fonosfera

Hi

After a looooooong time of silence (forced silence… we were working, not playing XD) We’re coming with great news for you. The 2.3.0.0 version of the firmware will be soon available for your foneras 2.0g!!

No, we haven’t forgot or let down our loyal fonera 2.0g users. We want to make them as happy as possible and we’re doing 2 things for them:
1) Improve the firmware as much as possible. This 2.3.0.0 has all the improvements we’ve developed during these months. The Fonera 2.0g will have as much as possible the same firmware as the Fonera 2.0n.
2) Give discounts for those who are willing to upgrade their 2.0g to 2.0n. We know you spent money on the 2.0g and now we have a new device that is more powerful (and also more expensive). This is not common in all companies, but hey, we try to make you happy, you help us with the feedback too, after all. So we have announced great discounts (we mean great, not small) for those who have bought a Fonera 2.0g and are willing to upgrade it! Please stay tuned to your mail!
New features:

• The web interface over WAN has been moved to port 443 for security
• Transmission has been integrated into the FON WebUI. You can still access it in the traditional way!
• Added QoS support!! Make sure you set realistic up and download values of your line on the configuration. Otherwise it doesn’t work…
• Twitter!!! Yes, your fonera will tell you when it has finished uploading videos or someone connects to your signal and much more! (Not available for Torrents yet, sorry)

So, what is the bugfix list for this RC1? Here it goes (hold to your chair):

• Optional Manual DNS server on DHCP mode.
• Pop up to prevent unwilling reset/rebooting on the systems menu.
• ALL configurations are saved now from upgrade to upgrade (except for firewall, coming in the next!).
• Sending files to the correct folder over samba triggers the upload to the corresponding service.
• Samba works fine now on Windows XP.
• NTFS is handled slightly better now. Actions won’t happen till the disk is properly mounted (source of many bugs).
• More robust upload management.
• Filenames starting with ‘.’ are ignored by the service uploades (picasa, flickr etc). Good for Macs ;)
• Both \\fonera\Media and \\fonera\disc-a1 work now (better use the first)
• Many, many, many, many more bug fixing. All boring and internal, but will improve the overall experience!

Please, test it and report back. We are only looking for compatibility bugs.

*IMPORTANT NOTE* This is a Release Candidate. It is not an stable firmware. Most of the things should work fine and it’s probably safe to install. But if you are not very skillful or feel not confident about it… please wait for the release or until you read enough feedback from other users. We are happy to help everybody with any problems they experience but sometimes are overloaded of work… ;)

*ANOTHER ONE* After upgrading, the torrent application might be broken. This is due to changes in the very interior of the fonera. The way to fix it is to remove the “FoneraApps” from the disc where it is installed and reinstall.
Enjoy!

Web upgrade image (do NOT uncompress):
Enduser
Developer

RedBoot / Ssh upgrade image:

Md5sum: 5d43a2ba405627975f09741e3d506681

http://download.fonosfera.org/RC/20090922_FON2202_2.3.0.1_RC1.image

OldMan released a pre-beta version of his plugin. He ported Motion software to the Fonera 2.0!

With the application installed and a webcam connected to your Fonera 2.0, you will be able to trigger events when motion is detected. A built in functionality is for example to save the images captured by the webcam when motion occurs. Needless to say with a bit of scripting the possibilities are endless.

Download the plugin Motion4fon_0.1beta.tar.gz
Draft version of the manual page on FON Wiki

Screenshot:

Hello all!

after a veeeeeery long time, we’re happy to announce a new Release Candidate: 2.2.6.0 RC4! Yes, we know the 3 comes after the 2 and not the 4, but RC3 was an internal release :P

Why did it take us so long to make a new release? Phew… LOTS OF CHANGES!!! Really, L O T S. And we hope this is going to be all for the good.

This is not a stable release or better said, not an official release, just a Release Candidate, but we think it’s much more stable and usable than previous versions. We’re closer and closer to the perfect device! LOL

Ok, no more boring info, here’s the Changelog:

