Flashing the N900.

I have been using the N900 for almost 2 years. I've upgraded from PR1.1 to PR1.2 and PR1.3 and more recently CSSU. I have installed countless things from extras-testing and extras-devel and have never had any serious problems.

Until one fateful day 2 weeks ago when I started to realise the battery life was getting worse by the day. The battery was draining at about 2-3% an hour on standby. A few days before, I had installed speedpatch and batterypatch. I thought that was the cause, so I promptly removed them. But the issue remained. (I suspect that speedpatch permanently broke the kernel setup somehow, from reading the forums I found others who concur.)

I tried running top and powertop and found the CPU was running at C0 constantly, with 12-20% constant CPU load%. I tried everything I could to find the source of the issue. I un-installed things for testing until I practically un-installed everything I used and it was still the same.

So I was left with no choice but to re-flash the firmware. I had never done it before. I read through the wiki. It was quite confusing at first. I didn't have an Ubuntu box around so I had to use my Windows 7 laptop at work. Unfortunately I had the 64bit version and had to jump through additional hoops to make the flasher recognise the N900. I decided to start from scratch. Backed up all my files and save games and flashed both eMMC and FIASCO images.

Afterwards I restored my contact data from backup but not my settings or anything else. I was advised against it, to ensure the problem does not return from a restored backup. I started to put back all my data & re-install everything I needed. Since I use the N900 as my everyday phone, I decided to install Stable CSSU this time instead of testing.

The fresh image really made the phone much faster and much more responsive than ever before. I've now quite glad I did it and I'm enjoying the phone like it was new. The battery now lasts even longer than the first day I got it. It goes down only 2% in 5 hours on standby.

Increasingly more people are finding they have issues after installing speedpatch and batterypatch. I'd advise against installing these patches.

It's a Crap - Developing in Qt

For a while now I've been tinkering with the Nokia Qt SDK. As a way of learning about Qt, I decided to write my own little soundboard app for my N900.

As an avid listener of Linux Outlaws, I called my app CrapAlert. It started out as just a big red button that played the crap alert when you pressed it. Later I added a selection list & included a bunch of my favorite meme sound clips as well. A month later, I then changed the design from hard coding everything to reading lists from files & that allowed me to add sound clips easily without rebuilding.

Here's a few screenshots of the app:

I tried to upload the app into the Maemo Extras, but the build process kept failing & I got fed-up after 20 tries. So I'm just gonna post the deb and tarball here for anyone who cares.
Deb package for N900: crapalert_0_1_4_armel.deb
Source tarball: crapalert_0.1.4.tar.gz

The Mandriva / Mageia Dilemma

As with alot of Mandriva users, I have a dilemma. Of course I'm talking about the question of whether to continue with Mandriva or move over to Mageia. I've tried them both out on a spare machine & I have problems with both of them. Lets see if I can list them out here.

My problems with Mandriva 2011:
- I really cannot get myself to like the Rosa launcher and taskbar.
- KnetworkManager intermittently fails to connect to my hidden WPA2 Wifi.
- Abandoning of the tools I've come to love & rely on. (draknetcenter, RPMDrake, etc.)
- I have no confidence in Mandriva (the company). I no longer trust them.

My problems with Mageia 1:
- Is exactly Mandriva 2010.2. (feels very dated)
- Very ugly icons and fonts. (why is the graphics and sound & video icons exactly the same?) UI styling, color scheme is so dated.
- Slow bootup. Still no systemd.

I really don't want to stay with Mandriva anymore & be at the mercy of that company but Mageia at the moment just looks so crap that I'm serious considering going with Mandriva 2011. I managed to stop myself & at least for now I'm keeping Mandriva 2010.2 on my main machine. Until they end security update support for it.

I know most of my complaints of Mageia are superficial and can be improved with some amount of tweaking, I did try doing that on my spare machine but one thing still makes me unhappy, that is getting a consistent look for both Qt and GTK+ applications. Whenever I get a look I like on Qt, it will screw up on the GTK+ side. So right now, I'm stuck on using the oxygen theme & color scheme, it seems to be the only one that looks good. (only due to oxygen-gtk)

I'm still gonna hold out upgrading. I'm hoping that Mageia 2 will bring them up to date and be pretty and innovative again. I can only hope.

