News of the OpenEZX project

.com and .net domains renewed for OpenEZX

Arne Voigtlaender (Shoogee Inc.) sponsored the renewal of the www.openezx.com and www.openezx.net domains.

Thanks to Arne.

.com and .net domains for OpenEZX

Jan Prunk (yang) has kindly reserved www.openezx.com and www.openezx.net for us. For now these new addresses point to www.openezx.org.

Thanks to Jan.

New Developer to work on ROKR E6 and Motorola Q CDMA

As we are a small team with a core team of only three people we sometimes suffer from the fact that we only have a limited amount of time we can offer our hobby project.

Getting more people involved is often a good way to spread the load. So we are happy to announce that two new developer have joined the project.

GM Zhuo is working on his ROKR E6 for a long time already. He is now working on getting the E6 in line with the support we have on the other phones and also write new driver like the pcap-rtc.

Timothy Meade is working on the Motorola Q. This is the first non-EZX device we have support for. Normally delivered with Windows Mobile it is pretty similar from the hardware platform, especially using the PCAP2 chip.

Welcome on board guys.

Working camera on A910

Thanks to the work of Bart Visscher and Antonio Ospite we now have a working setup for the A910 camera. The MT9M111 CMOS sensor driver was already in mainline and just needed a small fix to work correctly for us. Here is a picture to show the raw image quality.

Some versions of the A780 are also using the same CMOS sensor. Sadly we only get images with wrong colors out of it. Either the sensor driver still has a bug or we need a special setup for the A780 for it. Stay tuned, we will find it out.

Topgit for kernel patches

After a long time usage of quilt for our kernel patches, a short period of trying out stgit and guilt we finally have found something that matches our workflow and helps us to keep in sync with upstream in an easy way. Our tree is now topgit enabled. As topgit is only a small layer over git people are still able to use our git tree without topgit. Only if you like to start hacking on it we strongly suggest it. People just like to compile the kernel itself need to checkout the ezx/current from our git repo. Currently we are based on 2.6.28-rc2 and following closely.

boot_usb 0.2.0 release

The OpenEZX team is pleased to announce the 0.2.0 release of boot_usb. It gained support for transfering an initrd, setting the cmdline and setting the machine ID. RAZR2 V8 detection support was also added.

A910 donation for hacking

Today I recieved an A910. Peter Malte Mack was kind enough to send us one. A big thank you from the OpenEZX team for this. The most interesting about this device is the fact that ist is the only EZX with a wifi chip build in. We still need to find out which chip and if we can perhaps support it, but atleast we have the hardware now to do this.

Bleeding Edge Images for EZX devices

For a long time already the Angstrom distribution builds kernels and images for our EZX devices. We like to say thank you for this service. If people like to try out some bleeding edge images they should give the autobuild images a try. Based on this images we also like to provide a well tested snapshot at some point in the future. (Promissed schedules always fail, so no date. :))

ezx11 patchset released

OpenEZX is now based on linux-2.6.21. More infos about ezx11 in the ChangeLog.

Note

Only a780 and e680 kernels offer a useful set of functionalities, other phones are at a very early stage, please see the Project Status page on our wiki.

The recommended toolchain to crosscompile the images is the one from OpenEmbedded, see the wiki for further details.

Here you can find some binary builds to have a quick test on your phone. Please report your experience :)

• zImage-2.6.21-ezx11-a1200

  modules-2.6.21-ezx11-a1200.tar.gz

• zImage-2.6.21-ezx11-a780

  modules-2.6.21-ezx11-a780.tar.gz

• zImage-2.6.21-ezx11-e2

  modules-2.6.21-ezx11-e2.tar.gz

• zImage-2.6.21-ezx11-e6

  modules-2.6.21-ezx11-e6.tar.gz

• zImage-2.6.21-ezx11-e680

  modules-2.6.21-ezx11-e680.tar.gz

And you can check the integrity of the files using md5sums .

ROKR E6 first kernel boot

Paulo Marques joined our team. He is a lucky ROKR E6 owner and already was able to boot a 2.6.21 vanilla kernel plus only one EZX patch. This brings me to another topic. We have a 2.6.21 kernel branch for some time now. This will be the base for our next ezx release. Thanks goes to wyrm and ao2.

ezx10 is out

Better touchscreen handling and more. More infos about ezx10 in the the ChangeLog.

ezx9 patchset small bugfix release

The OpenEZX team proudly announces the release of the ezx9 patchset. No new features just bugfixes. For more details have a look at the ChangeLog.

ezx8 patchset released.

The OpenEZX team proudly announces the release of the ezx8 patchset. This release is somekind of milestone as we fixed the mux_cli driver to keep the phone alive. This means we can start to try some real telephony stuff in the next weeks. For more details please refer the announce mail.

boot_usb release with support for ROKR E2

We made our first boot_usb release. Fetch boot_usb-0.1.0, test and report if it breaks or works for other phones then A780, E680 and ROKR E2. I guess it should even work for A1200, but like to see a proof for it. We also were able to boot a 2.4 kernel compiled for E680 on a ROKR E2.

UPDATE: boot_usb-0.1.0 was successfully tested with an A1200.

Two new team members

The OpenEZX project is happy to annouce that Antonio Ospite and Daniel Willmann have entered our team.

Welcome and happy hacking.

Project status page

To give new people a better overview, a status page was started.

EZX7 is released

After a period of silence we are happy to annouce the release of ezx7. It fetches together all the patches flying around. Still no stable release and a lot of work is to be done before we have a full free-software stack. For more information please read the announcement on the maillinglist.

A1200, ROKR E2 and A732

The OpenEZX project now has three more models of Motorola Linux phones for development: One A1200 (thanks to a donation from Wolfgang Spraul!), and a ROKR E2 and A732 which Harald bought during his recent Shanghai trip.

As of now, we don't support any of those three phones. Expect news on this during the upcoming weeks...

New website launched.

As you can see, we've tweaked the website a bit. This is not a complete redesign, mostly small enhancements, cleanup and typo fixing. If you find some typos, broken links or even want to help to get this site better, don't hesitant to drop me a mail.

Logo contest is over.

We recieved 15 proposals from 10 people. That is a lot more we expected. First of all we would like to say thank you to everybody participated at this contest. The winner is David McKelvie. Congratulations. Based on this logo we will adjust website and wiki and start an artwork page. Stay tuned.

The project needs a logo.

The OpenEZX project makes progress every day. But one one important item is still missing. A project logo. So if you have the necessary skills please join our Logo Contest.

2.6.15.6 kernel port to EZX platform

The OpenEZX 2.6.x kernel makes significant progress. A kernel based on 2.6.15.6 has successfully been booted on A780 and E680 devices, including ports of the drivers for many hardware features, although a lot is still missing. More details can be found at this blog entry in Haralds blog.

planet.openezx.org launched

The new RSS feed aggregator planet.openezx.org has just been launched as a collection of OpenEZX related weblogs. If you know of some blog feeds that match this subject and we might want to add, please let us know!

USB boot loader released

The project has now released an USB boot loader application. This application can be used to download arbitrary custom code from a host PC into the phone (via USB) and then have the phone execute this code.

This is particularly useful for kernel development, since you can boot and test kernels without having to actually touch the flash of the phone.

OpenEZX project wiki started

The OpenEZX Wiki has just been launched as a collaborative effort to collect information on the EZX platform.

OpenEZX project homepage started

The OpenEZX project proudly announces their new project homepage.