FON Boards

We just have sent this email to the Fonera 2.0 beta testers, and I wanted to post it on the Fonera 2.0 part of the board for all to know. Please note, the firmware will be uploaded in less than 24 hours, I just wanted to let you know this:

The Fonera 2.0 Beta version is ready for release!!

Hello all,

After a long period incubating the idea, in August we finally launched the project in an official way and all the necessary resources were booked and even hired! I want to take the chance to give special credit to John Crispin, new member of the firmware team and also member of openwrt.org, who did most of the dirty work in the new firmware. Of course, without Felix Fietkau and Imre Kaloz (drivers and platform support, both members of the firmware team and openwrt.org), Pablo Martín (server communications) and Javier Monteagudo (testing and bugging) the release could not have been possible.

Slightly over a month after kick off, we are proud to announce that we have a Beta firmware for the fonera 2.0 and we want you guys to be the first ones to get it. As we promised, the fonera 2.0 comes with some nice features out of the box (in your case, after reflashing ): network printing and scanning, webcam support, disk management, network file sharing (samba), ftp server, dyndns and many many more to come.

Additionally, we will be developing a broad set of plugins you will be able to install and DEVELOP. The possibilities are countless: P2P download applications, remote access to the device, advanced firewalling, QoS etc etc.

For now, please, use the firmware we will leave before tomorrow for you to download (source tarball also available ) at
======================================================
http://download.fon.com/beta/2/src/fon2 ... .1.tar.bz2 -> Source tarball: 164MB
http://download.fon.com/beta/2/20081001 ... beta.image -> Binary file (redboot or bash): 4,3MB
http://download.fon.com/beta/2/20081001 ... 1_beta.fon -> Sigened binary file (web interface): 4,2MB

d018b6773bf5153b1ecf4078777f3709 fon2.0-beta-2.1.0.1.tar.bz2
6d499367220964291f8b69f4ea58d074 20081001_FON2202_2.1.0.1_beta.image
c5912e421b2a728610782f3d68ba7be9 20081001_FON2202_2.1.0.1_beta.fon
======================================================

All the feedback, bug reports, suggestions, patches etc will be very appreciated. We created a mail list at fonera20 (youknowwhatitgoes here) fon.com In the beginning we will try to handle it in a best effort policy, but as the device, the software and the community evolves, we will be improving the process so changes and improvements can easily be applied by the owners of the devices.

Yours sincerely,
The FON Firmware Team


If you have any questions, please ask them here and I will answer the best I can

There's a wiki section for the Fonera 2.0:
http://wiki.fon.com/wiki/La_Fonera_2.0
where tutorials and further information will be added.

when will we be able to get such a Fonera 2.0 and test it out as well?
eg get it on shop.fon.com
or get it as "fon" betatester?
or sign in as developer?

Does the Wiki get a "table" of tested stuff:

* Printer support
** BRAND
** Model : OK / NOK

* WEBcam support
** BRAND
** Model : OK/NOK

* Other
** Usb stick ?
** Usb HDD?
** Usb ...

So the "P2P" Torrent has been removed from the roadmap and the movies showing it on youtube & blog of MartinV can be seen as vaporware?

I don't see mentioning of the 3G USB stick support out of the box which was announced a month ago as being added as well "as we speak"

Nice to know it's supporting CUPS (printer) as well...

And thnx for the release


PS : BAD advertisement...your Fonera has been down for DAYS If even FON can't keep a FONpromise

*Skynet, good to see you keep your skepticism... wouldn't be the same. you want all the candies at the same time? that ends up in a fat greedy boy.*

More things are coming in the near future. We have been working very hard, mostly in the deeper side of the firmware, rewriting most of fon's scripts, rebasing the firmware in the openwrt trunk, making a better and more stable wifi driver (hopefully it will be wifi alliance certified soon?) etc etc.

For the user space, we added some basic but nice functionalities: printing (it's not CUPS, sorry but you can't expect to have that with all the rest in side such a device...), scanning, hard disk navigation, samba, ftp... well, we think they're nice enough for a start.

Needs a lot of debugging and testing, so please, don't expect to be the device of your dreams, but the will-be the device of your dreams haha

I hope this is the begining of a real useful product which anyone can enjoy or contribute to improve. The communities that were so involved with previous devices even though FON didn't help much, will hopefully be happy and active now and create applications, features, patches etc Of course, we also appreciate the negative comments for the device: it's not perfect!

Ok, so, please, everybody: enjoy, criticize and dance!
iurgi

Well FON has been tempting us with candy since April 2008... so indeed we're using it as some kind of roadmap to see what was promised and what was finished... and adding other features along the ride of what to expect as soon as the device is "ready" for public shipping.
And yes i've been googling for "fonero 2" updates for quiet some time


Is that thesame wifi driver (HAL?) that is send today to the fonera+ people as well? (so I can at least test that part this evening



yes my mistake...I assumed cups; hence I have no memory limit on my NSLU2 (2gbyte usb stick)
Nice to know something else is present...