• Upload service queuing: if you plug a disk with media to upload to different services (YouTube, Flickr, Picasa or Facebook) they will now be queued and uploaded serially and not in parallel (which caused the fonera to run out of memmory and crash).
• Applications know when another upload is in progress: if you’re uploading videos to Youtube and there are queued pictures for Flickr, the Flickr page will tell you: “Waiting for YouTube to finish the upload”. How about that? ;)
• Send files from samba and they will be uploaded to your applications. No need to unplug and replug the disk! More and more user friendly every time :P
• Prorgess bars for uploaders: so you konw when it’s gonna be finished. It also helps show that the fonera is working on something ;)
• Save configuration from flash to flash: no need to reconfigure all the settings again! Well, WPA password will be lost and the plugins you installed too… sorry. We’re working on it. But it’s already good progress, isn’t it? (this feature only works on web upgrade)
• Save and restore configuration: what’s this? well, some users like to have backups of their configuration. Now you can download it from the fonera and upload it again if you want to restore safe values… It’s not very tested yet, test it and let us know if it works fine!
• Better memmory management (processes stopped if unnecessary, less services running by default etc): ok ok, this is not a feature but an enhancement, but it’s important!
• More image and video types supported. every application is aware of what it can upload. They even check filesizes depending on the service. If a picture is too big for Picasa it will tell you ;)
• Videos are now supported on picasa and flickr too!
• Classic youtube accounts should work now: those without the @gmail.com - it’s not valid to have a gmail.com like account and just ommit it in the user field! Please, someone test it…
• Additional info on the dashboard: shows uptime, shows release candidate number…
• Disable FONSpot: yes… you can now disable the FON service. Why, you wonder. Well, we want to build the biggest wireless community in the world, but well, everybody is free to do whatever they want with their fonera, they payed for it after all. So, you don’t want to share? don’t share… but you are evil! mwahahahaha!
• And much more…

And let me finish with the most awaited the most critisized, the most conflictive, the most difficult bug we ever had… (NO IT IS NOT BRIDGING! LOL)… TORRENTS!!!

We removed the unworkable (thanks unworkable folks, it was a good try but didn’t fit our needs) and it’s been replaced with… TRANSMISSION! Transmission is the best torrent client out there and it’s opensource! It works really well and it’s been veeeery smooth to integrate in the fonera.

Thanks to pablo and john form FON and Charles from transmission and others, we have our first Transmission plugin for you guys to enjoy! It’s still the first version, we are already working on some improvements that will come in the future, but for now, it’s usable.

Don’t abuse… the Fonera 2.0 is still a limited device in memory and CPU. Please follow this recommendations:

• We suggest to limit download speed to 150KB/s-200KB/s for stability and responssiveness of the interface. This is the values we set by default, we know it’s not very high, but it’s kind of stable.
• Also, sometimes the interface seems to be freezed… it’s not common but sometimes it takes up to 30min to give a response, still it’s working in the background. If Transmission has proved something is that it’s very stable and very reliable, so just be patient. Really, be patient. Especially when starting or connecting while it’s been downloading for a long while.
• Do not add many torrents. Transmission right now does not support queueing. All torrents you upload to it will be added for parallel download and this kills la fonera. Well, it doesn’t kill it, just makes it totally unresponssive. IMPORTANT: adding torrents and pausing them does ALSO freeze the fonera, Transmission uses these files in background for something.
• Also, be aware that it does NOT work with NTFS so… windows users, use FAT32, linux users… you don’t need advice ;)
• DO NOT use it with a pendrive. The fonera uses the pendrive as RAM memmory (swap) and pendrives are too slow for that plus they deteriorate faster.
• DO NOT remove the disk before “shutting down torrent” from the fonera web UI. This is very important or you will have to uninstall and reinstall transmission. To extract a disk, you need to reboot (sotfware reboot) the fonera if you ran transmission first. This is a bug that will be fixed soon.

We are already trying to work with the Transmission guys to improve these problems, so stay tuned and ready for improvements in the future. Still, this is something already usable :P
I don’t want to extend on the incredible opportunities Transmission is bringing to the fonera (bandwidth control, seeding, access from other devices - Android, iPhone, Firefox plugins). You will get to know them by yourselves :)

I also want to thank the small betatesting team we’ve built. They are in great extent responsible of many of the improvements you see now and will see in the future. A big applause for them.
Ok, I think this has been the longes release candidate post I ever wrote so now I shut up.

Web upgrade: 20090708_FON2202_2.2.6.0_rc4.tar.gz

Web upgrade - developer mode: 20090708_FON2202_2.2.6.0_rc4_DEV.tar.gz
Console upgrade: 20090708_FON2202_2.2.6.0_rc4.image - md5sum f53f98adeeac9b9b5426d8a53cbd9db3

Yesterday we announced it, today, we release it!

In order to use foneradownloader-0.0.9 you need firmware 2.2.6.0-rc2 or later.

