Yey!!!

Hello fellow geeks.

Yeah, it’s true, I have one thanks to my buddy Nuno Tavares from NET7, who so gently “offered” it to me (kudos to him!). It’s only been two days since I got my hands on it, but I’m totally in love for this black beauty.

HTC Hero Black

You probably remember my post about the E71 vs IPhone and how happy I am (was) with that Nokia device, but after touching one of this, and having so many applications at hand, and that astonishingly cute user interface, I’m completely surrended! This Android-powered phone is a killer!

It comes with no carrier-blocking stuff, but still, as any respectful geek out there, the first thing I did was to investigate how could I make the experience better. I read that the HTC Sense UI was somewhat slow, and that an upgrade, which is expected in October, would solve that. But, curiously there is already a “preview” (of that update) in the wild!! The instructions are easy and are as following:

1. Root your phone
2. Download one of the two ROM images available in the previous link to the phone’s SD card
3. The ROM comes zipped. Change its name to update.zip
4. Boot your phone into the recovery image (press Home key and turn your phone on)
5. Do a “nandroid backup”
6. Wipe your phone/reset it to factory settings (it’s a new device, I didn’t lose a thing!)
7. Select “apply sdcard:update.zip”
8. Wait and then restart when this option is available (after upgrading)

The first boot will take some time, but it’s worth it.

Now, the phone I got is prepared to Poland/Romania/Czech Republic, and I don’t know why the update didn’t remove this and enabled me to select Portuguese (word suggestion, dictionary, etc.). The English language, though, is available and it was OK for me. Still, one good thing about this update is that there is this Custom Locale application who allowed me to set the locale to PT_pt, which changed the language to portuguese. There is no word suggestion or dictionary, though (and until there are, these functionalities are disabled!).

Also, for the portuguese reading this, I’d like to publicize one, and perhaps the only portuguese Android community, AndroidPT.

Enjoy! ..I surelly am

Hi fellow geeks!

For sometime now, I’ve been looking forward to acquire an embedded system that would become my home router and testbed for some networking stuff I’m working on. The requisites are the following:

• Noiseless, cause I want to sleep with it right next to me
• Very small
• x86 architecture, cause I want it as a testbed for my networking applications and don’t want to fiddle with architecture vs compiler/libraries issues
• Two or more Ethernet devices
• USB and mini-PCI are pluses
• Cheap!!

Thanks to my friend João Barraca, I went for a PC Engines Alix ALIX2D3. And must I say, it’s great!! And only 104Euro + 26Euro (customs taxes).  I’m not showing the unboxing process, but here’s a picture of the board.

ALIX2D3 board

I did some things wrong though, on the rush of getting a new toy (don’t you geeks know this feeling?!). First PC Engines is based in Switzerland, and therefor non-EU, and therefor customs taxes and a long wait for the delivery. Then I ordered the board and a black case only, so at arrival, I missed a DC, a Compact Flash card and a null-modem serial cable. I went to one of those big electronics market and bought the following:

• Vivanco universal DC 7v-24v (I recommend setting it for 18v, depending on the number of devices you’ll be using, such as USB and mini-PCI stuff). Oh and be careful with the polarity of the board which you can find by looking down the FB18, and using the correct connector size, 2.1mm.
• Sandisk CF Ultra II 4GB;
• Null-modem serial cable (female-to-female);
• Serial-to-USB adapter.

As I said, I also ordered a black case and I had an issue while assembling the board into it. The serial port hex nuts wouldn’t fit the case! Well, just remove them, insert the board, and attach them again. In the end, this is the result:

Board in the case

Front of "the machine"

Size compared to the E71

I recommend you install everything you need and test it before you put the board into the case, so you can avoid repeating the screw/unscrew process.

Now, let’s head for the installation.

