifup usb" additionally.
  
• eth0 (wifi) often comes up without wrieless extensions. SOmetimes fixed by suspend/resume. Sometimes shr-settings shows wifi as turned "off"
• rotate screen (using xrandr) leads to white screen of noise
• enlightenment using too much CPU (7% on mine) (no ticket)
• Dialer, Contacts,Phonelog crash when there is no SIM card inserted or GSM has been turned off. If this is not fixed it should definitely be mentioned in some kind of release note. Some sample tickets:

• #194 Opening contacts without gsm reception doesn't work
• #198 Turning off the GSM modem, should result in a 'not active' GSM icon in the top panel
• #215 Ophonekitd crashes with no SIM in phone 
• #63 Fail gracefully before SIM registration 

• It seems that GSM has problems currently when the SIM PIN id disabled (#244,#232,#223,#232) (also a contender for a release note mention)
  
• Handling of multipart SMS messages seems to be an issue: 
• #121 One long SMS received as a set of smaller ones 
• #272 not able to send long sms 

• A long list of reports on minor phonegui-efl-new usability issues and improvement suggestions. How urgent should they be? A random sample of issues: 
• #252 Show no. of new messages, missed calls directly
  
• no text wrapping or scrollbars when words longer than lines 
• #222 Why can't you send empty SMS's? 
• #161 Remaining SMS chars inaccurate when using backspace
  

•  My personal favorite is : #248 Can't dial #793# (or other USSD messages), as you can press "Dial" all day long and you just won't get any feedback :-) .
  

 
Missing here is a list of screen blanking issues, receiving call when suspended issues, and occassional, no sound or ringing never stops issues. However these seem very tricky to reproduce.
 
Now, discuss!!!  Ahh, by the way, I'm "spaetz" on trac and IRC. I am based in Zurich, CH
(although I am a German) and like to bother OSS projects :-) . Hello SHR!

Hello! My name is Sebastian (you can meet me on IRC as dos1), and I'm leader of shr-settings project. My goal is to explain you our mission and tell you, how we will do it.

What is SHR Settings?

SHR Settings is a python-elementary based app, which is supposed to be modular. We want you to do your own modules to it, without messing up with core code. Right now, to display some modules it's necessary to change one variable in the launcher app, but dynamic loading of modules is on our TODO list.

Our team is tiny now - it has only three people. I'm a leader, because I started this app and uploaded the first source files to svn on openmoko.opendevice.org (which is our polish community page). After that, yoyo and hiciu started messing with the code. yoyo firstly developed a GSM network selector (which was necessary for him to use his Neo in polish carrier "Play"), and hiciu introduced some pretty object modules system. Now we are working together on shr-settings in SHR git repository.

So, what is there right now?

Thanks to yoyo, we have pretty and finger-usable categories list on main menu.

Thanks to the modular style, SHR Settings can use different launchers. We were thinking about using Toolbar on the top (as in Illume configuration), and about starting only a specific module from the command line (if someone wants to integrate our modules with Illume options).

Because we're using Elementary for UI, shr-settings looks like all Illume and other SHR apps, and it's finger usable. For example, turning on/off radios is done by toggles, like in elementary-alarm app or on the iPhone.

shr-settings is still work in progress. It's still missing some features; it's slow and sometimes implemented badly. Our primary nightmare is slow dbus requests, which are blocking whole UI. We will work on it, I promise :)

Ok, so now I will describe all SHR Settings modules, which are there now.

shr_gsm.py

The GSM module now can turn off/on GSM antenna, display available GSM operator and connect to one of them (useful with roaming), and display modem information.

shr_sim.py

The SIM module can display information about messages and contact books on your SIM card, and clean all entries from them.

(note: part of the SIM module is displayed on the first of GSM screens)

shr_bt.py

The Bluetooth module can turn off/on BT antenna, visibility and start/stop bt services (spi, hci). We are planning to write some BT manager here - for sending or receiving files, connecting to PAM network, headsets or HID devices, etc.

shr_wifi.py

The WiFi module can turn off/on WiFi antenna. We have only started work on the WiFi manager - right now it is scanning networks and displaying button with names :)

shr_gprs.py

Right now it's doing nothing - only looking good ;)

shr_profiles.py

Here you can change active profile in frameworkd. We want to use hoversel widget instead of toggles in future, and implement some profile manager (changing ring tones, rules etc.)

shr_clock.py

This good-looking clock can provide you an easy way to set actual time. Synchronize with... buttons can set correct time automatically. In future, we want to be able to set the current date here too.

shr_pm.py

Power settings shows to you information about battery state and allows you to power off, restart of suspend your device.

shr_timeouts.py

Here you can set all frameworkd timeouts - for instance dimming, locking and suspending device. We want to implement an easier way to simply disable/enable some timeout (now if you have 30 seconds in suspend, you must click 30 times on "-" button to turn it off).

shr_usb.py

This module is mysterious for SHR users now, because... Probably due to frameworkd bug it's not working. But when it's working, you are able to switch your Neo from device to host mode. In future plans we want to implement setting powered mode in host, and ethernet, mass storage or maybe MTP device in device mode.

shr_services.py

Here you have listing of all services in /etc/init.d, which are used in some runlevels. You can stop or start it without playing with the console.

