Uber Geeky!

This morning I checked my phone only to find a message about updates downloaded and ready to install. That’s an odd thing, since I’ve got modded firmware that should have disabled such behaviour to prevent conflicts. I was a bit worried, but an ADP G1 wielding colleague pointed me to this notice… http://andblogs.net/2009/07/otas-in-jfv1-51/

I followed JF’s 2nd and 3rd suggestion and so far so good. Here’s the exact steps I took to disable the update.

1. Download and extract JFv1.51 ADP firmware and copy build.prop to the sdcard. Or use this build.prop (freshly extracted for your convenience).
2. Mount /system on the G1 as read/write. Two simplest ways to do this is either install “DroidSans Tweak Tools” or run “mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system” in a terminal.
3. Replace build.prop and make the permissions the same as the old one with something like:

   $ su

   # mv /system/build.prop build.prop.bak

   # cp /sdcard/build.prop /system

   # chmod 644 /system/build.prop

4. Find the update in the /cache directory and “chmod 000″ it…

   

5. Now I actually clicked on the “restart and install” option on the update dialog. The phone rebooted, and the update failed. I rebooted with Home+Back and haven’t had the update prompt as yet.

So far so good. One odd thing I noticed is the update is gone from the /cache directory.

The Cyrket website is an “Android Application Browser” for the desktop. Makes it much easier to search for applications and works especially well in conjunction with “Barcode Scanner” app installed on the handset.

Now why didn’t Google just do that in the first place?

Looks like some Italians figured out a way to access paid applications on the Android Market. Check out this English translation which contains a link to the MarketEnabler app they wrote. I’ve tested it out and it stills work quite well.

Just a quick follow up. The plans to maintain my KDE3 addiction worked, but it wasn’t a smooth ride. I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t keen to tinker. During the KDE3 installation some packages wanted to overwrite KDE4 files, which caused all sorts of issues with my package manager. I had to use dpkg to force a couple packages to install before I could remove the KDE4 ones and then re-installed the KDE3 ones just to be sure. I ended up culling a fair few of the default KDE4 packages to make sure I didn’t have any more problems like this. I can still login to KDE4, but some of the nicer stuff like Compiz is gone.

I had issues with Compiz in particular, there are problems with the latest nVidia drivers. The latest Compiz has a workaround for this, but it’s not available for the KDE3 version. I found the simplest solution was just to switch back to the 177 driver version and then it was all good.

So yeah, I recommend just switch to Gnome, or try KDE4 on Jaunty and enable the folder view desktop. It seems like pointless overhead to me, the folder view is just a full screen widget. Note also that it doesn’t span screens, so if you have a dual screen setup and you want some icons spattered on the second screen you’re out of luck. KDE3′s days are numbered so eventually I’ll have to face reality and move on. I’ve prolonged it for about another year now I reckon, but eventually I’m going to have to face the music.

I wanted to post this sooner, but the recent Word Press update broke my WYSIWYG. Luckily it was just a javascript conflict with one of my plugins, some people had much worse issues with the update. Still it’s embarrassing since I was just bragging to my mate the other day about how fantastic this application is, particularly the update management. Bloody updates, they are the bane of my life!

While searching around to find out why-oh-why I’m not allowed to have files on my Desktop in KDE4 (and hopefully how to re-enable it), I found this… http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/05/no-more-desktop-icons-in-41.html

This looks to me like the root of the problem. This KDE developer, in all his infinite wisdom, just simply ripped out the code that supports file icons on the desktop. Apparently it just doesn’t look nice to him or something. Too bad if you don’t like the whole widget based desktop experience, this guy has just forced us to either take it up or switch to Gnome. Suffice to say, when I read his article I was fairly taken aback by the action.

In all fairness though, he doesn’t see it the way I do. Yes, this post was originally fueled by rage. I quickly changed my initially confrontational title of this post to something a little nicer. Aaron’s intention appears to be to create a more flexible experience for the user (by culling features?!?). My tinfoil hat keeps telling me it’s really just a Microsoft conspiracy (joking of course).

One of my machines was recently updated to KDE4 via the Kubuntu Intrepid distro upgrade. I’ve been using it everyday, but I haven’t been liking it. The version that came with Kubuntu Intrepid is not nearly mature enough. Personally, I love KDE3 and I’d like to stick with it as long as possible. I don’t need the new Plasma features and many old features seem to have been dropped. Thankfully, I found this… https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty which should allow me to keep my systems up to date without having to touch KDE4. I’ll try the process out tomorrow on my work Kubuntu 8.04 machine.