Kudos to the Firmware team for releasing the sourcecode!
I hope it's also the start of a lively discussion (and not monologue) between FON and the Community Developers in the open instead of behind sealed doors

Yes, iurgi. There is no need to be insulting. Skynet only wants that which was demonstrably promised to him, as do we all. He does not want to be sneered at or mocked when he asks for explanations.
It would be nice indeed if La Fonera becomes a useful product. I hope you succeed.

I believe that's normal hence he has been working nonstop on creating this fine firmware for us!
There is sourcecode available!
let's see what it does on a Asus 500 deluxe... (if I had one

That's in process ! We would rather do a Confirm/Not Confirm as we have the lists from the drivers. More to come tomorrow...

hi all,

all the missing features mentioned are already working in the lab and I am working on the final details.

> Kudos to the Firmware team for releasing the sourcecode!
> I hope it's also the start of a lively discussion (and not monologue) between FON and the
> Community Developers in the open instead of behind sealed doors

well, here i am.

john
blogic <at> openwrt <.> org

http://p910nd.sourceforge.net/ for the printing part...
sane for the scanning
samba for the harddisk navigation including ntfs-3G support and automount (autofs)
mjpeg-streamer for webcam support... every 500ms it takes a "snapshot"
dyndns support
samba... to view the attached usb drive on a workgroup neighbourhood network scan....

nice!

I'd like to see three features:

La Fonera+ and LF2:
• MAC cloning for ease of installation with any ISP.
• An option to bridge the LAN jack to the public network, instead of the private network. This way, a future-tech AP bridge can be attached to instantly expand the Fon hotspot using the latest technology, like wifi-n. Unless, of course, Fon is terrified that this would cut into sales of it's own wifi-n router. Which is why they refused to put bridge-to-LAN on the La Fonera 1.x

LF2:

• The onboard USB port should be firmware-virtualized as an remote USB port over Ethernet, so only one universal driver needs to be installed on the router itself, and the port could be used for almost anything.

Will the "other" beta testers get one La Fonera 2.0 ?

I need one for my mobile fonera, I'm working on a ethernet device to control the car (no need to open the fonera anymore) and the USB will be cool to connect one cheap camera

iurgi and others like him that contributed, nice work, I want you to know that I appreciate very much your work, finally I'm having new hopes on the FON project, if you guys can add with success that many features to La Fonera 2.0 than it will be the most wanted wifi device for a long time

it's copyrighted?

http://www.usb-over-network.com/

Oh is it?

http://www.usb-server.com/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux+open-source+usb-over-network

And here is this one, reviewed by Gizmodo just today:
http://gizmodo.com/5058356/d+link-dir+825-dual+band-n-router-gets-usb-over-wi+fi-and-so-can-you

Any hints on how to execute the "redboot/bash" image?
eg for the Fonera+ we're doing :
load -r -b 0x80100000 image.bin
fis write -b 0x80320000 -f 0xa8260000 -l 0x003f0000

but the Fonera 2 firmware is 2x the size...so i guess some parameters needs to be changed for a successfull flash?
hence if upgrading via web interface doesn't succeed perhaps it can work with redboot?

The tarball contains the "help" files...
http://wiki.fon.com/wiki/La_Fonera_2.0 indicates that help is appreciated in "translation" of these help files...

can "we" (those that don't have a la fonera 2.0) help in translating these files to our motherlanguage?
it only requires notepad

Why not?

Why not? [/quote]

well because I did for "La Fonera" and it never got included
I'm reffering to this call once made by Iurgi himself in 2006 for the FONBasic source:
http://blog.fon.com/en/archive/technolo ... tions.html

Things have changed since 2006, luckily.
I don't think there's any problem with translations to be included in the tarball, but I'm not the one making the calls on it. For sure they can be included in the wiki, and I'm 100% sure they can go in the tarball, but I might be wrong on that.

Can we flash this firmware on our Fonera+
and start adding our "wanted features" in it?
* putting WAN in bridge modus ---> Editing connection.sh probably?
** Increase (private) internet speed 100x
** no double nat
** 1 network adress range less
** possibility to use network neighbourhood & pc names to find pc's instead working with "ip" adresses
* define "lan" port... currently it's configurated in advanced network settings -> Wireless Private...
** as Austintx specified perhaps some want it to be connected to FON_AP dhcp instead of MyPlace dhcp
** edit adv_net.sh
* Advanced Firewalling
** Instead of allowing "Public->Private"; be able to allow access to eg USB device or certain servers/ports (webserver ?) to the FON_* public and/or even WAN instead of only LAN (192.168.10.1)

hence I haven't read anywhere how it will be possible for developers to add stuff to it...?
Or do we have to wait for the "fonosphere" and opening of a public SVN versiontracker?
and we currently just test & poke in code but not change/add anything?