A Glimpse of GNU/Linux

3 months ago I bought one Motorola A1600 mobile. There were three reasons behind that decision:

One of the reason was my Sony Ericsson  K300 stopped working after 3 years of faithful work. It was a great mobile and almost all my J2ME experiments were done on it. I think it was more than worth the money that I have spent on it.

The other reason was I was looking for a Linux smart phone.  I have attended the Herlad Welte’s BOF and presentation of A780 on Foss.in-2005. That had a long lasting impression on me.  I thought I should  go for an updated version of the same mobile which is based on EZX platform.

The final reason was GPS .. Yes, though I came to Bangalore more than a year ago, I still don’t know some parts of the Bangalore.  So, with a GPS enabled phone, I thought I should roam around freely. However, I wasn’t that ready to pay for a GPS service on a monthly basis. So, I choose A1600. It has gps support and has a builtin map of India (We are free to download the map of any country, though… after all , that’s what freedom means) . It even shows the way from Bangalore to Kollam (my district in Kerala). I must say that this GPS on A1600 helped me very much when me and my cousin brother Lalu drove my modified Swift car from Bangalore to Kerala 2 months ago.

The first month with the A1600 was a bit boring. I was not able to spend more time for it. I also found that the built in real player needs some format converter software to run my favorite videos and songs (some are ogg files).  I was able to run some java me programs on it.. and the first j2me program that I ran on this mobile was ‘chicken warrior’ , my own production

I couldn’t believe that I have wasted 2 months without doing anything with my Linux mobile . Finally, I decided to do something.. I can’t let my mobile to be just another ‘ good looking mobile’ that just does what it’s supposed to do. It’s running GNU/Linux.. It is way more than just a mobile. If this was my purpose, I could have bought another ‘good looking M$’ mobile.

One of the hurdles that I have faced during the initial stages of  ‘moto modding’  was the inability to install the packages (mpkg files which are nothing else but tar.gz files with cross compiled binaries for ARM architecture) which are not trusted by Motorola, not by me. The installation of untrusted applications in the mobile were blocked in firmware by Motorola and it was a real not so cool thing for a Linux phone.  The way to avoid this was installing the  ‘MPKG’ package which resolves this issue. It is available at

http://www.modmymoto.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=4179

All we have to do is download it , unzip and copy the .system  and replace the .system in the A1600 phone with that folder.  I have downloaded the MPKG package for A1200 which is the previous version of A1600. It works well on A1600. Later , I found that almost all the apps of the A1200 works on A1600 as well. Installation steps of MPKG package is as follows:

How to install A1600 Mpkg Installer.
1. extract Mpkg_A1200.rar and you ‘ll get .system folder. It’s hidden folder If you cann’t see try show hidden file.
2. copy .system folder into your flash card in usb mode.
3. restart A1600 and you are ready to go.

After installing MPKG, we can install all the .pkg (again tar.gz files) to  the A1600. Even if the application is .mpkg, just rename it to .pkg and you can install it. The details of .pkg/.mpkg format is available here:

http://wiki.openezx.org/MPKG

I have downloaded the Ekonsole application and installed it on my phone from here:

http://www.motorolafans.com/forums/a1600-general-chat/24911-ekonsole-a1600.html

Now I have a cool konsole running on my mobile. Here are some outputs:

$ ps ax

PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
1 ? S 0:01 init [
2 ? S 0:00 [keventd]
4 ? SN 0:00 [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
3 ? S 0:00 [ipmd]
5 ? S 0:00 [kswapd]
6 ? S 0:00 [bdflush]
7 ? S 0:00 [kupdated]
8 ? S 0:00 [keventd]
9 ? S 0:00 [kdebounced]
10 ? S 0:00 [kemud]
12 ? D 0:00 [swapper]
13 ? S 0:02 [mtdblockd]
14 ? S 0:00 [khubd]
39 ? SN 0:00 [jffs2_gcd_mtd8]
42 ? SN 0:01 [jffs2_gcd_mtd9]
45 ? SN 0:09 [jffs2_gcd_mtd15]
54 ? S 0:01 ./musbd -r /ezxlocal/download/mystuff -s 30Mib -t fat16 -C UTF8 -U 2000 -G 233 -B 0 -H 0Kib -e
85 ? S 0:03 /usr/SYStapi/tapisrv
86 ? S 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/modem/modemlauncher
92 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/apmd
93 ? S 0:01 /usr/bin/emud
99 ? S 0:50 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/windowsserver -qws
102 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
105 tty1 Ss+ 0:00 -bash
113 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
116 ? S< 0:01 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
117 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
118 ? S< 0:01 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
119 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
120 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
121 ? S< 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/sound/soundmanager
126 ? S< 0:34 /usr/SYSqtapp/phone/phone
145 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
146 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
153 ? S 0:03 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/misc1
165 ? S 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/misc1
166 ? S 0:02 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/misc1
169 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/SYStapi/lapisrv
187 ? D 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/misc1
275 ? S 1:34 /usr/SYSqtapp/am/am
276 ? S 0:15 /usr/SYSqtapp/windowsserver/openwindow
277 ? S 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/am/am
292 ? S 0:19 /usr/SYSqtapp/messaging/messaging
297 ? S 0:02 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
301 ? S 0:01 /usr/SYSqtapp/opera/brwdaemon
302 ? S 0:02 /usr/SYSqtapp/addressbook/addrbk
303 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
304 ? S 0:34 /usr/SYSqtapp/sui/sui
305 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
309 ? S 0:11 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
342 ? Ss 0:00 ./inetd
354 ? Ss 0:00 ./smbd -D -l /dev/null
372 pts/0 Ss+ 0:00 -bash
379 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/db_daemon -tapi -delay 12
447 pts/1 Ss+ 0:00 -bash
575 ? S 0:00 /usr/SYSqtapp/messaging/messaging
593 ? S 0:03 ./ekonsole
600 pts/2 Ss 0:00 -bash
607 pts/2 R+ 0:00 ps ax

A1600 details:

An ARM processor based mobile which runs on EZX platform with the following confirguration

Processor: Intel XScale PXA27x rev7 v5l

RAM : 64 MB

Software info:  Montavist linux 3.1 with linux kernel-2.4.20

Telnet to the phone

MontaVista(R) Linux(R) Consumer Electronics Edition 3.1
Linux/armv5tel 2.4.20_mvlcee31-mainstone_pxa27x

Will be updated soon with more adventures ..