1. First, grab the alternate installer for the latest Ubuntu i386 (9.04 iso). Burn it.
2. Plug your CF card into a USB card-reader and punch it in your PC/laptop.
3. Boot from the CD and press F4. Select text-only system installation.
4. Install Ubuntu into your CF. I recommend setting only one partition and not using swap as you don’t want to “burn” lifetime from your CF.
5. Don’t install grub into the MBR of the first disk, but on the MBR of the CF.
6. Reboot.
7. Boot into your CF Ubuntu system and log-in.
8. Install an ssh server. sudo apt-get install openssh-server
9. Edit your /etc/network/interfaces and configure your network devices as you see fit.
10. As you’re using your PC/laptop for the installation process, udev has persisted the currently existing network devices. You must remove all entries before putting the CF into the ALIX2D3 board, so that all Ethernet devices there are correctly named (eth0, eth1, eth2). Just issue echo “” > /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
11. In order to protect the CF once more, edit your /etc/fstab and change relatime to noatime in the root line (/). Also, add the following lines:

none /tmp tmpfs nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777 0 0
none /var/tmp tmpfs nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777 0 0

Power off. Now, put the CF into the board and have fun through ssh. Enjoy

Oh yeah, just got “my” MIPv6 testbed up and running. It’s a work task actually, but some material is mine like the Asus EeePC and the Nokia N810. Well, just wanted to share with the world how wonderful it is :-p

Super-cool MIPv6 testbed

Enjoy you geeks!

While on my MIPv6 quest, I needed to define two IP addresses to a single ethernet card. Well, I thought the usual aliases thing would suffice, but I guess I was wrong since that didn’t work, complaining something like:

SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot assign requested address

So I remembered that, at least in Linux, you can have multiple IPv6 addresses in one single NIC just by issuing the command:

ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:a::1/64 dev eth0

This worked out! But now I wanted to add it to my /etc/network/interfaces so that the changes would be permanent. After some googling I found out that all I had to do was to add the previous command like follows:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet6 static
address 2001:db8:f:1::1/64
netmask 64
up ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:a::1/64 dev eth0

Then just reboot or execute:

sudo ifconfig eth0 down
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

And there you go! Multiple IPv6 in one single NIC the easy way

Recently a relative of mine bought an Asus Eee PC 4G (I believe it’s aka 701) with Windows XP. It’s a sweet device for any geek to have around, btw

Oh well, some cola over the keyboard made it unusable.. at least for the previous owner. That’s right, “previous”! Why? Well, there it was, this beautiful black toy, thrown to a dark and cold corner as if dead and I couldn’t resist to ask for a look. We agreed that if I got it to work, it would be mine. And so it was.. Now I only need to test if the built-in keyboard is really dead or if it’s a controller problem. Anyway, I’m using my Apple USB keyboard for home fun.

Asus EEE PC 701

After the hardware issues I got to the software part aka replacing the bundled Windows XP with Linux. As I was in a hurry I looked for the default Linux distro that comes with these babies, Xandros Linux, just to find out that it’s not freely available. Oh well, it actually sucks anyway compared to the distro I’m using right now, eeeubuntu. As a strong Ubuntu user and supporter for some years now, I am biased here of course, but it truly suits my needs without any hacks. First of all you have to select and download one of three versions: standard – a full blown desktop; nbr – Netbook Remix says it all; base – for disk space paranoids. I went for the nbr flavour and I’m quite happy with it!

The .iso file can be then processed into a CD that you’ll read using an external CD/DVD drive or simply by going the Ubuntu way, building and using a bootable USB stick. And so, after something like fifteen minutes I had my shiny new operating system up and running

After some adding/removing software, I wanted to start hacking this little bitch to get MIPv6 working on it, meaning I had to recompile the kernel which in this distro is obviously compiled with some external modules. I once tried it in a Xandros installation, and it was quite trivial, but now I wanted to package my changes into a .deb file I could replicate for others, like eventually yourself. I found out that there are already very good instructions to do so, and not wanting to add more noise to the web, I’ll just document the steps I took.

