Scienco.org » Hardware

Ubuntu on Toshiba AC100

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:47:55 +0000

I have recently bought a Toshiba AC100-10D (it was quite cheap because it's now old, but the hardware is still quite similar to that of the new tablets). I bought it with the expections of installing Ubuntu on it (I don't really need Android - I have an Android phone which is good for that purpose, but I'd like Latex, R etc. available on a netbook).

I found some tutorials on how to install Ubuntu, but I didn't really have any success until I found http://salaliitto.com/~gildean/ac100/wiki/phh/ . So thanks a lot to gildean! I would recommend that you follow that guide if you want to install Ubuntu to your Toshiba AC100. At least until Ubuntu 11.* supports the machine better, see e.g. https://launchpad.net/~ac100/+archive/ppa .

Import VCF-file to Nokia 6300 from Ubuntu through bluetooth

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:47:39 +0000

Today I got a new Nokia 6300 - my old Sony Ericsson W810i had hard times charging. Of course I wanted to copy my phonebook onto my new phone, but it wasn't as easy as I hoped for - but after a while I found an alternative and easy way.

First you need your phonebook as a VCF-file. This can be done be backing up your phonebook to the memory stick (this option is available on the W810i and possibly on several others). Now copy the file, e.g. by bluetooth or with a cable.

Now connect the Nokia 6300 through bluetooth and write down the port - it has the format 00:11:22:33:44:55.

Now install gammu:

sudo aptitude install gammu

Then create a config file:

nano ~/.gammurc

with this content:

[gammu]
port = 00:11:22:33:44:55 # change to fit your port
model = 6300 # change to fit your model
connection = bluephonet # if connecting with something else than bluetooth, you should change this
synchronizetime = yes
logfile = /home/username/.gammulog # change username to your actual username
logformat = textalldate
use_locking =
gammuloc =

And now check that everything is alright:

gammu --identify

And if it is, just copy the phonebook (remember to change the location of the VCF-file):

gammu restore Desktop/PB_Backup.vcf

While restoring, I got errors like this:

Location 12                    
    LUID                 : "00020000006D"
    Function not supported by phone.
Location 13                    
    LUID                 : "000200000090"
    Function not supported by phone.
Location 14                    
    LUID                 : "000200000007"
    Function not supported by phone.
Location 15                    
    LUID                 : "0002000000E9"
    Function not supported by phone.

But despite of that, it still worked.

I didn't know gammu before, but it seems very nice! Thanks to the authors of it!

Calling from Neo1973/OpenMoko in Denmark!

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:17:20 +0000

Well, for a phone it ain't really that amazing, but in the this (at least yet a while) small world called OpenMoko this is actually a break through for me! I've just made the first call from my Neo1973-phone with OpenMoko. Not through the Dialer or anything that fancy, just by executing AT-commands from the terminal.

I roughly followed the guide on the wiki page, but here's explicitely what I done.

Open two terminals (for example through USB-networking and SSH to the phone).

In the first terminal execute these commands:

/etc/init.d/gsmd stop
echo "1" &gt; /sys/bus/platform/devices/gta01-pm-gsm.0/power_on
chown uucp.uucp /dev/ttySAC0
cu -l /dev/ttySAC0

And in the second terminal execute these commands:

mkdir -p /usr/spool/uucp
chown uucp.uucp /usr/spool/uucp
stty -F /dev/ttySAC0 crtscts

Now go back to the first terminal and play with AT-commands; I made an outgoing call as follows (responses are included):

ATE1
OK
AT+CFUN=1
ERROR
AT+CPIN="x"
OK
AT+COPS
OK
ATDy

where x is the PIN and y is the phone number (for Danes: I only used the eight digits - no leading zero or anything fancy). Please notice that there is no space whatsoever between ATD and the actual number.

Progress in OpenMoko

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 10:07:12 +0000

As written earlier, I'm now able to build OpenMoko in a reasonable amount of time due to the purchase of a new computer. I haven't had time to hack that much with OpenMoko in the past week because of a busy week (we made a one-week-project in algebra, so I'm governing Knapsack, Elgamel, group-theory etc. ), but today I had some time to play.

