April 2010 – Roo's View

Life with Droid

I’ve now had the G1 for a few weeks and wanted to write a little about some of my experience so far. Previous to getting the G1 I had started to carry my iPod Touch with me on a regular basis, I still use the iPod Touch but I can imagine living without it.

Let’s talk about some of the basics. I wanted to carry some photos of my family around – this was super easy to do and very Linux friendly. Simply connect the phone to the Linux machine via USB, then on the phone choose to mount as a USB device. The PC will now detect a USB drive and hook you up. Copying photos into a sub-folder of /DCIM was all I needed to have them appear in the gallery. To disconnect, umount on your PC first – then on the phone. Moving music is similarly easy.

If you’re willing to “go Google” then your Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts will all sync to the device. I’ve previously talked about the state of Linux address books, and the calendar situation seems to be similarly dire. Email I’m still holding out on probably more because I’m stubborn.

A few tips on configuring your Android phone. If you want to exclusively use wifi (as I do, since I’m not using a data plan) then you’ll want fiddle with the advanced wifi menu. You certainly want to run CyanogenMod or similar, and when you do that you’ll want to consider using the spare parts option to keep the “Home app in memory” which for me seems to improve overall responsiveness.

Moving from the iPod Touch to the G1 I gained a camera, GPS, a built in microphone and phone functionality. In general the same types of apps are available, so you aren’t missing out on any function. The iPod is much slicker than the G1, the browser is faster the gestures and general UI experience is more uniform. I’m still completely sold on the Android path, the ability to tinker with the device is greater and it is possible to use it with a Linux based desktop without standing on your head.

Read on for a comparison between the apps I have on my iPod Touch vs. what is on my Android phone.

Continue reading “Life with Droid”

Ubuntu on Core i3

I wanted to document my upgrade success to an Intel Core i3 based system, this will focus on running Ubuntu on this hardware configuration. The hardware is very simple: Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3 with Intel Core i3, in general terms I followed the recommendations from techreport.com for their econobox.

I was pleased that after assembly the box booted on the 1st try! Having simply moved my drive over from my previous system, I was running an up to date 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 system. I started to exercise the box and after about 30mins got my first hang. The hang was a bit odd, the keyboard stopped working (numlock didn’t work) and the graphics froze. I was able to ssh into the box and issue a reboot. The hangs persisted, and seemed more frequent.

It turns out upgrading to Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04) was the solution to the following bug report. There was a problem with the drive for the on-board graphics which the later versions of the kernel contain updated drivers. It seems that I’ve gone from having trailing edge hardware to bleeding edge hardware. Upgrading was simple – hit ALT-F2 and enter “update-manager -d” (no quotes), the -d flag allows you to upgrade to the latest development release.

The next stumbling block was that suspend and hibernate didn’t seem to work. Fortunately someone in the forums had already solved this problem. The USB3.0 support seems to not quite be suspend friendly, so you can optionally disable it in the BIOS or modify your Lucid configuration as follows – create a script /etc/pm/sleep.d/05_xhci that contains:

#!/bin/sh # Fix some issues with USB3

case "$1" in hibernate|suspend) modprobe -r xhci ;; thaw|resume) modprobe xhci ;; *) exit ;; esac

and set the permissions appropriately (chmod 755). Now when the system goes to sleep, it will disable USB support and re-enable on resume (or hibernate).

Now that I had the system going to sleep, I wanted to be able to wake it up. The Gigabyte BIOS provides an option to wake up via PS/2 keyboard by typing in a password. I also wanted to have wake-on-lan (WOL) working, something I’ve posted about previously. The new motherboard needed new magic to enable WOL.

First use lspci to find the address of the ethernet contoller:

$ lspci -tv +-1c.1-[0000:03]----00.0 Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller

Then match that to the contents of /proc/acpi/wakeup

$ cat /proc/acpi/wakeup Device S-state Status Sysfs node PCI0 S5 disabled no-bus:pci0000:00 PEX0 S5 disabled pci:0000:00:1c.0 PEX1 S5 disabled pci:0000:00:1c.1 <- this one! PEX2 S5 disabled PEX3 S5 disabled PEX4 S5 disabled PEX5 S5 disabled PEX6 S5 disabled PEX7 S5 disabled HUB0 S5 disabled pci:0000:00:1e.0 UAR1 S3 disabled pnp:00:07 USB0 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.0 USB1 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.1 USB2 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.2 USB3 S3 disabled USB4 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1a.0 USB5 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1a.1 USB6 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1a.2 USBE S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.7 USE2 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1a.7 AZAL S5 disabled pci:0000:00:1b.0

So my new /etc/init.d/wakeonlan file looks like:

#! /bin/sh ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: wake on lan # Required-Start: $network # Required-Stop: # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 6 # Short-Description: Configures WOL # Description: Configures Wake-On-Lan ### END INIT INFO # ethtool -s eth1 wol g echo PEX1 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

If you want to understand WOL in more detail, please review my previous post on the topic.

The last thing I needed was to make VMWare Player happy. During its normal detect a new kernel level and re-install itself process, I encountered an error:

Apr 17 12:07:23.497: app-3079280320| Building module vmnet. Apr 17 12:07:23.497: app-3079280320| Extracting the sources of the vmnet module. Apr 17 12:07:23.556: app-3079280320| Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmnet-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/2.6.32-21-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.4.3 Apr 17 12:07:29.384: app-3079280320| Failed to compile module vmnet!

The above is a snippet from the log file and it indicates a problem with the network module. Again, someone else had run into the problem and provided a solution. This worked fine for my VMWware Player version 3.0.0 build-203739.

The system has been stable over the last couple of days, if I run into any serious problem I will revise this post.

You can run, but you can’t hide from the cloud

Excited about my new Android based phone, I wanted to get it setup with my address book.

Now, one of my criteria for a cell phone is to be able to sync my contact information with a computer. My Nokia 6585 supported irDA and could sync with my thinkpad. When I replaced that phone with the Nokia 5310 I was able to sync over bluetooth. Now I need to figure out how to get the data to and from my G1.

By default, the answer with an Android handset is to use Gmail Contacts. Android is setup to guide you down the path of full Google integration, even asking you to setup the association during the phones initial setup. Initially I wanted to avoid this route as I run my own mail server and prefer to keep my data on servers that I own (its a hobby, I know its the hard path). I figured it couldn’t be that hard to sync the phone to my Ubuntu desktop.

One solution that looked possible was Funabol. I may still play with this, but before I even got to the point of setting up a synchronization server I ran into the problem of moving my address book data from Windows to Linux. The Nokia PC Suite let me store all of my contacts into the Windows Address Book, and iTunes could also sync with this so my contacts were all on my iTouch. It should be a simple thing to take the Windows Address book and move it into Linux right?

There were two problems.

Windows Address book has a death grip on your data and won’t export it into a useful format.
Linux has no reasonable address book story, Evolution seems to be close – but it won’t easily import anything that Windows will export.

The solution turned out to be Google. iTunes will happily sync to Google contacts. Evolution will also sync to Google contacts.
Setting up iTunes with your Google account is straight-forward. You just choose Google Contacts, punch in your credentials and away you go. As my iPod Touch had lots of contact information and my Gmail account had very little, the large scale change was detected – and I was given the choice to over-write or merge (I wanted to merge). Once the data was in Gmail, going into the Settings on the G1 and configuring the Data synchronization for Contact information let the bits flow down to my new phone.

It turns out Google has the best Linux friendly address book, better than any of the stand-alone solutions I looked at. Today the cloud won.