fonosfera

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

pm2036, from FrancoFON, made the first community contribution’s to the La Fonera 2.0 firmaware. He bought the cheapest USB audio sound card he could find (US $1.00 on ebay) and made it work on the La Fonera 2.0 !

If your La Fonera 2.0 is in your living room, it can play on your stereo your favorite internet radio and MP3’s from your computer:

You will find an how-to and the needed files to install it on Pierre-Emmanuel’s page.

John will use pm2036 work and integrate it into a larger Audio Plugin. It will be the example plugin; the one on which will be based the how-to’s that explains how developers can integrate their work into the La Fonera 2.0

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!!