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Hardware

Linux-Based Phone, Snatched From Inferno 69

Posted by timothy from the also-washes-dishes dept.
elemur writes: "For your linux loving friends with everything, why not get a TuxScreen? This phone is based on the Compaq Linux distribution, normally used on the iPaq. When is the last time you needed to upgrade the packages or distribution on your phone?" A phone with a 640x480 touchscreen and a lot more smarts than "redial" would be an upgrade to most people anyhow -- being able to play games even more.
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Linux-Based Phone, Snatched From Inferno More

Linux-Based Phone, Snatched From Inferno

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  • Come on...
    This is a dumb marketing ploy. Attempt to get the linux community to buy our phones!
    I don't need the stability of linux on my phone. I have yet to have my phone blue-screen or crash. Its the age old "I got linux on my fridge" cliche...
    • That's a cliche already..? :-)

      Still, if there was a Doom port on this, I could see it being a good outlet for frustrations/anger after annoying phone calls from telemarketers and the like.. although could you imagine playing Doom on a numeric keypad? :-)
    • Actually my cell phone does crash.

      Its a samsung 3500. If you try to record a voice memo with less than 1/4 battery it locks up - have to pop the battery (hard boot :)

      Ocassionaly it will lock when browsing the phone book or the internet but not consitantly.

      Not that I think I need linux on my cell phone though ....

  • could someone explain? do you mean 'inferno' as the plan9-based OS from bell-labs?
  • And those have sold so well.

    No remote control so I can dial from my couch? Where's the advantage?

  • No camera?! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by micromoog ( 206608 )
    Wait a minute . . . it's a phone with a color screen, but no camera for "videophone" capability? Is this a joke?

    • It's a PDA that's, uh, not portable
    • It's a phone that costs way too much
    • It's a complete overuse of technology
    Gimme a freakin' break, and some freakin' technology that's useful!
    • The concept, when it was designed by a now defunct joint venture between philips & lucent, was for it to be an "internet appliance". They only sold a few hundred phones at $600/ea.

      It's a strongarm computer that sits on my coffee table, and a complete overuse of technology. But it's fun.

  • Linux and Telephony (Score:5, Informative)

    by pgrote ( 68235 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2001 @09:44AM (#2255366) Homepage
    Although some may snicker at the kicthen aspect of the phone, this really does provide a nice platform for Linux telephony.

    Strides are being made in the telephony arena using linux. Bayonne is making great progress:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/bayonne/news.html

    One of the interesting things that people forget is that while VOIP is cool, you can't forget about the phone/automated system interaction for transacation based systems. Lots of market there.
  • The ONLY use I could see for such a device is if you can add a network card and make a nice little X term. Otherwise it only scores point in the "oooohhh" category. Sure, it's fun to have a touch screen phone but unless it can play MP3s and DivX ;-) movies what's the point? And as someone else pointed out, there's no camera, so video conferencing is out of the question.
    • think about it, the caller is unknown and is asked
      to press "1" if he is a sales person and "2" if
      he is not.

      when he presses "1" you have the phone randonly
      choose from a list of insulting songs to play for
      our nice telemarketer ;)

      wonder how long before I'd get sued for infringing
      on his right to not listen to south park tunes...
    • It has PCMCIA slots.. Need network access, add it... I'm considering adding a PCMCIA soundcard and using it for MP3's in a room that doesn't have a phone or computer yet.. Right next to my bar, so I can snag drink recipes too....

      • Do you know of any currently manufactured? For under $100? That have Linux drivers?
      • It has PCMCIA slots.. Need network access, add it... I'm considering adding a PCMCIA soundcard and using it for MP3's in a room that doesn't have a phone or computer yet.. Right next to my bar, so I can snag drink recipes too....

        Unfortunately linux doesn't support pcmcia sound cards.

        The pcmcia slots in the is2630 are quite badly hacked in. They only support 3.3v cards and cannot send a reset signal to a card. Many 3.3v capable pcmcia cards work, and so far every CF card that's been tried in a pcmcia carrier works.

        I've got a 10/100 nic and a 64 meg cf card in one of mine.