I build a new kernel and rootf by issuing a

make update-makefile &amp;&amp; make setup update openmoko-devel-image

Afterwards I went to
~/moko/build/tmp/deploy/glibc/images/neo1973

and flashed my device with

sudo ./dfu-util -a kernel -d 0x1457:0x5119 -R -D uImage-neo1973-latest.bin
 
sudo ./dfu-util -a rootfs -d 0x1457:0x5119 -R -D openmoko-devel-image-fic-gta01.jffs2

The boot time was rather long compared to earlier, I guess. Not that it actually matters for me, but I noticed it, and thought that quite a lot of changes might had been made. And apparently changes had been made. At this time I've actually just booted the device, hence I've not actually found that much, but I've noticed these things:

The "Today"-label has changed to "Home" (in the upper left corner), reasonable I my opinion
I'm now able to create my phone as a network-place through SSH in Gnome; that's nice in order to make file-management smoothly
To today now consists of a "huge" watch, well, I like it, but I can easily imaging not everybody does, but I suppose it's things like this that should be made customizable later on

Here's a couple of screenshots of the glories:

Qtopia Phone Edition on Neo 1973

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:27:45 +0000

I've just - briefly - tried QPE (Qtopia Phone Edition) on my Neo 1973. I tried both the image on http://www.qtopia.net/modules/devices/openmoko.php and http://buildhost.automated.it/OM2007.2/?M=D and with two different SIM-cards.

The image from qtopia.net i a bit older, but seemed to work the best, i.e. most stable, whereas the Scaredycat-version was newer. Well, I didn't dive more into since I just wanted to try it.

Another thing is, that QPE only worked with my Telmore SIM-card (uses TDC) and not my BiBOB SIM-card (uses Sonofon). I didn't know whether it was a general problem, so I flashed my Neo 1973 with the newest OpenMoko from http://buildhost.automated.it/OM2007.2/?M=D (21-Oct-2007 09:55). I'm currently building my own image, but I really have to go to bed, so I'll try that one tomorrow instead and settle with the Scaredycat-version for now.

Before continuing, I'd like to say that until now I've never been able to make a call from OpenMoko, not even registering the SIM-card. So I'm actually really exiting. I'll of course try both SIM-cards.

I'm currently booting OpenMoko with my Telmore SIM-card. It's actually quite slow - and it's not feeling any shorter by staring at it. Finally done. The Matchbox panel is again not starting, so the usual

/etc/matchbox/session

is executed, and the panel appears. Well, OpenMoko isn't working with the Telmore SIM-card. I'll give it a reboot and see. I'm so excited about being able to call from this, and it doesn't work - it beginning to be a bit frustrating (although it's a really bad skill for a developer to exhibit). After the reboot several things are working: the panel appears immediately and the screen light fades when the screen is not pressed. Despite these promising signs, I'm still not able to register the SIM.

Well, I guess I'm not going to try the BiBOB SIM-card anyway right now. The next step is to attempt some of the hacks mentioned on:

Goodnight!

Wireless networking

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 09:15:39 +0000

I had no WLAN (wireless network) card, so I had to buy one in order to avoid the cables all over my apartment. And so I (accidentally) did, a Linksys WUSB54GC. After a few minutes surfing, I found out that it had the Ralink RT73 chipset, yielding an installation of the rt2x00-kmp-default-package:

zypper install rt2x00-kmp-default

I tried with the rt2500 at first, but it didn't seem to work - as far as I read, it's also to another chip-set, so it's not that weird after all.

Besides this I also installed a firmware from http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Linux.html (Firmware RT2501USB(RT2571W/RT2671)), but I really don't know it's actually required - and I'm to lazy to find out (it's Saturday!).

