The OpenTom Project was founded

Our distributed efforts in opening up the TomTom GO have now found a common home, the opentom.org domain. There's the OpenTom website and the svn.opentom.org subversion server.

There's still a lot under construction, expect more news here in this blog and in the subversion repository.

2.6.10-rc1 kernel for OpenTom

Christian Daniel has managed to get 2.6.10-rc1 running on the TomTom GO. This includes a 2.6.x-rewritten frame buffer driver, USB Host and Device support.

The kernel tree has been made available on svn.opentom.org.

All GPL issues with TomTom B.V. settled

I'm very happy that the GPL issues with TomTom have now all been settled, and despite some early disagreements we're now very happy with the way TomTom has handled this case.

The TomTom GPL page contains the latest source of their 4.42 firmware. Pretty much all of the drivers have been released with their source code (touch-screen, framebuffer, USB device, accelerometer, GPS). Only (obviously) the SD-Card driver is missing in the source and provided as kernel module. This is due to the stupid SD Card Alliance licensing agreement, which basically puts every recipient of the Documentation under an NDA.

So at the moment you have to put all of the OS into the initrd, which is loaded by the bootloader.

We're working on a solution for the card reader, though. At least MMC Card support should be available soon.

Back blogging again

I had some severe hardware problems during last week, resulting in almost one week of server outage. We had to change power supply, ram, mainboard and cpu in order to get the machine back running again - basically a whole new machine.

Sorry for anybody trying to access www/ftp/.gnumonks.org over that time. Email was not affected, since email is dealt with on a totally different box.

Thanks to my Towersoft friends who took care about the physical repairs of the machine (it's located some 500km from my place).