What you can do with is:

• click on a torrent and select to send it to the fonera 2.0 for download, instead of downloading it with the PC and then upload it to the fonera. Cool huh?
• select a set of plain text links (direct links or RS and MU links) and right click on them -> “Download with the Fonera”. YAY!!!! And you can select even normal text, it’s a smart plugin that will strip out only the proper links!!
• See the status of all your downloads in realtime on firefox, without needing to go to the fonera UI. You can see it all in a table like this (sorry about the Spanish):

hello

we’ve been quite busy lately. We are working on lots of things right now and soon you will know about some of them. But today, here you have a new release candidate for you to test.

As always, give us your feedback, it is very much appreciated.

Most of the changes are cleanups for the not-so-well working applications like torrent and rapidshare. So you, heavy-downloader… test it and let us know if it improved at all.  But there is a very nice new feature… the firefox plugin!!!!
You can expect

• a better handling of the RS and MU links: links are loaded without checking so it’s faster and are checked at download time so there’s no possible variation of temporary links. Summary: should work better and fail less :P
• torrent cleaned up: the torrent application is handled slightly differently and the different status are managed somehow better. even though the downloads won’t be perfect, it seems like you can now download some big files from time to time :)
• other cleanups…

OK, ok, you want to know about the firefox plugin. What does it do? well, it’s in beta state (lol) but the target is to detect whether you are connected to the fonera 2.0 and if so, it helps you send tasks to it. For instance, you can:

• click on a torrent and select to send it to the fonera 2.0 for download, instead of downloading it with the PC and then upload it to the fonera. Cool huh?
• select a set of plain text links (direct links or RS and MU links) and right click on them -> “Download with the Fonera”. YAY!!!! And you can select even normal text, it’s a smart plugin that will strip out only the proper links!!
• See the status of all your downloads in realtime on firefox, without needing to go to the fonera UI. You can see it all in a table like this (sorry about the Spanish):

Thanks Javier for the very good work and Steven for supporting with the APIs!

How do you install it? Unfortunately you need to wait till tomorrow so we can fix a small last minute bug :P
Enjoy and thanks!

The Firmware Team

• Firmware WEB image: USE THIS ON WEB
• Firmware CONSOLE image: use this on console (ssh/serial) - md5sum 21ed62df8adfaa858d61e52f7c41349a

Just got an update from our friends of the FonHome project. They made quite a lot of progress and expect to release a beta version before the end of the summer. The driver of the X10 USB controller they are using still needs a few fixes. But guess what, they have a google code repository, so you can give a hand or provide your expertise if you’d like to.

Noticed that they are good graphic artists too? I especially like the FonHome branded Fonera 2.0!

Hi all,

We are very happy to release a new RC firmware: 2.2.6.0 RC1 (the firmware will show still 2.2.5.0). We want to make clear that it is NOT a final/official firmware but an image for testing. We release it and those who dare and don’t mind having to reflash or revert it if it’s not working properly can install it and give us feedback and congratulate us for the good job. Please, no complains, it’s not a release.

Having said that, I want to thank Decodecoding for the  very exhaustive and helpful testing, debugging and reporting he has done. Thanks to him we might have found a good alternative for the buggy torrent. Yes, we have replaced our old torrent application, ctorrent with a new one “unworkable” - nice name huh? - But that’s not all, here’s the list of the features we added.

• We added nmbd: this will basically make the fonera discoverable on your network… Both Windows and MAC will see the Fonera as a network computer by browsing your network.
• Support for mDNS: this helps MAC and Linux discover the services a Fonera is offering (FTP, Network Disc etc) we will add more services in the future, such as printer etc. With this, things are much more easy to configure in most systems.
• Replaced torrent: now we use “unworkable”. The interface is not fully migrated, but it will be soon. Seems to work pretty well. You can chose 3 speeds… if the high speed gives you trouble, try lower ones.
• UPnP support: yes… we added this after so long. For us it’s a security whole but some users want it… IMPORTANT: it’s enabled by default in this image and can’t be disabled from the Web GUI. Will add that feature in coming releases. For those who don’t know UPnP, it dinamically ‘opens’ the ports of the services you are using (namely torrent, gaming etc)
• Uptime: the dashboard now shows the uptime of the fonera. This is only refreshed when you refresh the dashboard, don’t expect it to change synchronously.
• DDNS behind NAT: we added a script that will check the public IP of the fonera even behind NAT (this is the case for 99% of the foneras connected behind a cable/adsl router).
• RapidShare and Megaupload fixed and improved: RapidShare downloader had a bug that made some files not be downloaded. Additionally, adding too many links in a row while it was downloading others made the fonera crash from time to time. This is handled in a different way now and should not crash anymore. Please test it.
• Many fixes on the interface, facebook and other applications…

Please all comments to the development list or additionally IRC (#fonosfera on irc.freenode.net).