New computer

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:25:55 +0000

Today I received the parts which in total should be able to make up an entire computer - and it did. Or hopefully . No problems during assembling occurred, but the installation of Ubuntu made some trouble. The trouble was connected to the fact, that I bought two disk so that I could make RAID-1. It was quite tricky to get working (the right SATA-channel, Ubuntu installer-version etc.), but it seems that it's finally working. Before explaining more I probably have to list the specs:

Intel Q6600
Gigabyte GA-G33-DS3R
2 GB RAM
500 W PSU
2 x WD 320 GB disk
Misc. parts

I'm not that interested in hardware, only the things it can do for me . The mainboard provides some sort of SATA RAID aka. FakeRAID, which I read was (roughly speaking) a driver to Windows making the software RAID appear as hardware RAID (or something like that). Nevertheless, I decided to just forget that whicky feature and
just go for the "native" software RAID support in Linux (provided by mdadm - it oddly looks like "madam"!).

In the ordinary Ubuntu-installer (ubuntu-7.10-desktop-amd64.iso) mdadm is not enclosed, but it is in the alternate installer (ubuntu-7.10-alternate-amd64.iso) which furthermore guides you thruogh the configuration. So I'll recommend using the text-based alternate installer.

Before that worked, I had to connect the disks to the ordinary SATA-ports and not the fancy GSATA ports. I don't know why, but as earlier mentioned, I actually don't care if it just works the other way.

I actually made me partitioning a bit different that one would normally do. At servers RAID-1 is also able to avoid some system crashes because everything (i.e. also including system files) is mirrored. I only need to get my data mirrored. If a disk crashes I don't mind whether the system does, too, as long as I have my data. Besides that, GRUB is not working with mdX-devices, creating a need for a separate boot-partitioning. Well, a lot of arguments back and forth I came up with this partitioning:

/dev/sda
- /boot, 1 GB
- swap, 4 GB
- /, 40 GB
- 275,1 GB for RAID
/dev/sdb
- /xenimages, 41 GB
- swap, 4 GB
- 275,1GB for RAID
/dev/md0
- assembled by the two 275,1 GB sdax- and sdby-partitions making a /home

This configuration mirrors my home directory, but doesn't protect my system files - it's no problem in my case, I'll just remount /xenimages to a bootable / and/or make a fresh install when receiving a new disk. This set-up further more provides two different swap-partitions. Well, it was the best solution I could come up with.

So in a few seconds I'm ready to use my new computer properly. Guess whether I'm going to compile OpenMoko or install Xen as the first thing - I actually don't know it yet! It's certainly a shame that humans aren't able to natively multi-task yet. Maybe it'll come in the next firmware upgrade.

Developing to OpenMoko

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:38:12 +0000

...is not as straight-forward as I hoped. That's of course because I'm not that experienced at developing to Linux-based environments in C - actually my past consists mainly of Windows-developing with C#. There's quite a huge difference - not only in libraries etc., but also the set-up as such.

Well, the C-coding is slowly returning (I've done some C-coding, but not as much as C#), but I'm still having some trouble setting a proper development environment up. That being said, I really haven't got a whole weekend dedicated for that, but the times I've tried to use MokoMakefil and OE's HelloWorld tutorial wasn't successfully. But that'll come later on, I assure you!

But for now, I'm just developing on my desktop, and then I'll try to get a decen (or just running) environment up and running when the time comes.

Neo 1973 arrived!

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:20:15 +0000

For just half an hour ago my (hopefully) sweet little new toy arrived! I'm really not going to say much - yet. So I'll just give you some pictures which barely left the camera (click to enlarge):

What an excellent timing receiving such a sweetheart on a Friday!

Persistance

Mikkel Meyer Andersen — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:20:00 +0000

With the discussion regarding location-based software as a starting point, I realized that the issue regarding persistence was far from trivial. Of course it's a problem in the matter of making areas (as in a set of locations) persistent, but in general persistence of data structures often seems to be a problem, not just on OpenMoko.

Some optimal data structure might be quite a mess to make persistent, which lead to the selection of another data structure.

Still, I haven't read much about this subject in regards to OpenMoko, but I think remembering something about it uses a Evolution Data Server. Well, it's certainly a subject to investigate further - in particular to location-based reminding which I think is very exciting.

Oh, my Neo 1973 should arrive tomorrow! Yeah!