Complexity of emergency-only baseband firmware development

[david at matthews.pm]

>Our community contributor David Matthews can probably help you with
Freerunner issues, including firmware flashing, but I can absolutely
assure you that you WILL NOT be able to see any observable differences
between Openmoko's official firmware and FreeCalypso Magnetite: if
someone were to give you a used Freerunner without telling you what
firmware version it runs, you won't be able to determine it
behaviorally, only by looking at the ID strings returned by the modem.

I'll jump in here and confirm that the magnetite release works exactly as the last baseband version from open moko (OM 11 I think)

I'd certainly help with flashing issues if any - probably not as in my experience the freecalypso tools just work and I already wrote some howtos which I think are at least tolerably clear.

The real problem with the freerunner as a libre phone is as Mychaela says, it is neither fish nor meat - way more complex and power hungry than a dumb phone and way behind the capabilities of even a 5 year old Samsung with a replacement firmware.

If you did want to pick up the baton with developing the linux side (or baseband!) of the freerunner, I'd would be interested, but I doubt that I'd be able to help much apart from testing.

For the linux side, the last releases of Qtmoko would probably be the best starting point, but even these suffered from what I understand to be a faulty kernel - expect to find your phone has crashed at least once a day, even if you reboot it regularly. This distribution was pretty much a one man effort, by a very helpful guy - you might be able to stimulate him to take an interest again.

--
David Matthews
david at matthews.pm