fonosfera

That’s the name of the first official stable release for the Fonera 2.0: Tantor the Elefont. Why, because Tantor is a rock solid firmware; like an elephant, taking steps with no obstacle that will stop it.

We’ve added nice features, fixed most of the known bugs (not all, sorry) and set it ready to accept the nice coming plugins. We will take a short break for Xmas, we deserve it, believe me, and then will come back with great surprises. Because Tantor is our Santa present but in Spain, we also celebrate the coming of the Three Wise Men the 6th of December, so expect new nice things by then.

Back to Tantor the Elefont. This is what we added:

• New interface for developers! Yes, we changed the look and feel a bit. Guys, you’re developers, not normal users, you need some distinction, don’t you? Check the new colours, ain’t them cool? And what’s that new image in the top left corner? Just for developers ;)
• Translations and Automatic Language Detection. A small change that helps a lot! Our firmware comes out of the box with Spanish, English, French, German, Italian and… Basque! LOL!! Sorry, I needed a small wink to my mother language ;) Want to see it in other languages? Download the translation files from the svn and do the work! We will soon list what files need translation on the fonosfera wiki.
• Sell passes, videos etc. Older versions (this was fixed in RC1) had problems with the whitelisting of some domains and not everything was working on the public side. Thanks for your reports!
• New services added to the firewall for WAN access: you can now add ssh and web access from WAN. Now, forward the correct port of your broadband router to your fonera 2.0 and you can have full access to it from the Internet!
• ssh access enabled by default: this is only for developers as well. You guys can’t complain!
• Full integration with fon.com. The fonera 2.0 can now be considered a fully functional fonera! You can manage your SSID, passwrod etc from fon.com. Only the bandwidth limitation is not working but will be fixed very soon, don’t panic! Anyway, why limit how much you share? ;D
• We made tons of bugfixes as well, but why bother you listing them? You can check them on http://trac.fonosfera.org/fon-ng/ if you are interested.

Trantor is not perfect, sure not. We have some bugs open:

• *Ssh in Developer mode only works after rebooting* (I’m sure many will ask about this)
• Setting the bandwidth limitation  from fon.com is not working yet (this is a server problem, not Trantor’s ;D)
• Then Wi-Fi Wan mode work just fine but, when you’re connecting the Fonera 2.0 to another Fonera 2.0, you need to reboot after saving the changes. Not big deal, huh? How many of you have 2 Foneras 2.0? ;)
• Samba access from WAN is not working. We couldn’t find why… too busy with other stuff. If you know why, let us know, if not, we will fix it soon! Promised!
• Undetected bugs! (Ehr… yes, we have some, for sure, hehehe)
• USB 1.1 devices still don’t work when connected directly to the Fonera 2.0 (not only that remember that plugin a USB 1.1 device or a full speed USB 2.0 device will block the USB port and you will need to reboot it). REMEMBER to use a USB 2.0 HUB between these devices and the Fonera 2.0, sorry. Well… we all want to plug more than one device on it so, why sorry? hehehe.

And what does this release mean?
So, this is it. Our new baby: solid, stable and usable. It’s the first release of a surely different generation of foneras. We already have open projects to support Bluetooth dongles (with even Internet connectivity through Bluetooth), home automation modules, jamendo (the Creative Commons music station), advanced firewall controls, Vuze (the superstar of the plugins… you’re gonna love this!), a youTube video uploader (we’re making an impressive interface for this too) etc.

Enjoy your Christmas present, have a nice time with your families (not too much hacking these days, OK? :P) and start well the new year. This is gonna be the fon-ng year!!!!