CSSU, Nitdroid and Preenv-hd

I've been running CSSU for a few months & it's been exceptionally stable. There are crashes here there, especially with some application that didn't like to be started in portrait mode. Battery life seems to suffer a bit with all the auto-rotation going on. But overall, the experience has been positive.

I also installed Nitdroid 2 weeks ago. Mainly just to fool around & play some games I'm missing out on. I install the N12 UMay release of Gingerbread onto an Apacer 8GB Class 10 MicroSDHC card. It takes about 3 minutes to boot, in operations it's a little laggy, but bearable. I only play some games, so it's all I need. It's definitely NOT recommended to run the Nitdroid as the main OS, alot of things still don't work. For one, you can't make phone calls, can't take pictures & also the phone doesn't manage power well, it runs really hot when playing games & sucks through the battery in only an hour or 2. The battery meter is screwed too, so you won't know you're dry till it switches off.

Anyway, I got tired of Android & I'm back to running Maemo again. I was searching for games when I stumbled onto preenv-hd. Someone made a patch over Preenv 0.1.7 that allowed HP Touchpad games to be playable through Preenv. This is great since there a few more games for WebOS that are for the Touchpad only. I found a few I really liked:
- DoodlePoolHD
- Slice It! HD
- Quell HD
Not the mention the more updated versions of Angry Birds Rio and Seasons.
So preenv-hd is keeping my inner gamer happy for now.

Maemo 5 Community SSU

I finally took the plunge & went ahead to install the CSSU. It's currently at v15.

The install process was painfully slow. I'm not sure why, but downloading supposedly 28MB worth of files took well over 6 hours. I had leave it overnight. Fortunately, when it was done in the morning the upgrade went without a hitch.

The resulting desktop was by all accounts completely identical to the one before. I had to do some digging to make sure everything was working as it should. Only a few things were visible:
- an Orientation Lock button appeared in the status menu.
- the application menu rotates to portrait.
- the status menu rotates to portrait.

I immediately installed the CSSU Feature Configuration Editor & switched on the new 2 column task manager.

Have not run into any issues yet, but it's too early to tell, a couple more days & we'll see. So far, so good.

After Nokia Elopcalypse

Since Nokia became Microsoft's bitch & has screwed their few remaining supporters, there is no more hope for maemo/meego as a mobile platform. Despite the release of the N9 and N950, the platform looks dead from a 3rd party developer's point of view. There will still be some hardcore Nokia/Meego/Qt supporters that will develop for the N9, but ultimately it will just be another nitch. Much as I dislike Android, it seems there is no other good choice available for a Linux geek. I still love my N900 and I will stick with it till it dies. After that I guess Android is the only boat I can jump onto. As with the betamax, the better technology does not always win..

The Fall of Nokia. The Magic of Preenv.

With the whole Microkia debacle I'm feeling at best very disappointed with Nokia. They had something special in Maemo, but instead of driving it forward, they drove themselves into the ground by doing stupid shit. Meego was unnecessary if they had just focused on Maemo. Symbian was a dead-end they kept wasting money on.

So I feel they really deserve to die. Or get swallowed by Microsoft (according to some conspiracy theorists) So I'm left with the N900 in-hand, a great device with great potential, but largely unrealized due to Nokia's incompetence.

Since my N900 is still under a year old. I will be keeping it for a while. I love the platform & hope to stay with it for as long as I can.
Luckily for me, there is Preenv. This magical little program lets me enjoy many Palm Pre games on my N900. Especially Angry Birds (Who can live without Angry Birds?) Rovio stopped supporting the N900 a while back & we did not get Ham'em High Levels or the Seasons. But thanks to the work done by the Preenv guys I am happily playing all the current games released for the Palm Pre.

