Sunday, August 31, 2008

USB Networking on the Neo Freerunner

Well the new version of the open moko software isn't much better; they changed a lot in the interface but it still has some serious bugs.

This version of the software has a bug that causes my phone to suspend every 30 seconds when the USB cable is connected, even if you have suspend set to "disabled". Guys you have GOT to fix these bugs! Seriously. I was honestly better off before I upgraded, in terms of reliability.

In order to do much with the Neo Freerunner, you really have to have USB networking set up. I found some instructions that work nicely on Ubuntu. However, if the phone suspends at any time during the process (as mine does constantly due to the bug I was talking about), then -poof- your USB device magically goes away and you lose your ifconfig settings or crash your ssh session!

Unfortunately you have to have USB networking set up in order to run the install scripts to put Debian onto the SD card. Maybe I can type in a command that will force it not to suspend, but I have to do it faster than thirty seconds over SSH because it looks like they took the terminal app out of the newer release. (The one thing that was actually any good in the old release, and they take it out? WTF?)

I'm almost ready to flash Qtopia over the open moko software and forget about it, but I did really want to see what apps the open moko distribution would have available if I could get networking so the package manager will work.

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