Colin Charles Agenda

I dusted off the N770, and installed the new Maemo 2.0 Internet 2006 Tablet edition (probably worth reading the update guide - make sure you have the 2.0 Flasher). While I was at it, I set up scratchbox again.

In the sbox environment, if you need to install something, remember to use fakeroot (just pre-pend it to the command you’re running).

I must admit that I’m quite excited with the GTalk functionality. Holding the 770’s speaker to my ear, the microphone is just where my mouth is. Rumor has it (upon opening it up) that the mic is exactly the same as the one used in mobile phones that Nokia make. The quality of the audio is actually surprisingly good - I’m quite happy with the fact that I now have a VoIP WiFi phone. The other good thing about GTalk is that I can be connected on OS X, Linux, as well as my 770 - I like the idea of having multiple presences. If only more people used GTalk (as opposed to MSN)! (reach me at ccharles@gmail.com)

All the telephony options become even more interesting with Gizmo Project and their recent release of the 770 ARM client. I’ve had an account with the Gizmo Project almost since they started offering a Linux and an OS X client (I think the latter came first). I’ve hardly made much use of it, mainly because a lot of the folk I know are still connected to Skype. SkypeOut is also something I use from time-to-time, but now, it seems that the Gizmo equivalent is also not too bad. SIgning up with them gives you a little free credit, and I still had it after all this time, so a test call via the Nokia 770 proved to be useful.

My mother, some 4,500 miles away from me heard me loud and clear. Again, I’m hooked, and wish more people were on the Gizmo Project. Best part about it is you don’t actually need to even fire up the client, you can use standard SIP phone software, like Ekiga, to get things working. I don’t know if this works for dialing out to non-Gizmo Project users, but it’s on my to-do list to give it a go. Another boon is the fact that I can be logged in via OS X, Linux, and on the 770 - again, multiple presences at work. If only more people used the Gizmo Project (as opposed to Skype)! (reach me at colincharles)

One complaint that I have with the Gizmo Project is that you need to install not just one file, but three - it forces Bonjour on you (even if you have howl, it doesn’t seem to care), and you need a separate sound library (that can either be OSS or ALSA based). I guess this is where Skype wins with the one-file installer.

The other complaint is that when making a Gizmo-to-Gizmo call, the interface seems clunky enough to not allow me to pick up the phone call! On OS X its Growl, I click the answer interface and it doesn’t work. On Linux, its the same deal. On the 770, I pick it up and nothing happens. I seem to have problems making Gizmo-to-Gizmo calls, anyone had any success?

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups - can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm is there for the moment. Alt+F2, xterm, and you’re on your way. The root user has no password, so su - shouldn’t be a problem.

What doesn’t work with the olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3 firmware image is networking. Try modprobing for ne2k-pci, and it’ll fail, mainly because 8390.ko is missing. This should be fixed with the next firmware image.

All’s not lost however. If you run file on the .ext3 firmware image, you’ll notice that it contains an x86 boot sector, code offset 0×48. A little fdisk, will show that there are 63 sectors/track, with each sector size being 512 bytes. Multiply that, get 32256, and that should be the offset to mounting the image.

sudo /sbin/losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0/mnt
merrily going on making changes
sudo umount /mnt
sudo /sbin/losetup -d /dev/loop0

Its well worthwhile to not have QEMU running with the disk image - make sure it isn’t, otherwise corruption is likely. Once that happened, it was fairly trivial to get MySQL installed. So I did.

MySQL running on the OLPC

The question is… do we want 61MB of a package sitting there? It can probably be reduced in size tremendously. So can removal of /var/log and /etc/yum.repos.d/ and so on…

From reading the software task list, it doesn’t seem like there’s a focus on teaching IT to the owners of the OLPC. Does MySQL pass off as educational software, covering a database component? I don’t see OpenOffice.org being listed as something that will be on the OLPC, and the GNOME Office (Abiword and Gnumeric) don’t have a front-end for database connectivity.

I’d like to thank davidz and Daniel Berrange for assistance when needed! Oh and read his blog for little tips - the simulator debugging did come in handy.

Caught Venom; avoid it at all cost. Just got back from Malacca, which generally was another food fest; rained a lot, but I got to practice shooting photos without looking thru the shutter.

Friday was a good day. DHL came with a package from the company, and about ten minutes later I get a call stating that there’s another package with a possibly incorrect address. Its from Nokia. I get all excited.

At 2.30pm, it arrives. Pity, I left the house earlier. I finally get to it at around 10.30pm, after braving my way past the traffic jams, flooding and the closing of the NKVE at the Klang entrance. Hello Nokia 770! Anyways, first impressions time.