Also, recently the community got together & started to develop the Maemo 5 Community SSU. Which aims to develop Maemo 5 further after Nokia dropped the ball. So there is hope in the platform, at least I can put off going to Android. (A platform I never liked, cuz it's just so NOT Linux)

Corrupted Conversations Database

One bad thing happened to my phone just a few nights ago. Somehow due to receiving a malformed SMS, the conversations and call history database was corrupted. This prevented the Conversations windows from working. I could not access any of my previous messages & new messages were not stored anymore.

It was not pretty, but this is what I had to do to fix it. I first copied the database file out to my PC to back it up, the file is ~/.rtcom-eventlogger/el-v1.db

Then I deleted the file, ran touch to create a new empty one & rebooted.
This fixed the issue, however all the messages & call history was lost.

Fortunately it is possible to access the data inside the el-v1.db from a PC, because it's an SQLite database file. I used SQLite Database Browser to access the file & retrieved the imported stuff. They're all in the Event table.

It was a nightmare, I hope nobody else gets this problem.

Wow 4 months since my last post

Wow. It's been like 4 months since my last update. A career change in October threw me out of whack & now I'm just starting to get back in gear.

PR1.3 was released on Oct 25. It was a smooth upgrade but did cause some small problems. Several apps had font/color issues. But all were resolved with updates within a few weeks.

Alot happened on the Ovi Store. Many new apps were release & many new comic book apps are now available. Someone figured out how to get WebOS games running in Maemo & created the Preenv app which became quite a phenomenon.

I've discovered & started using a whole lot of new stuff.
Here's just a sampling:

grr - Google Reader App
cuteTube - YouTube App
Ansel-A - A Digital Darkroom
StellariuMobile - Mobile Planetarium
Accelemymote - Play Any Game with the Accelerometer.
swappolube - Tweak the swap & other setting to improve responsiveness
BlessN900 - Enhanced Camera Firmware

N900 - More Apps

Here are some new apps I've discovered recently:

MediaBox - An excellent All-In-One Media Center. A while back zoutube just stopped working, it's no longer being developed & seems like no one is stepping up to the task. So I started looking for another YouTube client & it seems there's only one left that still works, that's MediaBox.

FCamera - Advanced camera app that shoots RAW and allow full manual control.

Movie Finder - Find theaters, movies and show times on-line. Works very well even in Malaysia.

qTranslate - Translator app that uses Google Translate.

Faster Kinetic Scrolling in Menu & Phone App UI Fix

If you are like me, you might be slightly annoyed by the much slower scrolling in the main menu on the PR1.2 firmware. Well fortunately there's now an unofficial hildon-desktop update that addresses the issue.

Read more about it here.

This is how to do it:
You'll need to have rootsh installed first.
Download this file to the N900.
In the terminal:
$ sudo gainroot
# dpkg -i /home/user/MyDocs/hildon-desktop_kinetic_2.2.138-1+0m5_armel.deb

That's it. Reboot the N900 & it's done. The kinetic scrolling is now about the same speed as before the firmware update. Also as a bonus, the little UI twitching glitch in the phone app has also been solved on this update.

N900 - Missing GTK icons after upgrade to PR1.2

I had encountered this anoying little bug after i upgraded the Maemo firmware to PR1.2. It only happens in a few apps so I didn't immediately notice it. The issue is that a few stock GTK icons used in some apps such as cbrpager, abiword, gnumeric and kmplayer were missing. A broken link icon was shown it their place.

Took me quite a long time to look for the solution and I had almost given up. Today by sheer luck I finally came across the solution posted in the maemo.org forums just 3 days ago.
Here's the Link

In short, here's the solution. In the Terminal:
sudo gainroot
mv /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/mimetypes/gtk-* /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/hildon/

That's it. I'm happy now.

N900 - Applets, Widgets, Plugins and Utilities

My last 2 posts have been about the useful applications and fun games you can expect to find on the Nokia N900. Today I'll be listing some of my favorite little applets/widgets/plugins and utilities.

Status Menu Applets:

• Wifi Switcher - Lets you totally switch off the Wifi chip by unloading the kernel module. It will save some power when you don't have wifi.
  
