fonosfera

Hi all,

We have successfully tested some of the fixes today (or so we think so) and have an image almost ready for user testing. We have selected a set of users that have been reporting FON bugs consistently and in a comprehensible way in the last months to us. Also, they have experienced most of the important bugs that have been reported, so are good candidates to represent most of the rest.

Those users will be helping us test the firmware in the field. If you are not in that list, please forgive us and be patient. More users means more feedback (better), we know, but also much more coordination work. So, please understand we wanted a kind of reduced and well selected set of testers.

We still are working on some fixes, so what they will test is not meant to be a pre-final firmware, but an advanced stage firmware, with some important fixes. We can advance there is no major changes, don’t expect a cool super-fancy firmware, but just what we considered the most critical bugs (wifi connectivity, fonspot, stability, some 3g dongles support…) fixed.

How long will they be testing? Well, that depends on how good we made our work till now. Hopefully one week approximately should do it. Meanwhile we will keep working on the still open bugs and hopefully have a ‘final-to-be’ firmware ready for them by next week. Let’s cross fingers!

These users are, of course, free to talk about their findings about this new firmware with the rest of the community. They can blog, post, twit, comment, share on IRC… whatever they want.

Stay tuned and thanks again for your patience and trust!!

Hi all,

I am here to let you know a little bit about our current status of work, especially regarding the fonera 2.0n but also some other things.
As promised, now that the Fonera Simpl has been announced, we can communicate a bit more about what we’re working on. Sometimes, it might be that we are not working on your specific device, but we hope you will forgive us.

The Fonera 2.0n is already seeing some progress:
- We have reused the wifi driver of the firmware 2.3.5.0 RC1 which made the fonera more stable and also made all throughput problems with broadcom chipsets (some iphones, ipods, macs and other laptops) vanish.
- The FON funcionality that we broke in the 2.3.5.0 RC1 has, of course, been fixed
- We have added the mode_switch driver: this will permit us to support more 3G dongles and do it in a easier way. We expect to test about 10 models by ourselves and probably will support many more out of the box!!!

These are our biggest focus right now. We are still at the firmware team testing process but will soon get into QA and we also plan to get some of you involved in the testing. We already have a list of people that are willing to test it: either to help us or for the hope of having their bug fixed

So, stay tuned, we are already moving little by little.

As for the fonera 2.0g, we don’t forget about you, just these changes are fonera 2.0n specific. The only common part is the 3G dongle support and that improvement, we will try to add some day when it is confirmed it works fine in the fonera 2.0n.

In parallel, we are also continuing with the development and testing of the coming fonera Simpl. We will soon make some code public and will publish everything probably before the official launch in Europe. It is a nice and small device, you will see.

Thanks again for your patience and help, we hope to get you a good firmware soon!

Hi all,

First of all, my personal apologies for not having posted anything in such a looooooooooooong (not enough ‘o’-s, I know). I know many are expectant, many angry and some bored. I can’t blame them.

It’s been a huge load of work since my last post in December. Out of a sudden, everything had to be restructured and rescheduled due to an upcoming new product. Whatever the reason for the decision was, I could do nothing but follow it. I do understand the feeling many might have, of being left behind, especially for the lack of comunication: I want to say that it was 90% because of lack of time (informing is not only posting an entry but following up on it and IRC and forums etc) and 10% because I could not talk about why a new firmware was being delayed and I didn’t want to lie. So I thought it was to better shut up than liying.
As many of you know, we are launching a new product soonish and we need to work a lot on it. However we have not stopped developing for the Fonera 2.0n. The new product is based on the same Ralink chipset family, so some of the fixed bugs and improvements we have done for the new device will also be present on the next firmware release for the Fonera 2.0n.

We have been working on the Fonera 2.0n on a best effort basis and we expect to very soon be able to focus on it with the following target in mind: release a stable firmware that does all the WiFi router funcitonalities well. We are now reschedulling projects but I can already say we are aiming to release it on mid March. We mostly want to make sure we do proper QA this time and not rush, it just doesn’t pay.

This is our short term aim. For the long term, we expect to merge both firmwares, the one of the Fonera 2.0n and that of the new Fonera SIMPL, with the hope that it will be a robust and stable, feature-rich firmware.

Please, accept my apologies, again, and try the new firmware when we release it: I believe it will satisfy most of you.