First, you’ll need some packages. I believe the following command package “list” is incomplete as I’ve used this machine before for compiling other stuff like OpenWRT. Still, you should be able to easily identify the missing parts

sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper fakeroot git-core

Update (thanks to _trine @ freenode):From now on, I assume your user has got write-permission for /opt.
Get the tailored kernel source from array.org git repository (in my case I’m using Intrepid Ibex).

cd /opt
git clone git://git.array.org/array/ubuntu-intrepid.git

Now, manage a .config file which in this case is a bundle of default config and config.eeepc:

cd ubuntu-intrepid
cat debian/config/i386/config debian/config/i386/config.eeepc > .config

Define your kernel options as you see fit:

make menuconfig

Prepare things and package up:

cp .config debian/config/i386/config.eeepc
debian/rules updateconfigs
make mrproper
fakeroot debian/rules binary-eeepc binary-headers
cd ..

Now copy the packages into your machine and install them. Reboot and be happy

Update: I’ve received hundreds of thousands of billions screenshot requests from all over the World, the ISS and even someone who I believe is from Mars. Well, you didn’t have to wait much, now did you?

megatron running eeeubuntu

UPDATE: For those using Pidgin, you can install msn-pecan. It works and it brings some new functionality. Just install it and change your account protocol from MSN to WLM.

I’ll be quoting the Adium blog which apparently is now down (all adiumx.com domain is unreachable actually).

Jeez..

Just had my desktop upgraded to Intrepid and even that the upgrade process went smoothly, the first boot and consequent did not!

The problem? Well, it seemed that it was something about my device drivers at first. How could I explain that when I enabled the default driver “vesa”, everything worked. But with nvidia proprietary drivers it wouldn’t? But it wasn’t..

Somewhere along the update, I believe the upgrade to the new X.Org server version, some stuff wasn’t correctly performed cause after some digging I found out that my xorg.conf file was not being loaded due to some parsing issues.

All I had to do was to check in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and find out where the problem is. It was a parameter RgbPath in Section “Files”. Removed that line. Rebooted computer (I know I could’ve just restarted X). Off we go..

Now, I must go back to work! Hope this helps someone out there..

Well, this might work for distros supporting blacklisting of modules (all?). Here’s what I did to shut that so-80’s-horrible sound “BEEP”:

sudo -c echo “blacklist pcspkr” >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

sudo reboot

Yep!!! Weeeeeeeeeee…. Vem mesmo aí!! Novo CPU mais potente e WiMAX!! Agora só falta prostituir-me para o pagar quando sair

[UPDATE] VERY IMPORTANT: The solution I posted below is a bit hackerish and has been refuted by Rui Carmo who makes available a great resource for Acer One owners that want to hack their system a bit without breaking down functionality. For your own sanity, please take a look at his notes.

Today someone asked me if I could try to get the Huawei E220 to run over an Acer One. I agreed. Boy was it hard..

First of all, some background info. Do not skip it

1. Acer One brings its own Linux flavor, some distro based on Fedora 8 (Werewolf);
2. This distro bundles XFCE window manager;
3. There’s one OSS tool from Vodafone R&D Labs available here (actually this is the tool I use for my connection, even that I’ve a contract with other operator, Kanguru);
4. Download vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux-2.0.beta2-fedora-installer.run as that was the one I tried successfully;
5. Be sure to be running the latest version of software on your install;

Got it? OK, let’s go to the terminal. If you don’t know where you can find it, you should quit reading this post. Now:

1. sudo -s
2. yum remove linpus-lsb
3. yum install redhat-lsb python-twisted pyserial pytz gnome-python2-libegg
4. ./vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux-2.0.beta2-fedora-installer.run
5. If everything goes right, a dialog will appear asking for you to insert a space-separated list of users who will be able to use this software. Simply put user

This should do the trick. Now just run sudo vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux and it should ask you to edit info regarding your connection. To the Vodafone Portugal clients it should appear a dialog which asks you if you want to load Vodafone Portugal configuration.

Neat!

Any doubts, just comment!