• Flashlight - Turns on the LED Flash permanently for use as a makeshift flashlight.
  
• Simple Brightness Applet - Quick access to the screen brightness controls.
  
• Wi-Fi Signal Applet - A simple 1-10 number beside the Wifi icon to indicate signal strength.
  

Home Screen Desktop Widgets:

• systeminfowidget - CPU & RAM usage percentage.
  
• Desktop Command Execution Widget - Run arbitrary shell commands and output on the desktop.
  
• Personal Dataplan Monitor - Displays mobile data usage stats.
  
• Personal IP Address - Just displays your IP address.
  

Plug-ins and support add-ons:

• MSN (pecan) protocol plug-in - Support for MSN Chat protocol in Conversations and Contacts. Pecan version works better for me than the standard or pidgin versions.
  
• Extra Decoders Support - Support pack for various media formats. Such as ogg, flv, rmvb, mkv and WebM.
  
• Subtitle Support - Adds subtitle support to the media player.
  

Utilities:

• Extended Call Log - A more verbose call log list.
  
• QCPUFreq - Allows CPU frequency scaling adjustments.
• Shortcutd - Lets you assign shortcuts to the proximity sensor & camera focus key.
  
• tweakr - Enables some small tweaks, such as desktop align to grid & additional profiles.
  
• maenotify - Displays notifications on the lock screen.
  

Some Games for the N900

Following up from the list of the most useful apps I found. This one is dedicated to the games. So lets get right too it. Again in no particular order:

• Angry Birds: You shoot angry birds at greedy pigs using a slingshot. Works kinda like worms & although it sounds cruel is actually loads of fun. The first 21 levels are free. Pickup the Level Pack 1 for 42 more levels. Highly recommended.
• Color Flood: Gradually fill the screen until it's all 1 color. Sounds mundane but is rather difficult & addictive because you gotta do it in 25 moves.
• Crazycat: A real simple Flash game of capture the cat. Takes a surprising amount of strategy to corner a crazy cat.
• EightyOne: The best sudoku implementation on maemo. There are at least 4 others that are shit in some way.
• Airport: An air traffic control game. See how many planes you can guide to land safely & avoid collisions. So far 35 for me. (I know, I suck!)
• Electric Beams: Move beams of electricity to light up all the light bulbs. Simple & fun game. Not much replay-ability though.
• Hex-a-hop: Jump around on a puzzle of hexagonal tiles that break-up behind you. You gotta break them all. This game will last a while, it's got a lot of levels & it gets progressively harder and more complex as you go. Highly recommended.
• Kobo Deluxe: A top down view, all directional space shooter. Simple premise, destroy enemy ships and bases & stay alive. This game would be shit if you had to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to play it. But it's support for using the accelerometer for direction and the proximity sensor for the trigger makes this games very playable and enjoyable on the N900. Highly recommended.
• SolarWolf: A similar game to Kobo Deluxe except you don't shoot anything, instead you just pickup stuff while avoiding getting shot. Plays with the accelerometer & is pretty entertaining.
• Wok: Frantically shoveling stuff to the side with a rectangular wok using the touchscreen. Sound bonkers but is actually kinda fun.
• VoR: Variation on Rockdodger. Navigate your ship through an asteroid field. But Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1. Plays very nicely with accelerometer. See how long you can survive.
  

2 months with the N900

It's been about 2 months since I bought the Nokia N900 Smartphone/Tablet. Just updated to firmware PR1.2 a week ago over wifi & it went smoothly, nothing except for a couple of settings were lost.

The main reason for me getting this device was so that I could remove the need to carry around a Linux netbook wherever I go. In this respect the N900 really exceeded my expectations on what I could do with it. I expected to still need my netbooks in some cases such as when I'm traveling on business. But as it turns out, I've not used my netbooks AT ALL this past 2 months. So it looks like I might be selling them off soon.

