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.