  • Fun hack? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kableh ( 155146 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2001 @09:50AM (#2255394) Homepage
    I work for a company doing a lot of wireless VoIP stuff, and can imagine all sorts of cool stuff you could do with this. Just load up OpenH323 [openh323.org] and you have a functioning VoIP phone for anywhere. A guy who works with me has written an open source H323 app [kiryanov.com] for WinCE on the iPAQ, and I bet it would be simple to port to a device like this!
    • Open source on WinCE? Has your friend read the license agreement? Is that allowed? I'll bet he gets a visit from the M$FT legal team, especially now that you've posted it here. Don't you know they monitor this sight closely for license violations, new ideas to steal, and anti-Microsoft thought-crime?
  • is the phone I considered buying a few months ago. It cost here R$ 799,00 (aprox. US$ 300). I had the money to buy it without caring for the money, but after a second tough I gave up and kept my old 5120, you know why ???

    I have a palm IIIC with a modem that allows me to connect to internet and read mail, I have a desktop at home and at the office for more sofisticated use of the Net, so would I buy a phone with crapy 9.2kbps, black and white small screen when most of the time I'm on the big blue room I DON'T need to be connected ?

    7100 is big end clumsy for a cell phone, is not a decent PDA, and almost worthless as a web browser. I rather have an excelent PDA, with a reasably good web connection and an awesome desktop.

    all-in-one devices usually doesn't perform any of it's individual tasks as good as a dedicated device and in some cases they cost more than buying 3 or 4 separate pieces of hardware, so give me a break.

  • hello anyone there? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    hello!!! there are 2 usb ports on the thing.. so what is the problem with adding a usb supported device... come on guys be creative.. I think it is a nice prospect

  • Go to Japan, come to Europe. This really isn't news. The nokia communicator http://www.nokia.com/phones/9210/index.html or for you guys next year http://www.nokia.com/phones/9290/index.html does all of that, runs on the rock solid EPOC operating system and is very nice as it runs full Java and a proper rather than cWAP browser (although it does that as well).

    Java's CLDC and CDC profiles address these sort of issues in a device independent mechanism which is critical given the differences in OSes, memory configurations and facilities.
    • I have a 9210 communicator and it's the only PDA worth having for me, but I wouldn't want to use the term rock solid in the same sentence.

      Have you ever actually used one?
      Are you in marketing?

      (it does actualy crash fairly often and there are problems syncing with PC's)

      Regards,
      Xenna
  • If phones had decent and available SDKs, as Palms do, we would have some useful user-written software for them, as we do for Palms. Alas, cell phone designs change much faster (or it seems so). Also, producers use same hardware for several models, enabling and disabling features in software. So, having an SDK or just decent specs may lead to conversion of cheap model to its more expensive and able brother just by upgrading software. (Remember the USR Sportster to Courier thing?)

    Let's hope that using embedded java will lead us to some standard for phone software. Anyway, by the time when all phones will have java onboard, most of them will be PDAs anyway.
  • How about a simpple device, handheld, controlled with an easy to use numeric keypad, used only for voice communication? Has anyone else ever thought of this?
  • From the article "We hope to get Linux running on the devices soon". Its nothing more than a design concept for now. I'll stick with my $10 wal mart phone for now.

  • Cool toy, but needs to be re-directed. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2001 @09:57AM (#2255439) Homepage
    microwindows is cool, I use it in embedded places.
    but this phone screams for PicoGUI instead. It's much smaller, and is better suited for a multi-display device instead of a mini-X windows. I tried both in a home automation project, and picogui won because of size and speed and the lack of ability to have overlapping windows.

    I for one am getting 3 of these phones just for the hardware hacking potential.

  • explanation (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Since a lot of posts here seem to show a misunderstanding about what this phone is all about, let me explain:
    This is actually a phone that was developed and produced about three years ago. It was really ahead of its time when it was made, but never reached the market before the project was cut.
    Tim got his hands on a big pile of them, and is reselling these dirt-cheap as Linux developer boxes because they've got a 206MHz StrongARM, 640x480 color LCD screen, have 2 PCMCIA slots, are expandable up to 72MB (come with 16MB), have telephony circuitry (caller ID, etc), so they make a great development box. They come with an
    IR keyboard too. (I saw some comments about having to use the keypad to play games which
    isn't true)
    You can find out some more details about them by going here [eclipse.net].
    • this looks really nice I was looking for a StrongARM evaluation board and this fits the bill for a student project

      I am very greatful to Tim Riker who seems like at really nice guy (tm)

      its projects like this that make it all worth while..

      regards

      john jones

      p.s. mod this AC up
  • does this device have an X10 interface? according to the hardware [tuxscreen.net] doesnt say specifically, but when you look at the logo [tuxscreen.net] on their index.html has a little subscript '10' next to the "X" in Tu X

    Anyone care to comment? Still a very interesting little device...
    • Well, according to the apps bit of the site.