Today I'll list some of the apps that I use regularly on my N900. I'll only mentions apps that are not pre-installed on the device. So here it is in no particular order:

• Storage Usage: Shows usage of the various storage devices and even lets you deep dive to find out which folder/app is consuming the space.
• Panucci: An excellent audiobook/podcast player with great bookmarking features. (Love the pizza icon)
  
• GPSJinni: A app for monitoring GPS signals, it's very useful for getting a lock before starting your map application.
• WifiEye: An app to visualize the Wifi signals in an area. It's great as a site survey tool for deciding where to put an access point & which channel to use.
• Sygic Mobile Maps: A commercial in-car navigation app. It's car friendly interface makes it miles better than Ovi Maps. It's pricey, but it's quality. Incidentally, the Ovi Maps on the N900 does not support turn-by-turn navigation.
• Ncalc: A calculator app with a simple UI that makes more sense to me than the built-in one.
• Password Safe: An app for securely storing all your user names & passwords. Indispensable these days.
• fMMS: A must have if you want to send/receive MMS. Although I don't use it often, I do want to be able to receive MMS.
• MGutenberg: Lets you browse, download & read ebooks from Project Gutenburg. It also works very well generally as an ebook reader.
• CBRpager: Comic book reader. Cuz I read alotta comic books.
• MussOrgsky: A meta-data editor for your music collection. It lets you edit album/artist/title and even the album art for your music.
• zoutube: A pretty sweet YouTube client. Even though you could watch YouTube videos right in the browser, using this app the video is fullscreen, plays very smoothly and even allows you to download the video.

Well, that's enough for today. What I've listed is only a fraction of the apps I have installed, but are the ones I use more regularly. Next time I'll get into the games.

Exploring the Nokia N900

Haven't been posting lately cuz was bz with work & life. I'd gotten myself a Nokia N900 & just had to try posting to my blog from it. Using an app called MaStory. Looking good so far. I'm starting to get used to the small keyboard, it's actually not as bad as it looks. Well that's it for the first post. Hopefully I'll be blogging more with this baby.

Getting Bluetooth A2DP to work in Mandriva 2010

One of the grips I've always had with KDE4 is it's rather poor bluetooth integration. For most of 2008 and 09, I've tried in vain to make my really nice bluetooth stereo headphones to work on Linux. I started to see a glimpse of it in 2009.1 where it would work for 2 minutes before crashing pulseaudio.

Now with 2010 out I decided to give it another go. Finding instructions for doing it is not particularly easy. There is no single place that provided something that will just work on Mandriva. So I decided to document my steps here.

Lets start with the require packages you will need to install.
kbluetooth
bluez
bluez-alsa
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
*There's much more, but they should already be installed.

Start kbluetooth (it's somehow under the Internet category)
Make sure your bluetooth adapter is detected & showing a MAC address. Give it a sensible name.
The kbluetooth device manager gui only works for input devices. So don't bother trying to pair the headphones with it. We'll need to do it from a konsole.

Put you bluetooth headphones into pairing mode. (usually done by holding the power button until it blinks) Then do this:
$ hcitool scan

This should discover your headphones and list it's MAC address. Now connect to the MAC. (seems like only root can do these steps)
# hcitool cc 00:00:00:00:00:00

kbluetooth should now popup and request for the pin. (It's usually 0000)
Now lock down the pairing:
# hcitool auth 00:00:00:00:00:00

That's it for pairing. Now we need to tell alsa about the new audio device. Open up the file .asoundrc in your home directory (create it if it's not there), and put this in it:

pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth
device "00:00:00:00:00:00"
}

Replace with the MAC address of your headphones of course.

Now you need to reboot. Next you'll need to tell pulseaudio about your new output device.

$ pactl load-module module-alsa-sink device="bluetooth"

Now open the PulseAudio Volume Control. (pavucontrol) You should see bluetooth listed as another output device. You can now make it the default or you could assign the output device on a per application basis.

Now, the part the sucks. Pulseaudio will not remember these setting across reboots, you will need to rerun the pactl command everytime you want to use the headphones. One easy way to do this is to put an icon on the panel to run the command.

Another thing to be aware of is if you are playing something & you disconnect the headphones somehow, pulseaudio will segfault. So remember to stop playback and switch the default output back to your soundcard before turning off your headphones.