Command line image: here - md5sum 5291756e6df93e4f66f5975bb734045a

Web image: here -> untested… if the flash process fails, use the other over ssh.

Hi,

After lots and lots and lots of impatient requests to make the plugin to switch from ENDUSER mode to DEVELOPER mode, it is now available on the “Applications” menu of your Fonera 2.0. Yes I put it there… one by one… I got into your houses and hacked your foneras!!! muahahahaha!!!!

What does this plugin do? It will basically change one configuration file (/etc/config/registered) so the “dev” option is changed from 0 to 1. That is all. Simple huh?

The effect is nice…

• the interface color will change,
• the ssh access will be available after 2 reboots (don’t ask why…)

There’s one more thing the plugin will do (please don’t be paranoid): it will connect to fon.com and tell us your MAC address. Why? Because we want to know how many people switched to developer mode. We promise not to tell anybody what you did, ok? Actually we’re not even storing this info in a database, but a simple log.
What are we working on?

• New torrent application -> we hope it will fix the issues we’re having now
• Fix RapidShare bug: some files could not be downloaded. It’ fixed and will be pushed in the next upgrade.
• Improved audio plugin to listen to shoutcast streams… etc.

Your feedback was so useful and that’s why we’re releasing fon-ng 2.2.5.0 RC2. It’s gonna be, very likely, the last release candidate. But this time we want to make sure it works as good as it can, because the Endusers are coming! yes, Arpil 21st is the date!

This is the bugfix / new features list:

• Facebook uploader is here! You can now add as many pictures as you want to facebook. I used it 2 and I’m already the biggest image uploader of all my friends!
•  Picasa uploader fixed! it used to crash with many pictures to upload. Not any more!
• Static DHCP leases…
• All icons are now alligned and look better :P We also like design ;)
• 3G connectivity has been reworked and has more options now.
• Picasa and Youtube applications now check your password and let you know if it’s wrong
• The FONBackup page has been redesigned. Now you can browse the content of your backup to make sure it’s all in there!
• The password bug has been fixed, yes.
• Added nice icons on the File browser to directly upload pictures and videos to picasa, flickr, facebook and youtube. Nice hack
• WiFi-WAN now works better. It didn’t work with some routers before…

Give us any feedback you can think of: we’re happy to get more than we need and filter it ;)

We hope you enjoy this image during easter!

The images

• Web upgrade image: 20090407_FON2202_2.2.5.0_rc2.tar.gz (DO NOT untar or unzip it, use as is)
• Command line upgrade image: 20090407_FON2202_2.2.5.0_rc2.image - md5sum e8cbcacff7a3c51a0b124822ed85da28

P.S.: once again, thanks to all the team, especially John ;)

Yes, we are faster and faster! This is just a release candidate launch, we want you to test all the bugs you reported and let us know if they’ve been fixed. But John, almighty John, has been busy with new stuff too!

(sorry, no pic this time, it’s not a release, hehe ;))

BIG DISCLAIMER: even thought the configuration wizard tells you to use a password of more than 8 characters, IGNORE IT. It has a bug so use a password of 7 chars MAX!
This is the bugfix and new feature list. Test and report, my friends:

• Added flickr functionality: works as the youtube one. Put pictures on the pendrive on a “flickr” folder and they’re uploaded when plugged!
• Added picasa functionality: exactly the same way but on a “picasa” folder.
• Nintendo DS now works fine with this firmware!!! (more than one will be happy in Japan…).
• Freed space for more plugins! We now have 1,5MB instead of 1,19MB :)
• Samba and FONBackup have a separated firewall option.
• Fixed IE visualization of the Wizard (yes, IE users, now it works… dunno why we fixed it though, lol).
• Fixed Torrent crashing problem with files that have many seeds.
• Torrent downloader now lets you chose the port and will be automatically opened on the firewall.
• The partitions on multi-partition disks can be now labeled as well.
• And more I can’t remember right now :)

And this is the missing bits:

• Translations for all new stuff are not ready yet.
• And more I can’t remember right now :) LOL

The images (only developer mode):

• Web upgrade image (only from 2.2.3.0 and on): 20090330_FON2202_2.2.5.0_rc1.tar.gz
• Command line image (any version): 20090330_FON2202_2.2.5.0_rc1.image