fonosfera

Hi all,

There’s already a lot of people, mostly by mail, that contacted us for developing applications for the fonera 2.0. We expect to have the first Community developed applications soon, but… what’s the firmware team busy with?

Well, as you can imagine, we don’t only work on the fonera 2.0… we have other things in hands (implementing FON in other devices, improving compatibility with other partner’s devices etc etc) but we now have a permanent team working on the Fonera 2.0.

Some are working in future stuff we can’t talk much about… (Martin, did you already mention anything? lol) but others are doing fonera 2.0 development on a daily basis. And we’re soon giving you the results of this work. Wanna know what I’m talking about? How does this sound?

• We already fixed the bug that limited WAN traffic to 1MB/s. Actually, we improved it quite a lot: whereas the fonera+ is only able to do 1,8MB/s, the fonera2.0 is now able to reach 2,4MB/s! Good work huh?
• UMTS/HSPDA, as Martin and John already confirmed is already working. We want to support more devices, but for that, we will need people to test it!! We expect your feedback as soon as we make it available.
• My favorite: WE ARE MAKING A BRAND NEW WEB INTERFACE for the fonera 2.0. As some of you already ‘guessed’ it will be based on lua. It’s an adaptation of the LuCI technology. The look and feel will be much nicer (thanks Rico!), the HTML code cleaner (thanks Iban) and the usability much better (thanks Eloy, Martin, Jordi etc etc). But the best of all: making web pages for the applications inside the fonera 2.0 won’t be a nightmare anymore (thanks John and Cyrus!) :D
• Your favorite: well… even if some doubted it… YES! BitTorrent support and YouTube support are on their way. Soon? You can bet on it.

I know you’re all expecting some dates now… right. But I’m keeping them for myself, even if it’s only to annoy a few ones.

…

…

…
Ok, just as a present for those who deserve it: I dare say it will be before the last month of the current year comes. lol

“In this video John Crispin from Fon shows how a Fonera can obtain WiFi from a 3G modem.”

via in Martins blog

Hello all,

As you probably know, we are little by little trying to build the fonosfera, a development community for the fon-ng firmware, meaning the new firmware generation for our recently launched fonera 2.0.
So, how to build this community? We want to do it progressively, the way to grow is by not closing any doors: we will try to learn every day from our memebers feedback. We have started rolling with this blog, a mailing list and an IRC channel. The IRC channel is surprisingly the most active place, there’re about 20 people all the time, giving ideas, helping each other, showing what they did etc. It’s already become a nice meeting place mostly for developers at this point but also very adviseable for users.

The next step is to install the real development framework. We think svn and trac, although probably not the best applications, meet a perfect balance: they are well known for most developers nowadays and are efficient enough.

The plan is that anyone will be able to open a ticket (no matter it’s a bug, a feature request or other) in trac. Meaning trac will be open, as usual in this kind of project, to all the public. On the other hand, svn will be, for the quality’s and the tidiness’ sake, restricted for writing although also open for reading. This is: anyone will be able to access any of the svn repositories for reading, but only selected users will have the write access granted.

Now, who will get write access? Again, we’re not reinventing the wheel, there are many other open source projects and we will follow a well known model: meritocracy. There will certainly be a FON official branch and the communities that have already proven good expertise and activity on modifying and improving FON’s firmware (such as francofon, freewlan and others) will have their own branch as well, but only a few members of them will have write access to it (or maybe all, this is very likely to be decided by the memebers of the group). Additionally, individuals that prove persistency, dilligency, interest and seriousness on helping the fonosfera and the firmware improve (by writing documentation, applications etc) will be elligible to get writing access to all or certain parts of the svn.

Well, this is the basic structure for now… as things keep moving on, we will add a space for end users, where the work that comes out of the development teams will be made available for them so they can install and customize their foneras

Hope you like the project. Please, feel free to comment, suggest and criticize!!

My first blog ever :)

I have a small screenshot, i want to share. I am mainly writing this entry, because i needed something to do online, whilst doing the testing of the huawei E220 usb umts dongle attached to my fon2.0 :-)

So what is missing ? The web interface does not not prompt you yet, if you enter an incorrect pin. But the new web interface will have that feature. (oh and some way of showing signal strength ….)

… which is yours as well from now on!

Jordi Vallejo, CTO of FON, introducing the La Fonera 2.0 during the Facebook Developer’s Garage held by FON in Madrid:

Welcome developers, enthusiasts and Foneros! Today we are launching the blog that will keep you updated about the work made on the La Fonera 2.0 firmware.

We have also setup a development mailing list, so independent developers can talk to each other as well as with our FON firmware guys. This list is public, you can subscribe right now! For those using IRC you can also find us on Freenode: #fonosfera

In case you don’t know about it yet, we also have several pages on the wiki about the La Fonera 2.0 as well as a special sub-forum for discussions.

Now let me introduce our development team for the La Fonera 2.0:

Name: Iurgi Arginzoniz
Position: Firmware Team Manager
Background: Telecommunications engineer, always working on WiFi companies (airbites and fon)
Tasks: Various, from small developments to management of the firmware team
Distribution: Ubuntu
Desktop environment: Gnome
Based in: Madrid, Spain (from Basque Country)

Name: Pablo Martín Medrano
Position: Software Engineer
Background: B.Sc. Computer Science, Panda Software Linux Developer
Tasks: FONUCS, weird daemons and other mindbreaking stuff
Distribution: Debian etch-and-a-half
Desktop environment: openbox + xterm + screen + vim + alpine
Based in: Madrid, Spain

Name: Javier Monteagudo
Position: Software Engineer
Background: M.Sc. Computer Science
Tasks: Automated testing
Distribution: Ubuntu
Desktop environment: Gnome + emacs
Based in: Madrid, Spain

Name: John Crispin
Position: Firmware Hacker
Background: OpenWrt developer
Tasks: Making Firmware
Distribution: Debian Lenny
Desktop environment: awesome
Computer: Thinkpad T61 (there is no other)
Based in: Hamburg, Germany

Name: Rex Tsai
Position: Technical manager of FON Taiwan team
Background: FLOSS evangelist and developer
Tasks: Technology development and operation support in Taiwan and Asia.
Distribution: Debian GNU/Linux Sid.
Desktop: Gnome
Based in: Taipei, Taiwan

Name: Imre Kaloz
Position: Firmware artist
Background: OpenWrt kernel related developments
Tasks: Take any router they throw at me and make it OpenWrt (hence FON) compatible
Distribution: Linux (Ubuntu 8.10)
Desktop: XFCE
Based in: Budapest, Hungary

Name: Felix Fietkau
Position: Firmware nurse
Background: OpenWrt
Tasks: fix and do everything the rest of the people on the Earth can’t
Distribution: Mac OS X
Desktop environment: Mac OS X (text mode;)
Based in: Berlin, Germany

Let me take a chance to introduce myself as well. I will cheerfully manage the fonosfera (blog, mailing list, wiki etc):

Name: Inouk Bourgon
Position: Communities’ voice
Background: B.A. (and FON Wiki)
Tasks: Get everyone together so we can make the La Fonera of our dreams!
Distribution: Ubuntu
Desktop environment: Chairs, desks, coworkers & Foneras
Based in: Madrid, Spain

That’s it for today, more community tools to come… Stay tuned!