The FON fonosfera Team: John, Felix, Imre, Pablo, Javier, Inouk and Iurgi

Links to the files:

• Bare image: valid for ALL versions (recommended for all, mandatory for beta releases) – md5sum  4b92fe23f57e869c26741e4c35250766
• .fon image: ONLY for 2.1.0 and 2.0.0 versions (old web interface) – md5sum 6b8ea77b6bed64073c619ba53830bb6c -> IMPORTANT it will not give any feedback, just be patient, allow at least 30min!
• .tgz image: ONLY for rc1 and rc2 – md5sum 5933826db9e6ced266dfd45d091f9bba -> IMPORTANT it will not give any feedback, just be patient, allow at least 30min!
• The source tarball, the Redboot image and the failsafe image will come in a few days. Please, let us take a small rest ;) You can check the sources on the svn server, they’re public!

Miguel Ángel Díaz, Daniel Dionne and David Martín are enthusiasts computer engineering students from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. As a year project they are working on the integration of a home automation protocol for the La Fonera 2.0

They can already control the lights of their home connected to La Fonera 2.0 wireless signal! They have a neat interface for the iphone and ipod-touch to do this:

It can actually work with any electrical device. They are using this X10 USB controller: CM11 marmitek

Their system will be totally modular, so it will be simple to add new functionalities and hardware support. They are also about to launch an independent web site for their project. It isn’t available as a plugin yet, but we will be will keep you updated on the progress.

Congratulations guys for what you have already achieved!

Version: 2.2.0.0 – RC1

Codename: Alfred

Description: Alfred is the first release candidate (RC1) of the stable release of the fonera 2.0. It has all the basic functionalities one should expect from the fonera 2.0 (printing, UMTS, WiFi-WAN – testing -, firewall, etc.). It’s been made with stability and reliability in mind, thought as the basis for installing plugins, but not having any of them yet.

Picture:

Binary: http://blog.fonosfera.org/20081204_FON2202_2.2.0.0_rc1_alfred.image – md5sum d3b09324b0456f4ce2f774a655f89c50
Source: http://blog.fonosfera.org/20081203_FON2202_2.2.0.0_rc1_alfred.tar.bz2 – md5sum cf9609bd0c5d75a2f5892f281c0c5fc6
Alfred is a vanilla firmware, we have not added many features compared to old Sylvester. We have done a lot of debugging (thanks to all the folks at the #fonosfera channel and the mailing list!!!) and have made lots of underlying changes that even though not being visible as features, they  can be felt in a day to day basis:

• UMTS support improved: more stable, more usable, not buggy anymore. Give it a try!
• WiFi-WAN: yes, this is the way we call the ‘repeater mode’. It should work with any AP on the market. Don’t connect it to the public signal of a fonera though, there would be 2 FON captive portals in a row ;) – some tests have shown that it’s not 100% stable under high load
• Switched from httpd to the brand new “lucittpd”! Our new http server is lighter, faster and nicer (of course!). It’s been done in C and lua. It supports multi-threading and http eTags. This makes it much faster. You can feel it when you’ve been using it for a while. The web interface is not the fastest in the world, but it’s fast enough and more powerful than any UI of a router, isn’t it?
• The webcam application is muuuuuuuuch nicer now: it’s real time streaming! plus you can zoom in, zoom out, change the size, etc. When nobody is watching it, it goes into a low load mode. Needed a surveillance webcam? Enjoy it! ;)
• You can now open service for WAN (remote) access. ftp and printer server are ready for it. Now want to open http or ssh? Try to do it yourself and learn how easy to implement it is!
• And more stuff!

And so, now what? Well, now we need you guys to test it, give us your impression, your feedback, your bug reports… but how?? Using Trac and svn! Yes, we finally opened read access to the fonosfera trac+svn system.

Trac is in: http://trac.fonosfera.org/fon-ng

Svn is in: http://svn.fonosfera.org/fon-ng
As we foretold you, some development communities will have write access to it as soon as they get in contact with us, some individuals as well. For the rest, you are totally eligible to get write access granted, but first, give us the reasons ;)

Anonymous users can open tickets to report bugs, request features etc. Registered users will be able to manage and assign them. We hope this will be the tipping point of the project. Now on, this is officially a development community project!

Welcome to the fonosfera!

The FON firmware team