      X10 Control Interface

      Many X10 customers are ever looking for new interfaces to expose their X10 control capabilities. The TuxScreen phone provides a touch screen interface to control X10 networks graphically. The application's User interface would likely be HTML based images or tags which when selected through the touch screen take action. X10 control commands would be routed out of the serial port of the TuxScreen device and could either be directly connected to an X10 controller or to a dedicated Linux box which reroutes X10 commands to the X10 controller. The latter configuration would allow for communications to be multiplexed for more uses than just X10 and a non-dedicated channel. This application would essentially extend the user interfaces available to control a home by one or many depending on how many TuxScreen units were distributed throughout a home.


      So I'd guess yes.
    • It does have an X10 interface.
      See this link... [tuxscreen.net]
    • No, it doesn't. But it has a serial port on the back. You can plug an X10 interface into that quite easily.


    • does this device have an X10 interface?

      I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it does have an X11 interface ;-)
  • is a computer with a Lucent DSP chip to provide telophony support.

    I bought 2 of these units and think they are pretty damn great. Right now, they can boot linux and run xwindows + pcmcia support. Unfortunately, the dsp chip itself needs a driver to really use this device as it could be used.. glorified call management device that could forward 'voicemails' as e-mails or posted to a website (which could also be run from said device). I can't wait to get it to the point where I enter my kitchen, click on an icon to review calls,v-mails, etc. Then use 'normally' as a linux computer and run kmail or konqueror to quickly check e-mail or look something up.

  • With a DSL connection (and some software), you could basically answer your phone from any computer connected to the internet.
  • I can't describe how dissapointed I was when I saw the picture of the phone. When I read the posting I thougt it was a cell-phone, that would have been much cooler!
    Anyway.. who uses ordinary phones these days?
  • This is a product that was dumped by Philips. They made the phones, spent a ton of money, and eventually decided to not even sell them. They dumped them, and Tim Riker managed to pick them up for a fraction of their value. The touchscreen on these things alone is worth $150 and yet Tim is selling these things for just $99.


    The other thing people seem to not understand is the we (the people currently hacking on the tuxscreen) already have Linux running on them, thanks to Russ Dill's work on the kernel, and Tim's work on the blob bootloader. I bought 2 of them and I'm having a lot of fun hacking on them. I plan to use it as an email terminal (using a pcmcia network card) and for VOIP as well. You really can't go wrong here. Tim could turn around and sell the lot of them to an electronics salvage house with about 15 minutes of effort, but instead he want to make them available for people like me to hack on. These phone are very cool.

  • kinda
    'cept for app support
    the usual annoying problem
    if you kept it inferno no doubt you can keep all the telephony gubbins going and add more apps that you need.

    Inferno'll do tk & limbo out of the box
    If you need to customize it use the tools that fit, not batter it with the linux hammer.

    Still, nice cheap boxes.

    M

  • Thank you Slashdotters (Score:2, Informative)

    by TimRiker ( 83932 )
    Thought I'd post here briefly to clear up some of the comments.

    As andersen mentioned these are a discontinued product which I got a hold of for below the manufacturing cost.

    They are a true hackers appliance. Probably don't serve any useful purpose yet. Once we have VoIP and a digital answering machine working then I'll call them useful.

    At any rate the components should run you around $300 (usd) so if you want a project to hack on, this has been a fun one for those involved.

    There is no x-10 interface. As the paragraph quoted below mentions this could be connected to the existing serial port if you like.

    Linux will run on the device. Inferno is on them now. Play with both. Subscribe to Inferno source for $500 and hack on it if you like.

    It looks like MicroWindows and perhaps others as well running on uClibc will fit in the 4M of onboard flash and get about the same functionality that the existing Inferno offers. I prefer a complete open source solution, but will not force those views on others.

    Thanx for the interest! Still around 1000 units left at the time of this writing (for the may that keep asking).

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