Update:

You can re-enable the normal desktop behaviour in Jaunty simply from a desktop right click menu. But not Intrepid. In Intrepid you could try editing $HOME/.kde/share/config/plasma-appletsrc replacing plugin=desktop with plugin=folderview, but that didn’t work for me.

Another Update:

You can’t drag and drop your icons on to multiple screens. It only works on the primary because it’s still some kind of crappy complete waste of resources full screen widget.

I’m currently trying to find a fanless AGP video card with dual monitor support for Ubuntu. My existing one is a bit temperamental and I’ve never been able to get dual monitors working properly with Ubuntu. Looks like it’s got to be either ATI or nVidia. I’ve always owned nVidia cards in the past and I’ve been reasonably happy with them, although there do seem to be some minor annoyances when using Compiz, and since the drivers are all closed source, long term support isn’t highly likely. The other problem is that nVidia don’t make AGP anymore so I have to find a supplier with some old stock or check out eBay if worse comes to worse.

Just about all the old ATI cards appear to have fans. I really don’t want a fan because they tend to break or get really noisy, particularly in the rather humid climate where I live. The Matrox cards look like exactly what I want, slow and reliable, but I don’t really trust their Linux support.

After a bit of searching looks like there are still a few vendors stocking generic models with vNidia GeForce 5xxx-6xxx chipsets and no fans. As for the ATI, looks like I can probably get the Radeon 9600 Pro, then try to clock it down so I can unplug the fan. I haven’t had any luck finding too many fanless ATI cards, which is a shame because they will have better Linux support in the long term thanks to their open source drivers.

This is for my home workstation, it’s only got about a year left in it before I seriously consider getting a new one. After that however I intend to use it as a home server. It’s got masses of RAM and other decent components, but like the AGP bus, all now obsolete. I can’t reuse anything other than maybe a couple of it’s SATA hard drives. I’ll probably replace the PSU and fans to quieten it down a little and boost it’s life span, then put CentOS on it just for something different.

Just a cheap video card is all I’m looking for. I’d like something that’s going to last a few years at least. I’m not sure if the motherboard will boot without a video card, I’ll have to check that out. Need to do a little more research. Perhaps I’ll get adventurous and go with the Radeon clocking option.

Tested on:

• Rooted G1 (clean JesusFreke v1.51 US image)

Prerequisites:

• VPN connection settings or a pcf file
• If you need to decrypt enc_GroupPwd from pcf, Linux box with vpnc installed
• Something to extract bz2 files
• BusyBox (or alternative copy method that doesn’t use tar)
• Get-a-robot-vpnc package
• Root access!

First of all, this is an alternative version of instructions from xda-developers post by Phlogiston. I’ve included more complete details for those people who wouldn’t know the first thing about getting started with vpnc. Big win credit to wmealing for bringing vpnc to Android!

Extract the bz2 file (not on the phone yet). Note the directory structure is /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/..., this is designed to be extracted directly to the root of the phone.

Open /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc.conf and place your VPN connection settings in there. Very important that you remove or comment out the line “IKE authmode hybrid” or later you will have errors about missing openssl components. If you are not sure about the vpnc.conf settings and you have the .pcf file, map the following values…

You should know your user name and password. Of course I’m not going to recommend that you store them in plain text in this file, but it sure does make life a whole lot simpler.

*If GroupPwd is blank and instead you have enc_GroupPwd you need to use the cisco-decrypt tool that usually comes with a standard vpnc installation (in my distro it’s found at /usr/lib/vpnc/cisco-decrypt). Simply run:

/usr/lib/vpnc/cisco-decrypt <enc_GroupPwd hash>

Open /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc-script and change the first line to “#!/system/bin/sh” (replace bash with just sh).

Now you need to get it all on to your phone. Confirm you have the tar command on the phone by opening up the terminal app and typing “tar“. If you don’t have it, you might want to get BusyBox.

From the directory where you extracted the bz2 file, run the following to make a tarball:

$ tar -cvf vpnc.tar ./data/data

Copy that to the phone’s sdcard. While you have the sdcard mounted on your PC, create a directory called vpnc and create two empty files in there named go and prep (you can name them anything really).

Open go and paste the following (this is one single long line of text):

/data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/bin/vpnc /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc.conf --script /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc-script --pid-file /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc/etc/vpnc/vpnc-pid --no-detach --debug 1

Open prep and paste the following:

modprobe tun
lsmod
mkdir /dev/net
ln -s /dev/tun /dev/net/tun

These scripts will help you type less on the handset. Now unmount the sdcard and wait for the phone to check it. Open up a terminal and run the following:

$ su
# cp /sdcard/vpnc.tar /data
# cd /data
# tar xvf vpnc.tar
# rm vpnc.tar
# cd /sdcard/vpnc
# sh prep
# sh go

If all went well you should see the following happy little message!

