FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What will be the price of the Neo FreeRunner?
A: $399 USD.

Q: What components are included?
A: We have not yet decided.

Q: What are the volume discount details?
A: We will sell a “10Pack”, which is a package of 10 phones, for which we will charge $369 USD per phone. Note this is not for any quantity above 10, but rather only for multiples of 10.

Q: Will there be a separate “developer” or “reprogrammable” version?
A: No. All Openmoko products will be upgradeable and reprogrammable by anyone, at any time.

Q: Will I need a “debug board” in order to develop applications or to reprogram or update my Neo?
A: No. Anyone can download applications to their Neo, upgrade, or reprogram the Neo Freerunner with a standard USB cable.

Q: Can I damage my Neo Freerunner by accidentally corrupting the boot loader?
A: No. Every Neo Freerunner includes a fail-safe boot loader that can not be written to or erased using only a USB cable.

Q: Why would I ever need the “debug board”?
A: Only if you need the ability to single-step the hardware, such as when you are debugging the kernel or a driver, or if you accidentally corrupt or otherwise need to reprogram the fail-safe boot loader.

Q: How do I get the “debug board”?
A: It is a separate product, and can be purchased by anyone for $99 US.

Q: How can I ssh from my Linux computer into my Neo?
A: See USB Networking

Q: What sort of warranty does the Freerunner come with?
A: Phones with hardware flaws will be repaired or replaced (at our discretion) if the flaw is reported with 14 days for individual phones, and 28 day sfor phones shipped in “10 packs”.

Q: Where can I get the dfu-util binary?
A: http://downloads.openmoko.org/snapshots/2007.11/images/neo1973/

Q: Can the debug board that shipped with GTA01 be used with GTA02?
A: Yes, with the following restrictions:

• it won’t let you write to the NOR FLASH
• I2C and SPI aren’t available on the debug board

The main functions, JTAG and serial console, will be just fine, and you can always write to NAND FLASH.

Q: What are the best images to use on GTA01? Where can I find them?
A: Kevin Dean’s excellent reviews of the daily builds, along with his recommendations, are here. The images that Kevin recommends are always available here.

Q: What is stored in NAND FLASH and NOR FLASH on GTA02? What’s the difference?
A: Both contain U-Boot. The difference is that NAND FLASH can be updated by the boot loader, while NOR FLASH can ONLY be updated with the (GTA02) debug board. In case of an accidental corruption of NAND FLASH, the U-Boot in NOR FLASH can be used to boot and restore NAND FLASH.

(With the GTA02 debug board, your system is also “unbrickable”, even if you mess up the NOR FLASH. In this case, instead of a quick DFU download, recovery then needs the devirginator, or something equivalent.)

Q: How do I preserve my PIM information (contacts, calendar, etc.) when re-flashing to a later snapshot?
A: Copy the appropriate directories elsewhere BEFORE re-flashing the phone. Copy the files from the phone to a different computer using scp, or copy them to a micro-SD card (at /media/card/) using cp.

Then re-flash the phone, and copy the files back.

Note: Since this is early-access software, we do not recommend that you store valuable information on your Neo with no other backup.

Q: Where is PIM information stored?
A: If you’re using a pre-ASU snapshot, all such files are stored in ~/.evolution and are in “Evolution Database Format”; you could in theory copy this information to your desktop and access it via Evolution or EDS (or vice versa).

If you’re using ASU, this information is stored in ~/Applications/Qtopia/qtopia_db.sqlite. Note that Qtopia Desktop is too old and will not work with Qtopia version 4. Currently Qtopia will only sync to Outlook (we think). Openmoko would welcome a project to write plugins for other applications.