• Was generally hard to open the RS-MMC slot; once opened, closing it was a lot easier.
• Didn’t realise that there was a stylus at the back, but picked the one from the box instead (i.e. the spare).
• First time setup was intuitive; even paired up with my Bluetooth phone. Then it was time to get on WiFi. Also a breeze.
• By not reading the manual, it seemed that the Power button was what to press regularly. Seems closing the case puts the device into some sort of standby mode.
• How do I let it install and run files of the RS-MMC card? If it can work (without me symlinking /var/lib/install to the /media/mmc) I might look for a larger RS-MMC card.
• It has Bluetooth over the Tungsten C that I have, which is a clear boon. It also has a larger screen. But the virtual keyboard isn’t something I enjoy.
• They included Ice Age 2’s trailer, which was nice for video. The online streaming radio station is highly neat, as the music that comes out of it is actually nice/modern.
• Some apps seem to crash. Debug mode or log files will be handy to see why.
• Installing apps via the Internet works a charm. They’re .deb’s, and you double-click it from the file manager, and they just work. Impressive! I now have Xterm, vim, pine, and Abiword installed.

Seeing that I managed to use an Internet tablet without the Internet for the weekend was not too bad. And the battery hasn’t even died yet. Impressive. I now also need to setup Scratchbox on my FC-4 box (again), re-flash the N770, and find a screen protector for it. I think the latter is going to be a challenge seeing that these devices aren’t available, in general, at least in this part of the world.

• Some cool Nautilus file manager scripts and GNOME Power User Tools. When time permits, or if someone else is interested, these should really get packaged for Extras. Also, posting to flickr using Nautilus is nifty. A useful resource is the GNOME ISV Guide - with tools like Sabayon, and more gconf customisations, I can see this being a very, very useful resource.
• San Francisco was the usual fun. Oakland was far out, but go BART. We toured the Mission District on Wednesday, and tried to run a tour on Thursday for various sites in San Francisco. Seeing Fisherman’s Wharf after about eleven years, things don’t seem to have changed. Topic is from the fortune cookie that I kept.
• The craze with Harry Potter is out. I pre-ordered the last book, and till today, a year later, still haven’t read it. So I’ll have to marathon the two at some stage. So, its not only churches that don’t like you reading HP, its also rms.
• Finally catching up with mail (thanks to the rain, humidity and heat outside), and there’s some new things in Maemo land. For starters, python 2.4 is now available. And there’s also a MaemoWiki. Also, since Fedora is big on Eclipse, there is a Laika Scratchbox plugin available. While I haven’t tried making a package, I’m unsure if it will work on Fedora or not without a Debian chroot or something.
• At the Desktop Developers Conference 2005 I learnt a few new things - how to use inotify with gamin (its now in rawhide kernels too), Eclipse Trader might be useful for stock trading, Unicode is important, Rasterman believes that “Bling bling is much more important than functionality”, and Hubert has been lied to, many a time :) More to the point, I learnt more about digital imaging, and its something that’s of interest lately (I want my RAW working, and cataloging, backing up, and manipulation via The GIMP, etc.).
• Glad to see its not just dwmw2 or me running FC-4 on the Pegasos II. We clearly need a new yaboot (basically with svenl’s patches), and we don’t have anaconda working (neither does ydl), and I definitely need to update the fedora ppc document.

• KL for a few days. Its really warm. Saw William, Sean, & Kenneth for a bit on Saturday. Met up with Ditesh, Dinesh, Radha for some fun too; Ditesh and Dinesh again on Sunday, with Ow for a bit. Too many raids occuring in KL, closing all nightspots by 2-3am, which sucks. Spent another day just hanging out at a coffee joint with Wing Hol and Ruben.
• Syncing the Tungsten C with FC-4 works quite well. Just create /etc/udev/rules.d/10-visor.rules, with the line: BUS=”usb”, SYSFS{product}=”Palm *”, KERNEL=”ttyUSB[13579]“, SYMLINK=”pilot”. Now in J-Pilot, make sure that you’re syncing against /dev/pilot rather than /dev/ttyUSB[0,1], because it can tend to change.
• Saw that Novell is launching a Linux programme for undergrads yesterday in Computimes, and today Khairil points to the online link. Now, this Certified Linux Professional (CLP) that they’re trying to push assures you that after a practical exam has been passed, you’re certified to administer a SuSE Linux system. Why? I appreciate the fact that they’re doing some OSS goodness in the Malaysian market, but its rather silly when its one-sided. Its not vendor neutral, and this pushes the silly idea that Linux/OSS equates to Novell/SuSE. How different are they to Microsoft then? Not very in my books, and this is clearly evil. Do it LPI styled or something, make it vendor neutral, and make more Linux-certified Malaysians (see how I don’t say professionals anywhere there?). Certification has its limits…
• Yes, I am bad for using the the hsf softmodem drivers from linuxant. And with it, they don’t support S3 sleep either. So remember to stop hsf before sleep.