… and to later kill the VPN connection, just press Ball+C. Note: You only need to run the prep script the first time during the session (when the phone reboots you’ll need to run it again).

If you want to undo it all and start from scratch, just do a recursive delete of /data/data/org.codeandroid.vpnc directory and reboot.

This morning I finally decided I couldn’t stand Evolution any longer. I started using it as my mail client at work because we have an Exchange mail server and Microsoft doesn’t make a client for Linux (surprise, surprise). I’ve never worked at a place that uses Exchange, so I’ve always just used Thunderbird for mail in the past. When I got here, this was my first serious experience with Outlook, and I started to get a bit hooked on some of the calendaring niceness. When I got my new Workstation and ditched Windows for Kubuntu I was looking for something that could integrate best with Exchange.

Evolution seemed the most attractive option because it has a plugin for exchange integration called evolution-exchange. You can install directly from the Ubuntu repositories. Basically it’s a scraper for the OWA (Outlook Web Access) web interface, and generally it works really well. I’ve been using it for about 5 months now, but there are just a few things I can’t stand about it that made me decide today to bin it.

1. Password manager is broken and has been for about 12 months it seems. No one cares to fix it. You have to type your password in each session.
2. A bug with the Evolution/Nvidia/Compiz combination of packages causes the cursor to leave garbage on the screen when you use the cursor keys in a new mail message.
3. HTML support sucks, the development community seem hell bent against it.
4. It can’t handle contacts with “>” in the name, which is a convention we use to keep mailing lists at the top of the list. This character will cause it to generate invalid mail headers, destroy the html layout of the email and makes me look like an ass, especially when sending announcements to groups like “>ALL STAFF”.
5. Occasionally the evolution-exchange plugin cache gets corrupted and you loose random mails, but you wouldn’t know unless you check occasionally in OWA or Outlook. You have to delete the whole cache and download them all again.

I was prepared to switch back to using Outlook in a virtual machine, but before doing so I decided to check first to see if there was any possible way to get Thunderbird to read Exchange calendars. Thunderbird has an extension called Lightning that adds Outlook style calendaring integration. The latest release is 0.9. Last time I used Thunderbird I think I had to get the development version of 0.8 in order to get enough working features to call it functional (appointment invites used to be very buggy in the 0.7 version). Version 0.9 has come along way, everything seems to work great… except still no support for Exchange calendars unfortunately. Your calendar is maintained locally or in some 3rd party web calendar that uses a non-proprietry protocol. Not quite good enough.

Then I found DavMail. It’s a gateway that basically does the same as the evolution-exchange plugin. This thing acts as a webservice making data available from Exchange via standard protocols by scraping the Exchange OWA interface. It maintains separate user sessions, so you really can set it up as a server side service, possibly even installed on the mail server itself.

A ray of hope! But would it work?

I had enough problems getting Lightning installed to tell the truth, and that’s just a plugin for Thunderbird! Turns out the link on the Mozilla site was no good for 64bit Linux OS and I had to jigg about with the URL to find the actual release for me. DavMail is a totally unsupported package though, the one thing going in it’s favour is that it’s Java based, so it should just work right? Well lets find out.

They have a deb package ready for me to download. I attempt to install it but I’m missing the dependency “libswt-gtk-3.4-java”. Oh boy, looks like it’s using ugly Swing for the UI. Well, looks like my Kubuntu Hardy distro is a bit behind the times now because the best I could find was a package called “libswt3.2-gtk-java” (yeah, I love the way they switched naming conventions too ^^). I installed that anyway and then just used dpkg to force it to install. It created an icon in my start menu under “Internet” and then seemed to work perfectly, connect to OWA no worries, all was good. Except now my package manager is going boonta because I’ve got a “broken package”. I can’t find the chill button so I uninstalled it for now.

How do you downgrade a dependency? Well this method worked for me…

dpkg -e davmail_3.2.0-1_all.deb
cd DEBIAN/
nano control
tar -czvf control.tar.gz *
mv control.tar.gz ..
cd ..
ar r davmail_3.2.0-1_all.deb control.tar.gz
mv davmail_3.2.0-1_all.deb davmail_3.2.0-01_all.deb

When editing the control file I changed the dependency from “libswt-gtk-3.4-java” to “libswt3.2-gtk-java” and also changed the version number to 3.2.0-01 so as not to conflict with a real version. The deb installer GUI detected something was wrong and wouldn’t install it, but “dpkg -i” worked like a charm. This is probably totally the wrong approach to take to my problem, but I don’t care. While I can sort of understand why Gnome developers might think Swing is cool, I can’t believe the libswt-gtk project can possibly have achieved much in two minor versions that would break compatibility. The latest 32bit Ubuntu has the correct version so most people wont have to care about this at all.

