fonosfera

OktoPussy is making making good use of it’s name. Here it comes as OktoPussy-2 ‘reloaded’

In no time it has changed to adapt to the environment. This is the new stuff it brings for you:

• Samba works on WAN! Oh yes…  You can finally connect the hard drive of your Fonera 2.0 from your home network! Some people were dying to have this
• More and more languages! Can you speak Traditional Chinese, Dutch? Then the OktoPussy-2 is for you!
• Hey! How about this? we like Windows too! (well, we don’t, but need to pretend). NTFS issues have been fixed so far. If you still experience trouble, go buy a new hard drive! :D
• We have added a nice timer for when you reflash the fonera and get rid of OktoPussy-2 to get the next animal. OktoPussy-2 will say goodbye like a real gentleman. No need to wonder if the flashing is over or not, it will let you know!

Guys… we’re getting closer and closer to the final release. We’re stable, we have closed most bugs. We only have a few features more to add to the base firmware. Get ready for the opening to the world!

What wil be the animal for the first production release?!? Give us some suggestions if you want ;) we won’t listen anyway hahahaha

As a special present, we have 1 more thing for you. Well, some of you. The OLPC plugin: this makes the fonera be the first AP to allow OLPC devices to connect to it!! Oh yes! All OLPC owners should get a F2, the Marvell WiFi dongle and connect it to the  F2!! Will F2 become the main Internet access for millions of children over the World?
The files:

• Image - md5sum
• Fon package - use only with Tantor or OktoPussy
• ddns plugin - with new languages (need to uninstall the previous version if installed)
• OLPC plugin
• FONBackup - The backup tool for your F2. Use it in combination with a hard drive and backup all you want. Win, Mac, Linux

So here we are… later than expected but happy enough to present: OktoPussy, the new fon-ng firmware release for the Fonera 2.0

And so what?  Well dudes, we’ve got some nice tools for you. First of all, we are finally releasing a few plugins. Most of the work in this month’s been to clean up the system to accept the plugins, make some of them (we are releasing 2 today but we have 2 more in the oven), fix a few bugs you discovered in poor old Tantor and adding new features.

Here we go with the presentation, welcome our new rockstar! OktoPussy!

OktoPussy represents the extendability of our firmware. It’s many arms resemble the plugins you will be able to install in it. It can use many arms at the same time, doing different tasks! It’s multimedia ;) (remember when this word was being use for the very first times for PCs? Now it’s come to the routers!)

The new features and fixes are the following:

• Improved look and feel: added a few new buttons and icons
• New status page. We still want to integrate more information and format it in a nicer way… but now you can see some traffic stats on the different interfaces. Tell us if you love the graphics like we do!
• Added and fixed access to some services from the WAN interface: ftp now works and the webcam can also be accessed from the outside. Samba is the pending issue though, sorry windows lovers…
• New languages! Hungarian is there (thanks bmpeter) and well… any others would also be there but we need you guys to translate! Here you can find what to translate…
• We fixed the whitelisting system. Sorry, some of you reported you couldn’t sell passes from your devices. Too bad… but over!
• There’s a button to reboot the device and one to reset it to factory defaults ;)
• Added the option to enable/disable replying to pings on the WAN side.
• Some internal working as I said… if you’re interested on what, check the svn logs.

And well, the first to arms of OktoPussy (official ones) are DDNS (DynDNS support) and, surprise, a FONBackup tool!

This Backup tool is still in development so, please, don’t use it as your main backup tool (although reliable, it’s still not as fast as we want it and you may end up jumping off a cliff… hehe). But it has very good points we want you guys to test:

• First of all: it is SO EASY. No installation, no configuration (almost). Just open it, pick the Hard Drive or partition of the disk attached to the Fonera (if more than one) and the folder of your laptop you want to back up. THERE YOU GO! That’s it!
• It is multiplatform. Of course! We’d never do Micro$oft only software. Use it in Windows, Mac and Linux! It’s Java ;)
• It’s incremental: you change something and only that will be sent to the backup, not the whole directory.

The application uses HTTP to transfer the files, but we will change to FTP for the next release. This will boost the transfer speed from the current 450KB/s up to 1MB/s which is far better than the Time Capsule of Apple (estimated at 600MB/s on 802.11g transfers). Additionaly, we are working on improving the 2 slowest parts, the time lost between different files and the time to calculate the changes (Yes, it’s incremental backup!)

Please, test it and let us now if you find it useful and what would you change to improve it. We are always to listen in the IRC channel #fonosfera (irc.freenode.net), the mailing list  or here in the blog.

So, as promised, here you’ve got the links for everything we mentioned above. Ciao!

Firmware:

• Bare image - md5sum 907b240308420b09b94812e1974f2ae0 (Valid for all versions using ssh or redboot, please check trac.fon.com and wiki.fon.com for instructions)
• Signed image - This is the binary ready to be flashed using the web interface of Tantor (not working with older versions, sorry)

Plugins:

• DynDNS plugin - it’s been signed by FON to ensure authenticity
• FONBackup 0.1 - it’s NOT a plugin. It communicates with the Fonera2.0 OktoPussy without installing plugins to it :P

Once again, thanks to all the team, specially Blogic as always, and Cyrus, Albert and Victor too for their nice last minute intervention with FONBackup!

The fon-ng Firmware  Team

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!

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

Hello!

This is it, our little kitten. Sylvester, the firmware for la Fonera 2.0, fon-ng beta2 is out! Here you have its picture ;)

And what is this little cat bringing us?

• Improved structure: for a better plugin integration and programming
• Completely new web interface (both visually and logically!)
• Many bugfixes: including the well known 1Mbps WAN limitation. It’s now faster thant he fonera+
• I nice bed… it’s a cat, its bed is all tidy. We will show you the buildroot in a few days now. The code is coming today as well
• Ehr… I think I’m repeating what I already said…

Want some pictures? Here we go… but I warn you, after seeing them you will not be able to resist buying one. We’re getting closer and closer to the final release. And more plugins are coming so soon:

 This is the Dashboard

The new interface is based on the concept of a Dashboard. We wanted to remove any similarities with traditional router management consoles. They’re ugly, not stylish, difficult and not useful at all. This Dashboard is not final, but you can get the concept. There’s a summary area, which is secondary to the 2 main frames: the “Action icons” which have 3 fixed buttons (”Services” for samba, ftp etc, “Plugins” to manage your plugins and “Settings” to change the router configuration) and the icons for each plugin that is installed in the future so they are easy to access. The second frame is the devices/events frame. It will let the user know which supported devices are currently connected and configured in the Fonera 2.0. It is quite 2.0-ish…seamless autoupdates etc.

This is the File Browser

The File Browser is again a beta application. But it now detects different MIME-Types and tells the browser what to do when clicking on them. The look and feel is much nicer and soon will include other interesting information, such as the file size, creation data etc.

The links to the firmware are here, don’t panic:

• Image - md5sum:  264a9303b38db5073da845e8fbdc4b9e
• .fon package - md5sum: 41a0927c0c8f641b59f996ce873be336
• Source tarball is here - md5sum: 1fe36db183dd3e826bd5691d89b55c4f

Well, this should be enough for you guys to start willing to have one… Or are you one of these guys waiting for the BitTorrent plugin? Hmmm who knows… maybe soon… ;)

The Firmware Team