Syntactic sugar » linux

HOWTO : Bluetooth Tethering with Nokia N900

buTTon — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:40:07 +0000

Tethering (using you’re mobile phone to get your laptop/notebook online) is a quite important feature for me, when I’m at a meeting I do not wish to rely on wireless connections from my customers or the hotel/cafe where I’m at. With my Nokia E90 I used JoikuSpot, which turns the E90 into a wireless accesspoint, worked like a charm but drains the batteries extremely fast. One very big advantage of creating a Wifi-accesspoint is speed; I have 7.2 mbit 3.5G subscription (the E90 only got to 3.2 mbit though), which is too fast for bluetooth, you usually get about 1 mbit from bluetooth.. With wifi I was able to use the full 3.2 mbit my E90 was able to provide.

With the new Nokia N900 I’ve been looking for a way to get my Ubuntu Karminc netbook & Ubuntu Jaunty laptop online, preferably with Wifi, but at least using Bluetooth. Wifi is unfortunately not yet supported because the some kernel-modules (iptables, iptables_nat) are not available for Maemo (they are working on it). Bluetooth is possible, and quite easy to archive with Ubuntu Karmic. I’ll explain how to get your Ubuntu Karmic laptop online with a N900 using the DUN-service (DailUpNetworking)

You need to be comfortable with the commandline/terminal and have rootsh installed on your N900 to do this! If you’re NOT comfortable with the Terminal : do not proceed, you will need to be root, and that enables you to brick your N900!

On the N900

You’ll need the following script (taken from Maemo Wiki):

sdptool add --channel 1 DUN
while true; do
        rfcomm -S -- listen -1 1 /usr/bin/pnatd '{}'
        sleep 1
done

I copied the script, pasted it into a new text-file on my laptop (called it dun.sh) and sent it to my N900 with bluetooth. Your N900 will ask where to store the script, I stored into Documents. Now fire up the terminal application on the N900 and become root:

~ $ sudo gainroot

Move the uploaded file to /usr/bin :

/home/user # mv /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/dun.sh /usr/bin/

Make the file dun.sh executable;

/home/user # chmod +x /usr/bin/dun.sh

Start the DUN-service:

/home/user # dun.sh

You should see something like this:

Dial-Up Networking Service Registered
Waiting for connection on channel 1

Configuring the N900 is finished, next;

configuring Ubuntu (Karmic)

Be sure you have paired the N900 with your laptop

Configuring the network-connection

Left click on the network-manager from the notification area of the gnome-panel, select “Edit connections”
Select the “Mobile Broadband”-tab and press “Add”
Click “forward” (leaving the selection to “any device”)
Select the country, click “forward” and select your mobile operator.
If you have the option to select a plan, do so (I needed to select Vodafone Business to get the correct APN), else click “forward”
Click “Apply” to save the new Mobile Broadband-service
A new window will appear to configure the Service, be sure to enable “Connect automatically” and click “apply”
Close the window “Network connections”

Next: connecting to your N900 with DUN

First; be sure you have Blueman Installed, you’ll need this to configure the connections. If you do not have Blueman running install it following the instructions found here

In Ubuntu Karmic you can add blueman repositories by issuing this command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:blueman/ppa

And to install it run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blueman

Check if you have enabled the correct plugin;
Right-click on the bluetooth-icon in the notification area in the panel and select “plugins”
Enable “NMDUNSupport” (optionally you can enable the “NetUsage” plugin to monitor data-usage) and close the Plugins window.
Open the bluetooth manager (by left-clicking on the bluetooth-icon in the notification area in the panel) and look for your N900.
Right-click on the N900-icon and select “Refresh Services”
Again; right-click on the N900 and click “Dail-Up Networking”.. your laptop will try to connect to your N900
If the connection is OK you can establish the network-connection to your Mobile Broadband provider, left-click on the Network-manager in the notification area and select the network connection you created in the previous section (“Configuring the network-connection”).
If all goes well you should be online now! (if you had a ‘normal’ wifi connection, disconnect it to be sure you’re using the Dail-Up with your N900).