Now I’m rock’n with Thunderbird and Exchange! Without too much tomhackery even. So I settle back in with my old friend, so many features I’ve missed. The fantastic rich text editor (well actually it’s really basic, but light years a head of Evolution). The simplicity of theming it. I toyed with installing an Outlook theme and trying to get it to look and act exactly like Outlook. You can choose which IMAP folders to subscribe, so I picked Inbox and all it’s sub-folders, Drafts, Sent and Deleted Items. Now it’s easy to configure Thunderbird to put your sent mail into the IMAP Sent folder, but you still have the default Thunderbird Trash folder which you cannot easily convert to the IMAP Deleted Items folder. I found out you just have to edit user preferences to change the name. Searching on the net, people are always talking about editing some “prefs.js” file. I always just change the welcome page in Thunderbird to about:config, it was one of the first things I did when it was installed. This allows me to edit my preferences in the exact same way as you would in Firefox. In this case I just added the property as specified, restarted, and it worked like a charm.

I also hooked up the address book to the Exchange Global Address LDAP and then just tweaked the LDAP settings so it finds contacts a little quicker. One thing I notice is that the compose window only completes local addresses and not LDAP addresses. There had to be a fix for this.

With the power of about:config I searched for ldap and quickly found the settings that looked most useful…

• ldap_2.autoComplete.directoryServer
• ldap_2.autoComplete.useDirectory

The first one needed a quick search to figure out the syntax but the second one was just a boolean. Once that was done I had the same, if not better, contact auto-completion as I had previously with Evolution and Outlook. Game over, Thunderbird/Lightning/DavMail wins!

Update May 20, 2009 at 12:45 pm: Set mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new to true, otherwise Thunderbird doesn’t check for new mail in your subfolders. This can be a problem if you have any Exchange mail filters running.

Update May 26, 2009 at 12:58pm: http://www.trustedbird.org/tb/Multi-LDAP here’s an addon that’s showing the easy way to configure LDAP addressbook lookups. Install that addon if you would like to search multiple LDAPs.

It’s not made very clear, but apparently Picasa don’t allow hotlinking to full sized images, although they seem to make an exception for blogspot blogs. I’ve suspected something like this was the case for a while since the Android splash screen image in my first post tends not to render most of the time (until I’ve visited Picasa, and it gets cached). I just noticed that my dysfunctionally hotlinked image of the android splash screen is on page 2 of a Google image search and decided it was time to get to the bottom of this.

Visiting the image URL directly also always works, so I suspect they check the referrer URL, and if it doesn’t belong to Google, they return zilch. I got a bit of confirmation about this from the Picasa forum, and also found a solution (hopefully). If you click “Link to this photo” and look at the “Embed image ” html, you’ll get a scaled down thumbnail URL in there. You can also specify a larger size thumbnail up to 800 pixels in width. I’m now hoping the full size thumbnail URL I’m using will stay active.

Personally I’d like to keep using Picasa to manage all my images, but all this jumping through hoops is a bit out of control. If this method doesn’t work then I’m shifting to Flickr.

Was just talking today about the future of Flash, considering the G1 and iPhone don’t support it. Hell, I spent a good hour or so getting my tag cloud to look good both with and without Flash support so this blog maintained good compatibility with those handsets.

Looks like they could be making up some ground at the moment with Bsquare porting Flash Lite over to Android for the upcoming release of Dell netbooks. I predict now it’s just a matter of time before it’s ported to these handsets.

I think you’ll agree it’s been bigger-better thinking for such a long time for most of the big players in this industry, particularly Adobe. How massive is their PDF reader theses days? It’s ridiculous. I uninstalled it after version 7 was released and switched to an alternative reader because I couldn’t take it any more. The industry is still catching up with the concept of people wanting more of the desktop experience on less powerful devices. I still suspect Microsoft’s approach is to get a strangle hold on the distributors to ram their outdated wares down our throat rather than actually improve their product, but I have no proof yet so stay tuned. As soon as I find out why there are only Windows netbooks for sale in this country I’ll post it.

Actually, while I’m back on the netbook OS topic again, I stumbled upon this little gem which appears to have no OS whatsoever! The Astone UMPC netbook. The specs aren’t too bad for the price, but mostly I admire their balls for releasing a bare metal netbook to the public. Viva!

Thanks to Gizmodo for the rather flashy heads up!