• Caught Madagascar at La Premiere in Hoyts. I can heartily say that Gold Class at Village is heaps better. On DVD, got to see Farenheit 9/11, which makes me wonder about Bush, and all.
• Walked the 1,000 steps. It was surprisingly nice. Been up to Mt. Dandenong a lot, but never ever went on this trail. Napped, and then karaoke later with a bunch of friends - boozie took over.
• Because I tried hard to put off any writing for the MyOSS Magazine, I ended up doing some Fedora package stuff. Sorted out gaim-guifications, MagicPoint. Trying to include xwrits. My livna foo is sorted, gtkpod is updated.
• Spent most of today lazing around in her house. All was fine, till dinner time when I felt like punching his face. The gall. My stupidity for going, I guess.
• I got my Tungsten C back. Its a nice, brand new unit, with everything “just working”. I’m impressed with Palm’s customer service, being the first time I’ve had to use them, ever. FileZ is useful to beam your old DatebookDB/AddressBookDB/MemoDB over to the new unit. pssh is an SSH client worth checking out. One annoyance is that when the Writing Area is enabled (grafitti all over the screen), the NotePad doesn’t work - is there some way to disable the writing area just on a per-application basis?
• Wah, Base is now component-ized. (iz#46898) So its now an optional install, and OpenOffice.org requires no JRE. I can imagine this pleasing Windows users somewhat, but all sane free Linuxes are probably going to include the gcj stack, and get things going, right?

I refuse to have my Xorg run at 16-bit depth, so, here’s a better way of running Maemo, rather than the prescribed Xnest method. Install vncviewer and vnc-server, then:

1. Xvnc -geometry 800×480 -dpi 72 -ac :2 -depth 16 -rfbauth ~/.vnc/passwd & - this creates an Xvnc server with size 800×480 (to fit Maemo), with a DPI of 72 (you may want 96, but it seems rather large). This creates it on display :2 with a 16-bit depth, and the password file to be read is in ~/.vnc/passwd.
2. Create a VNC password, by using vncpasswd
3. Then, type vncviewer :2, enter the password, and you’ll have a window appear. Now in scratchbox, just type af-sb-init.sh start. Make sure you already ran export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:2 in scratchbox as well.

On Fedora Core 4, remember, you want to echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/vdso as well, to ensure scratchbox will even start. The tutorial is incorrect in terms of telling you where to get maemopad - grab it from http://repository.maemo.org/stable/1.0/applications/maemopad/.

Maemo on FC-4; changing the input method

Interesting reading is the interview with Dr. Ari Jaaksi from Nokia. Debian’s packaging format was the only thing chosen, as the kernels come from upstream kernel.org. Last little Maemo tip is that if you don’t want to use the keyboard, better switch input methods to the X input method, and this will allow you to actually type text in (rather than tapping on the online keyboard).

• So my server ran out of space, so it’s been NFS mounting more disk from another box. IP address of said box changed, and look: 7:12am up 35 days, 7:28, 2 users, load average: 70.90, 69.24, 65.59.
• The F1 in the US, was horrible with only 6 cars running. Big wow Ferrari, hollow the victory was.
• My hair is really gone. For all those that asked if it was Photoshopped (really, GIMPed), it wasn’t. I removed it all, completely. This is in lieu of me entering the States again within the next 3 weeks (okay, thats a joke. I just needed a change). This time last year, I straightened my hair.
• I purchased a Tungsten C to get organised and stuff. I love the color screen. Too bad the digitizer and the WiFi radio module seem hoarked. Called Palm Support and they seem to be wanting to send me a new unit out (after I send mine in, of course).
• Caught The Longest Yard - I don’t like football, but it was definitely funny.
• Finally cleared (Fedora) mail. Ever found a package name you completely hated? jonathan-core seems to get on my nerves. Okay, weird.
• Want to dual-boot FreeBSD and Fedora? Well, install FreeBSD first (I think it doesn’t matter if you do it later either), and when it comes to installing the bootloader, don’t use BootMgr, but the second option which is not to touch the MBR. Fun with LVM when /dev/hda2 and /dev/sda2 have names VolGroup00, making it oh so hard to get my data off the USB disk.