Possible Issues

If you disconnect from dail-up networking and try to reconnect you could get an error : “Connection Failed: Port already in use”.. To fix this, restart bluetooth on your laptop:

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

Loose ends

You could leave the DUN-script running in a terminal on your N900, I’m not yet sure if this could drain the battery. If it doesn’t it may be possible to add the script into the /etc/rc2.d directory, this way the script will be started at boot and you can connect to your N900 quickly without manually starting DUN. I’ll look into this when I’m sure the script doesn’t drain the battery (Update: It doesn’t; it’s save to autostart the script).

Ubuntu Jaunty doesn’t have the bluetooth manager which is used in Ubuntu Karmic; I’ll update this post with instructions for Jaunty later, and if anyone has a step by step howto for Windows, please let me know so I can add a link to your site or add the howto here

Update : If you’d like DUN started automatically, check out this and this helpful post

Update 12-30-09:
The DUN script is now available in the Maemo-repositories; still in testing though.
Also; I forgot to mention Blueman . I assumed it was part of Karmic and installed by default; but it’s not, i’ve added instructions (Thx to Alex & Alex in the comments).

Nokia N900: first experiences

buTTon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:26:21 +0000

Nokia N900

Yay! Got my N900 directly from Nokia yesterday and I’ve been playing with it a lot. Overall I’m very happy with this new phone, finally something that beats the Nokia E90.

My findings for now;

Hardware
It’s a lot smaller than I expected, ok.. I was used to a E90 which is a huge brick (or my “mobile fridge” as I used to call it). It feels well constructed and solid; no creaky sounds when you squeeze it. The keyboard is a bit too small IMHO, but again; I was used to the keyboard of the E90 which is pretty large. The keyboard sliding-mechanism feels stirdy and will probably survive the phone.
The touchscreen has a very soft feel, probably not very scratch-proof (I ordered a 3M Vikuiti DQC-160 screenprotector rightaway). Touch-response is good, though I do need the stylus for browsing, clicking a link with my fingers is practically impossible without zooming in.
The speakers are quite good, though not as loud as the E90, but it has a surprisingly good stereo-sound with a large range. The headphones are also pretty good, have a lot of bass, but I’ll keep using my Sony MDR-E888’s for a while.

Software
It’s clearly a phone for geeks; Maemo is very stable, pretty fast, but there are some things a ‘regular’ phone-user will miss. Don’t get me wrong; almost everything works, but there are some issues I came across;

The email-client; IMAP is supported, but my IMAP-account is filled with a lot of folders and emails (from over 7 years worth of business-email) and you can’t unsubscribe IMAP folders. The N900 checks them all and this take a lot of time and processor-usage (which will eventually drain the battery). After a while the mail-client just refused to open the Inbox-folder. According to this bugreport this will be fixed in Nokia’s next update. There’s a workaround; you can use Nokia Messaging, in which you can select the IMAP-folder which need to be synced. Also there’s no support for IMAP-Idle.. which kinda sucks.
No MMS-support unfortunately. Maybe this will be implemented in a while.
Almost all apps have to be used in landscape mode; only the Phone-application switches. This is supposed to be fixed in next update (though I’m not sure about that)
“only” 256 mb storage available in the root-filesystem; though Nokia fixed this by creating a 2GB Ext3-filesystem and mounted this in /home/opt there are a lot of app’s out there that are not ‘optified’ and use the root-filesystem. This shouldn’t be a problem if you only use the repositories from Nokia and Maemo Extras, but if you’re using Extras-testing and Extras-Devel you’re filling up the root-filesystem.. Which I found out the hard way .. Also most third-party apps are not optified, eg. Mozilla Fennec which takes roughly 35 mb of storage. I’ll be trying some other file-system layouts later, after making backups
Nokia Maps is verrrry slow and uses a lot of processor. There’s no guided navigation available yet.. Sygic announced they will ship their navigation software at the end of 2009 .. I’d also like Google Maps for the N900, but there’s still no support for it (yet?).
I still haven’t found a way to select multiple files/messages (yet), mainly in the file-browser or in the mail-client. If you want to remove multiple messages or move/delete multiple files this is annoying, you have to move/delete each file/message individually. Any tips on this are greatly appreciated.
Update 09-12-09: selecting multiple files/email is supported, just click “delete” in the email-app and select the emails you’d like to delete, same goes for file-management..
Battery-life is kinda bad.. depends on what widgets and programs you’re running. I think I have to order a desktop-charger and some extra batteries soon.

The good things about the N900:

IM Integration: Skype, Gtalk, MSN, ICQ are integrated into the Contacts-app, which is very cool IMHO. You just select a contact and you’re able to choose; message using SMS, any kind of IM (if they are online), email, call using cellular, skype or GTalk.. the works! This really makes the N900 a multipurpose communicator ..
I wouldn’t use it; you can update the IM-status with your location, you can even choose which level of detail you’d like to expose: region, city or street.
The browser is verrrrry good, very fast, renders everything, also Flash and just works like the browser you have on your computer. Only small thing ; bookmarks.. I didn’t find a usable bookmarks-manager. You can only create folders in bookmarks by adding a bookmark, not by editting (but maybe I missed something). I’ve tried Fennec also, but the default browser is much faster, uses less memory and has better controls.
When connected using Wifi in my home-network the media-player and filebrowser automatically detected uPNP-shares from my Mac and my MediaTank.
Finally a phone on which I can be ROOT! (without hacking/jailbreaking)
Syncing Google Calendar works great with the Mail For Exchange-feature.. as long as you keep syncing of email and contacts disabled.
Update 09-12-09 : Syncing Google Calendar worked great, but now it keeps telling me “Cannot connect to server” .. annoying!
The FM-transmitter is very cool.. It even sends the text “Nokia” to RDS-enabled radios..
I can use WAVE from my Mobile!!! w000t!

In general I’m very happy with the N900, mainly because everything that in my house that has a processor is running some kind of Unix/Linux-flavour. Maemo has a promising future and I can’t wait for the next update; not only for bugfixes, also because I’m very curious what new features will be added.

Ordered the N900

buTTon — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:19:48 +0000

Nokia N900

After almost 3 years of Nokia E90 usage I ordered a Nokia N900. Imho it’s the only phone/MID worthy of replacing my E90. Ok; it’s bulky, heavy (the E90 is a brick too) and the OS is probably a bit rough around the edges, but it runs Linux (maemo), has a 800×480 px screen, 1 gb of RAM (of which 768 mb is swap) and a whopping 32 gb storage. I will miss Route66 though, not sure if Nokia Maps is capable of keeping me on track…

Can’t wait to get root on my phone

Cordless Trackman Marble FX on Ubuntu Jaunty

buTTon — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 09:45:00 +0000

Trackman Marble FX Cordless

My all-time-favorite mouse trackball is the Logitech Trackman Marble FX (Cordless). Logitech stopped making those a couple of years ago, but I’ve bought 5 of them and since the first one still works fine I’ll probably be using this model until USB is replaced with a new kind of port;)

The Trackman FX has 4 buttons and no dedicated scrollwheel. Before Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) I was able to configure the buttons from /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but I upgraded from Ubuntu Hedgy (8.04) to Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) all the way to Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) and Ubuntu dropped the mouse-configuration from xorg.conf in favour of the HAL-device-manager.

My xorg.conf setup for the Trackman FX looked like this:

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier "TFX"
	Driver "mouse"
	Option "CorePointer"
	Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option "Name" "TrackMan Marble FX"
	Option "Vendor" "Logitech"
	Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
	Option "Buttons" "9"
	Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
	Option "EmulateWheel" "1"
	Option "EmulateWheelButton" "8"
	Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
	Option "XAxisMapping"   "6 7"
EndSection

Using this configuration the upper-left button was assigned as scroll-switch; if I’d keep the button pressed and use the trackball I could scroll. The left-middle button was used as “normal” left-mouse-button, and the lower-left button used as back-button for Firefox and Nautilus.
However; xorg.conf configuration didn’t work anymore in Jaunty; HAL took over, but how to configure the Trackman FX from HAL? After several searches in Google I came across this bugreport in Launchpad. According to the posts I’d had to create the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi and enter the following :

After a reboot (which isn’t neccesary; unplugging it and plug it in again is enough) the Trackman didn’t do what I wanted it to do. After some digging I suddenly realized the Trackman I used was cordless, and the model in mouse-wheel.fdi was defined as Logitech USB Trackball, the wired model. It seemed HAL didn’t match the info.product-string with the cordless Trackman, so I needed to find out what would match my Trackman. This was quite easy; from a terminal type:

sudo hal-device|less

You’ll get a list of all devices in HAL, press slash (/) and enter Logitech to search for any device from Logitech and you’ll run into “info.product = ‘Logitech USB Receiver’ (string)”. The Cordless Trackman FX apparently had the product-id : “Logitech USB Receiver”, so I changed the line match key=”info.product” in mouse-wheel.fdi to this product-id. Unplugged the Trackman, plugged it in again and hurray!!! Scrolling worked!

If you have a Trackman Marble FX Cordless, all you have to do is create /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi and enter/copy-paste:


        
                
                        9
                        true
                        300
                        1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9
                        8
                        6 7
                        4 5
                        
                        true

Unplug the Trackman (or the Receiver), plug it in again and you should be ready!

Small update:
The outer left button didn’t act as third-mouse-button, as I was used to. Using the method above it will be used as back-button. If you’d like it to be used as third-mouse-button, remove the line :

1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9

Ubuntu Firefox, Moonlight and Microsoft Codecs Pack

buTTon — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:17:08 +0000

I have Ubuntu 8.04 running on my laptop, and with Wimbledon coming up I wanted to install Moonlight , the Linux alternative to Silverlight, since Net5 (the dutch channel airing Wimbledon) only uses Silverlight (annoying!!!)

Installing Moonlight was quite easy, just go to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/, click on the image under “2. Download the plugin” and Firefox will ask if it may install the Moonlight Add-on. But; Moonlight by itself is quite useless without the copyrighted audio & video codecs from Microsoft. Novell (moonlight’s daddy) can’t distribute those codecs in Moonlight itself and you need to install them after Moonlight has been installed. This is supposed to be easy, go to the Moonlight-website, rightclick on the notice at the top saying “Congratulations!! You’re running the current release of Moonlight” and select “install microsoft codecs”. You’ll need to accept that you’re willing to sell your soul to Microsoft .. eh.. the EULA and the codecs will be downloaded and installed.
However, after the download I got the message “Permission Denied“. Obviously some directory was off limits for me, but I didn’t know which directory. So I tried to install Moonlight and the codecs as root, gksudo firefox, which went fine. Next I started looking for files, where did Moonlight leave the codecs? In /usr/lib? /usr/share/firefox? I found it in the home-directory of root; /root/.mozilla/plugins/moonlight/silverlight-media-pack-linux-x86-5-1.so. Next stop; copy the .so-file to my own home-directory, but wtf? No directory /home/[me]/.mozilla/plugins? So.. i created the directory, and while I was at it, also created /home/[me]/.mozilla/plugins/moonlight, chmodded it to allow writing by me and tried to install the codecs; Success!!! And they actually work; the codecs:)

So.. all you need to do to get Moonlight with Microsoft Codecs Pack installed, step by step

Go to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/ and click on the image under “2. Download the plugin” (see here for moonlight installation instructions )
You’ll be asked to restart firefox, don’t.. Bookmark this page and open up a terminal.
In the terminal; type:
mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins [enter]
and
mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins/moonlight [enter]
and
chmod +w ~/.mozilla/plugins/moonlight
Restart firefox
Go to the Moonlight website again, and if Moonlight was installed successfully you’ll see “Congratulations!! You’re running the current release of Moonlight” somewhere at the top of the page. Right click on that (the normal context menu of firefox will show up, click somewhere on the page to hide it)
Click “Install Microsoft Codecs”
A popup will appear with a lengthy EULA, accept it (if applicable) and the download of codecs will start
When finished installation will start as well and you should be done.
Check the moonlight site again to make sure it’s running OK; if you right click the notification you shouldn’t see the item “Install Microsoft Codecs” anymore