Interim update...

... because I don't have anything really interesting yet.

Looks and feels quite nice. The screen is indescribably sharp and it runs quite snappily.

The power management's a bit annoying - I wanted to show off my Neo to a friend in LA and I wasn't able to power it back up even wired up to my laptop's 500ma USB port. It would be nice to be able to power it up even without a battery! I also had to play with removing the battery a bit this morning... argh. Now I see why the Advanced kit has a second battery. ;)

I'm going to take a crack at getting cpufreq working - I had begun writing my own patch but then I found http://www.evolware.org/chri/paciugo/cpufreq.patch using a quick google search... so I'll add that to a local tree and try to get all the other periphs going along with it. Once voltage control is added it should save a measurable bit of battery life.

After seeing Koen's blog yesterday and noticing he used Angstrom I decided to build it myself. So far I have Angstrom w/GPE on and I'm building packages from the tree. Once I get my Bluetooth keyboard working I can use Pidgin. (I wonder how hard it is to use Bluetooth GPRS...)

A couple of build tips:

- I needed to add 'ENABLE_BINARY_LOCALE_GENERATION = "0"' to the sample local conf because trying to build locales using qemu-arm failed.

- Had one build failure in the x11 image phase - a glibc fault. This might've been my opty (although i hope not!) since I just ran it again and it worked...

GPE looks pretty nice - it's geared to 240x320 devices though so things tend to get a bit small on the Neo. I was able to resize the fonts a bit and get it working though. Also the Neo needs a flashier 'main' screen. But the elements are all there - Angstrom has recent/latest gtk+ and cairo libraries.

More later when I have something worked out - ala cpufreq or a local copy of the 2007.2 apps working ;)

Got my Neo!

- Home-built OpenMoko image, check.

- One Neo1973 phone, check.

- One hacker lunchbox, check.

- 2GB MicroSD card, check.

- One happy Chad, check.

- Getting image onto phone... not quite yet.

First blog post... done.