A long weekend, a some time to spend on a pet project. Since the cat is part of the family, and the aquarium is no more, I had two choices left. Actually more, but I’d narrowed it down to something constructive. Setting up a recently acquired Vista laptop was an option. Yes, I remember what I have been saying about Vista, but this Vista laptop (something like one of these Lenovo R61 Thinkpads) was a bargain which I had to take as is or not at all. With another setup being required if I did it now, that ruled it out.

The second option was to try to re-flash my Neo FreeRunner. Okay, for those readers who are wondering do the what? The Neo FreeRunner is smartphone from OpenMoko. It is not just any smartphone, but an “Open” smartphone, which, according to ars technica means “completely open in both hardware and software, and is designed to encourage third-party modification and customization.”

Now the Android platform used on Google’s G1 phone is also open, but not that open.

Back to the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner. You won’t find it on Pricegrabber (not yet anyway), because it is not currently a consumer product. OpenMoko says the phone will be ultimately aimed at general consumer use . Right now though it is aimed at developers and power users.

There is no printed documentation for the Neo FreeRunner. There is a whole lot of documentation online in the form of a wiki. It didn’t take me long to found out that to upgrade the firmware I needed a Linux Desktop. So I installed Ubuntu Linux on one of my main machines using Wubi. I was still reading through the wiki to figure out the next step when I ran out of weekend…