Others (shr_test.py, shr_misc.py)

This is playground for our developers :)

And that's all! If you want to write your own module - look at module.py, shr_misc.py and shr_test.py. You should be able to understand how shr-settings modules are working. And when you finish - commit, or if you don't have access/don't want to have access/something else - send it to me! My mail is seba.dos1@gmail.com. The same with patches - all work on shr-settings is welcomed.

What's next?

To sum up - our primary goal is to provide all basic functionality, mainly based on frameworkd dbus interface. Secondly, we want to make it faster. If you can help in something, we will be happy when you'll do it :) You can give your thoughts on trac. Happy hacking!

Hey SHR Users!

First of all, happy new year to everyone. These days have been tough for lots of people, it's apparently hard to develop software on a near-exploding belly. Nonetheless, we have candy for you, as you'll see here.

Thanks to bumbl for his help in this entry, and for his picture ;-).

Domain Name

Among the useless stuff some of us did during the holidays, buying a domain name was one of them. Even though Bearstech (praised be their name) are kindly hosting us, they suggested we buy a domain name for our visibility, and in order to have more simple URLs. So your favourite information will be accessible here:

• Trac: http://trac.shr-project.org
• Git: http://git.shr-project.org
• Blog: http://blog.shr-project.org
• Buildhost: http://build.shr-project.org

SHR Settings

Per Sebastian Krzyszkowiak (dos), shr-settings is a modular python-elementary software to control hardware through frameworkd of your SHR based phone. Users will be able to turn on/off radios, set or synchronize time, connect to another GSM carrier, WiFi network or Bluetooth device, etc. Developers can easily write their own python modules, which will be loaded and used in the settings window.

You can meet developers of shr-settings on #openmoko.pl or #openmoko-cdevel on freenode. Right now project is mainly developed by Openmoko community in Poland http://openmoko.opendevice.org/). The code is located on the SHR git (http://git.shr-project.org).


Release Date / Testing Feature Freeze

The release (our first, tiny baby) is coming. You may have heard that a lot the past few months, but it's true this time (well, at least we hope!).
In Testing, we're going to freeze features, and focus on fixing the last remaining bugs to milestone.
Some of them imply working on e, especially to build a working illume environment (latest revision we used was borking on the dictionnary level, but locales were properly handled).
Some of them are related to our UI, there are still mistakes waiting to be fixed, but there are less and less of them everyday.

Things to do in the future

Everyone knows today that we are eagerly waiting for opimd. We need a way to store PIM entries, and this is currently, in the eyes of the team, the major show stopper on frameworkd (FSO) based distributions.
That's why as soon as opimd hits the ground, it'll be our first priority to do what's necessary to use it. We are also studying a temporary replacement solution based on some work by raster.

We also need a good and reliable settings application, and SHR Settings is currently looking fairly good. Hopefully it'll do more and more stuff in the days to come.

As ever, we'd like to demonstrate the modularity of our architecture by being able to show another UI library, based on the old 2007.2 GTK UI. We still need developers to do that, so if you're a GTK zealot, and eager to show your skills, please mail us!

Last but not least, we are seriously thinking, as soon as the first release will hit the ground, to develop software for products other than the OpenMoko devices. FSO is a transversal initiative, and there was some talks about being able to produce a full and working distro for, say, the HTC Universal. This won't distract us from our first priority, don't worry: testing on OM devices :-)


Team Organization
 
The SHR team is fast growing - if you want to become a part of it
there are several different contact persons and areas in which you can participate.
 
Developing
 
Ainulindale: Responsible for the infrastructure/architecture, bitbake recipes, and lots of code all around the SHR project
quickdev: Responsible for the infrastructure, developing the EFL UI at the moment, and lots of code related to FSO handling
mrmoku: Responsible for the infrastructure, bitbake and some code around the project (e.g. he ported the fastboot patches for SHR)
TAsn: The man behind pyphonelog
Hire: Our Italian friend who did the SHR artwork
The guys from openmoko.pl (dos, hiciu, yoyo): SHR settings
We won't forget contributions from mywave, ptitjes, dolf, around many areas of the project.

A special thanks to all the testers/ticket reports, who help us a lot. Special thanks too to Bobby Martin and Mike Westerhof for their whining :-)
 
Developers are needed in all areas
If you have an app which you like to add to SHR/the SHR repository or if you'd like git access to help us developing software ask Ainulindale or quickdev

We also need bug-wranglers. As more and more tickets are created, we need some people to help us follow and answer to tickets.
 
Testing squad
 
If you want to become part of the testing squad just join #openmoko-cdevel on freenode and volunteer

And don't forget: