Marcin Juszkiewicz

Today I finished storage upgrade of my box. Before I had only PATA devices. Recently I bought Serial ATA II hard drive so my config was (2.6.21-rc3 kernel with libata for all SATA/PATA devices):

ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3120026A       3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)

scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            TOSHIBA  DVD-ROM SD-M1212 1R22 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 32x/32x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

scsi 1:0:1:0: CD-ROM            TEAC     CD-W516EB        1.0K PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3320620NS      3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)

PATA bus contain: Seagate 120GB hdd which I bought in 2003, then 9 years old Toshiba DVD drive and 6 years old Teac CD writer. Then SATA Seagate 320GB hdd which I bought one week ago and configured as LVM (some parts of 120GB will be added into it).

Today I took out old PATA optical drives and replaced them with Samsung SH-S183A DVD writer (Serial ATA). Now bus look a bit different:

 ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
 ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
 ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
 scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3120026A       3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)

 ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
 ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
 ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
 scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3320620NS      3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)

 scsi 6:0:0:0: CD-ROM            TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S183A SB02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 94x/94x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

That “94x writer” looks funny as this is 18xDVD writer. And I must say that due to switch to libata in Linux there are no problems with handling Serial ATA devices (nevermind hdd or atapi ones).

USB Networking is not my preferred way of networking but it is quite usable with palmtops or Neo1973 phone (which spend most of time connected to USB due to charging problems in GTA01Bv3). But this also has some problems due to fat that this is hotplugable:

• each plug mean usbX device re-appear
• no idea which usbX it will be this time

Today I moved my Zaurus c7x0 back to using WiFi so second problem disappeared for me (now only Neo1973 is connected over USB) but first problem was still present. I was tired to having to write sudo ifdown usb0;sudo ifup usb0 each time when I reconnected phone so after reading some man pages I updated my /etc/network/interfaces with this:

allow-hotplug usb0
iface usb0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.200
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.0.0
        post-up iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.0.0/24
        post-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
        post-up iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

And now when I connect phone (which has 192.168.0.202 IP) it gets connection to world automatically.

During first days of playing with Neo1973 I got a problem with connecting to GSM modem. It just does not worked at all. It was reported in OpenMoko bugzilla so I added comment.

Today I tried to enable hardware flow control by hand after starting ‘cu’ and it works!

Time to go somewhere and buy cheap prepaid card for testing.

During last weeks I mostly work for OpenedHand company. In this time I became more and more addicted to some of programming related KDE apps. My usual set of working programs consists:

Basket

Great note taking apps which I use to keep 3-4 lists of ToDo items.

KDESvn

Subversion client which is nicely integrated in Konqueror window.

KDiff3

merge util which is too good to not be used

Kompare

difference showing util which visualize changes (KDESvn can use it)

Another interesting apps:

KScope

KDE interface to Cscope — provides a source-editing environment for large C projects. Good thing if you want to work with things like kernel drivers. Linux.com had article about this tool quite recently.

PicoCom

Minimal dumb-terminal emulation program — very useful when it comes to talk with U-Boot on Neo1973 or talking to GSM Modem inside of that phone. Much better then cu from uucp package as this one does not need any permission changes, extra spool directories etc crap.

Some of my readers use them, some use other stuff. If you know interesting application which can help me in doing my programmer/system integrator work then feel free to add info in comments.

Yesterday I got my Neo1973 phase0 phone. It came with black/silver case which I think is nicer then white/orange or white/red ones. By default it came without any phone related applications because they are not written yet or are not ready to be used even by developers.

Phone itself is bigger then my current one. Screen is… awesome — very clear and bright (LCD has 3957 levels of brightness).

When it comes to wireless connections there is Bluetooth 2.0 EDR available and GSM/GPRS (no EDGE or UMTS). By default also USB Networking is available (I do not like this way but it works out-of-box).

Ah.. and it has only two buttons — Power and AUX (also called 911 button). And GPS (Hammerhead chipset).

I plan to write longer review during next few days.

Today I got mail from Harald Welte that I am one of 36 developers which decided to get phase0 device (Neo1973 revision GTA01Bv3). Why not 50 like it was announced before?

Week ago Harald wrote to phase0 developers that we have a choice. We can get GTA01Bv3 version which can be hard to use (all described in OpenMoko wiki) or wait 4-6 weeks for phase1 device. The good part of it is that those of us which prefer to get broken version will also get fixed one (and can keep both devices).

Someone can tell why other developers decided to skip phase0? I think that main reason is customs office. For example in Poland we have to pay 22% VAT for electronics which can be expensive for many users.

Why I decided to took GTA01Bv3? Few reasons:

• want to have device for Pingwinaria event in March (there will be one talk about OpenMoko and I will have one about OpenEmbedded)
• it is nice hackable device (even with bugs)
• sidetone effect can be later fixed by GSM firmware update (which is non-free but maybe on some event one of coreteam devels will be able to do it)

I changed /etc/hostname from Nokia-N800-48 to Nokia770 on my Nokia 770 tablet. But I forgot to do the same in /etc/hosts so no way to connect via SSH or use gainroot to be root. Decided to reflash it with IT2007 again — but backup first.

After flashing and restoring backup I got interesting look. Because I had Polish locale installed now I do not have any “Regional settings” chosen so I got names like “home_ap_home_view” etc. So I decided to use “ai_ap_application_installer” to “ai_me_package_install” locale-polish-extra package. After some time I got “ai_ni_install_successful”.

One more reboot and system starts to look more normal. Maybe in IT2008 Nokia will switch Regional settings to default if not existing ones will be restored from backup.

UPDATE: submitted into maemo bugtracker.

At FOSDEM I got Nokia 770 device. Today I flashed latest system release on it: IT2006. And here I got first not nice thing — flasher is available as binary only ;( Anyway it works.

Booted into IT2006. Looks a bit other then IT2005 (which I had on device). Annoying things:

• no clock applet
• no way to switch from AM/PM to 24 hours time
• taskbar occupied mostly by Web/Email/Menu buttons
• no possibility to change UI colors/fonts (only via themes)
• connection applet does not give information which one is in use
• to get rootshell you need to enable it from PC first
• no option to remove/disable some applets
• no good package management
• no good repositories with software

Device itself is interesting but very, very slow. GUI waste so much screenspace that if you want to use something you need to switch to fullscreen…

But there are also good things:

• connection via WiFi works after few clicks and entering WEP/WPA keys
• simple connection to mobile phone via BT
• nicely working WWW browser
• form factor
• easy to get batteries/chargers