Enjoy. :)

Moving up to Mandriva 2010

Just upgraded my Dell Mini to Mandriva 2010. Been running it for a few weeks and working through the issues. I must say, although I welcome the improvements that KDE 4.3 brings, this release was nowhere near as solid as 2009.1. It's riddled with many serious bugs and annoyances.

One bug that seems to still be unresolved is the haldaemon bug where the system will sometimes fail to mount external drives, requiring a restart of haldaemon.

A quick rundown of some of the things needed to make this release fully functional on a Dell Vostro A90 (Inspiron Mini 9):
- Audio still didn't work. I still had to add the following line into /etc/modprobe.conf

options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell
- I used the same method as before to install aircraft-manager. This worked just fine.
- Disable speedboot by editing /etc/sysconfig/speedboot. Setting "speedboot=no". This stops some weird ACPI bugs.

Some observations:
- The intel driver has stabilized and no longer freezes
- Idle CPU is generally lower & better behaved than KDE 4.2

All the bugs are reported & being worked on, so lets hope that in the following weeks updates will work out all the issues. Overall, I'd say if you are already running 2009.1 and are thinking of upgrading. Wait a month or so, you'll have better experience by then.

Mandriva 2009.1 on Dell Mini 9 - More tweeking required

Only while trying to play a video did I realise that there was no sound coming from the speakers. So a quick search revealed the solution.
I had to add the following line into /etc/modprobe.conf
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell

Reboot, open the mixer and turn up the volume for the channel Speaker. There will be a loud buzzing noise after you do this. To stop it, disable the channel Capture 2 (untick the checkbox).

So far, I've tested the boot speed versus Ubuntu MID, It is actually quite fast to boot & only ends up being < 10 secs slower due KDE4's longer startup time.

Power consumption has also been quite good, averaging about 3 hours. I could get 3.5 hours from Ubuntu MID, so I'll definitely have to see what I can tweek to make this better.

Mandriva 2009.1 on Dell Mini 9

I got my hands on a Vostro A90 (Black clone of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9) from a friend in the states. It came with Ubuntu MID 8.04.1 preinstalled with the custom Dell launcher. I've been using it for a while now, it works perfectly as expected since the distro was heavily customized.

Lately I decided to try out something else on it. Since I've always loved Mandriva, I decided to give it a go, I knew it wouldn't be so simple.

From the LiveCD boot, it was already clear that WiFi and Bluetooth both did not work. I installed it anyway into an SD card & proceeded to try various things to try to make it work.

But whatever I did, nothing worked. I booted back into Ubuntu MID to check the setting there, nothing much helped. I rebooted into Mandriva again, but this time everything magically worked.

Bluetooth & WiFi was detected & worked nicely. The only thing I couldn't do was use my Bluetooth stereo headset. This is mainly down to kdebluetooth4 being still quite new. It had worked in Ubuntu, but it's no big loss.

Most of the important shortcut keys worked, namely brightness & volume control. Keys that didn't work are, Sleep, Wifi toggle, Battery Status & Toggle VGA. Of these, I only cared for the Wifi toggle.

To make Wifi toggle work, I needed to install aircraft-manager. Unfortunately, this was only available as a deb. I extracted the files out the deb & tried to figure it out.

It was basically written in python, so it wasn't too hard. This is roughly what I needed to do:

1. Extract the data.tar.gz out of the deb

2. Extract the data.tar.gz into /

3. Move portio.so from /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages to /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages

4. Install (through rpmdrake) python-dbus, pygtk2.0-libglade and gksu.

That's it, after that you can simply use KDE's System Settings -> Input Actions to configure a shortcut for running aircraft-manager.

You might see this message when booting the system:

Configuring wireless regulatory domain nl80211 not found. [FAILED]

This can be fixed by commenting out the line CRDA_DOMAIN=XX in /etc/sysconfig/network

The intel driver will exhibit some artifacts especially if you are using kwin effects. This can be solved by adding the line:

Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

to the Device section of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

That's as far as I got for now. I'll update as I go along.