Thanks

iurgi

PS: there are some unpublished comments on the previous posts and some on this one might remain unpublished too. It’s not censorship (which I’m not against in some cases): you can see we publish very critizicing comments. It’s lack of time to go over all of them to see if they cross the line or not. Somee good ones are unpublished as well. Sorry about that They might eventually be published.

Hi all,

Some of you might have noticed that Rudolph has been removed from the location it was made publicly available at. Many wonder why… well, Rudolph had a congenital illness: the FON Hotspot did not work and also, it registered a wrong MAC address on FON’s system.
Anyway, you can still compile the image from svn if you want to use the rest of the benefits.
We are working hard, even if it is Christmas and will try to release a new fixed RC asap.

Also, 2.3.5.0 will be available for the Fonera 2.0g too. A bit later than for the 2.0n, but it will come.

Thanks for understanding.

Hi all,

I would like to kindly remind you that “rudolph”, this is 2.3.5.0_rc2, is only a “release candidate”. We know it has bugs and we DO NOT recommend it for anyone that doesn’t like testing and reporting bugs.
We know it is a long waited firmware: it has very nice functionalities that many of you asked for (bridge, wlan client etc) but please be patient. There have been MAJOR changes on the firmware, including a completely new WiFi driver, so don’t expect it to work perfectly on the first run.

I am sure you all understand this is not an easy task. We are a small team and really appreciate your feedback and support, but also suffer your impatience and unhappiness. So please, try to be comprehensive and give usgood feedback so we can make Rudolph grow into a nice firmware from the little young reindeer it is now

Thanks a lot for your patience and understanding

Ho, Ho, Ho, …..

its been nearly 3 months since the last update, but it was worth waiting.
Just intime for xmas, Santa has sent us a new update called Rudolph (2.3.5.0)

Rudolph

Santa gave Rudolph a lot of presents for us. The main ones are :
- adds new wifi driver (fixes 11n only, iphone, powersave,…)
- adds openvpn server
- adds upnp mediaAV in DEV-only image
- adds wifi-wan mode
- adds bridge mode
- adds wps support
- fixes cache problems that cause errors after 24 hours
- fixes ntp server pool, we now use openwrt pool
- qos was not enabled even if selected in webui due to a typo
- fixes column header in torrent app
- open torrent port and allow client to register as active on tracker
- disabe snr graph on fon_status page as it was not working as expected
- fixes wpa validation 8-63 chars with special chars are no supported
- small fix to SimpleForm template
- fixes “onsucess” logic of firewall app
- allow anonymous login for ftp (and make it configurable on webui
- onlined now only checks the fon server
- typo in italian translation, openvpn, qos pages
- fixes coova for NEC cell phones
- disable tcp_ecn in sysctl
- adds port allocation logic of switch when in bridge mode
- fixes lucid when ip changes
- fixes lan netmask
- fixes mac override for wan port
- fixes large file download in fonbrowser

This is RC2, a few translations are still missing but if everything goes well, we will release 2.3.5.0 final next week.

Enjoy !!

Developer image: http://download.fonosfera.org/Rudolph/20091210_FON2303_2.3.5.0_DEV-RC2.tgz

New release,

Fixes:

• The addon supports passwords with non-ascii characters. (ticket  477)
• Update the UI whenever a link is sent to the fonera.
• Update the UI whenever a download is manipulated from the download manager.
• Update the download manager window on the last item manipulated when dealing with multiple items

As usual, grab it from here or here.

Thanks,

javier

Hi

This new release brings multiple selection in the main download window. You can right click on various downloads and trigger an action on all selected downloads.

We hope you find this feature usefull. You can get it from the addon website and here.

Enjoy!

Hi

We have moved the firefox extension to addons.mozilla.org. We may continue to post updates here but basically we want to add it to the place it belongs.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/51665

New stuff:

• more bugfixes.
• new menu to access common tasks from the download window.

Enjoy

P.S: You can still grab it from here.

Hi all,

We know you’ve been expectant to receive a new firmware image both for the fonera 2.0g and 2.0n. It has taken us longer than expected and many are by know starting to feel impatient and annoyed.

I want to let you know that we are now getting closer to a new release. We have had a couple of ugly bugs that we’ve had trouble to fix but fortunately, it looks like they are under control now. If everything goes well, we might have a beta version for you to test likely next week.

You can expect the connectivity problem with some iTouch (3rd generation), iPhone 3Gs, Macs, and other Broadcom Wi-Fi chipset based devices to be gone. Some stability issues and other will also be fixed.

Thanks a lot for your patience!