Category Archives: Technology

Android 1.6 on the G1 Dev Phone

Technology, , ,

Tonight I had some time and wanted to load the latest version of Android on my g1. This was one reason why I got it, even though I skipped over the 1.5 update and was still running 1.1. I haven’t been bold enough to load any custom ROM images yet so I go to the Android Dev Phone 1 site at HTC and grab an updated radio and recovery image. As time goes by I might go another route but for now those versions do the trick.

It has been a while since I blogged about the g1 and some things have changed. The T42 I was using fell victum to the well documented ThinkPad GPU reflow problem, probably the result of a fumble while at the Avis rental counter in the Denver airport back in April. I replaced it with another T42 from ThinkPad Depot a couple months ago and have been happy with it so far.

    Interesting those sound like topics worthy of a blog post but there are none !!! Will try to rectify that in the future.

So needing to start over I first grabbed the Eclipse for RCP and then the Android sdk. I followed the upgrade instructions and managed to have a problem with the adb tool that I think I ran into when I first got the phone and flashed it with 1.1. None the less I did some googling and found where the SD card should not be mounted and adb needs to run as root.

    The “needs to run as root” can be resolved with the right tweeking I believe but I haven’t spent enough time one it yet.

That said the flash went without a hitch for both the radio and recovery image. I’m looking forward to some of the new features, although I’m not sure about the virtual keyboard since it eats up half the screen. The nice part is if it’s a bust I can always try something different or go back.

Windows 7

Technology

A few weeks ago I downloaded a trial version of Windows 7 Ultimate to give it a whirl. At the time I thought it might be a way to get away from XP for work yet still run inside of VirtualBox. If it worked I could always load it to the hard drive and not worry about the SATA driver issue I had with XP. Loading was initially a problem as I don’t have a DVD burner but thanks to VirtualBoxes ability to create a virtual machine from an ISO I was in luck.

The UI is better, visually kinder to the eye but functionally similar. Some changes in the control panel area have me wandering a bit, but what’s already on the web has helped. I get the impression Microsoft is moving to helping the average or not so informed user with some of what it’s doing. I don’t blame them there’s more numbers in users that need education than those that already have it. Personally though I could do without the wizards, that’s probably “old school” mentality.

The only problem I have at the moment is after starting the VM I can’t join the domain at work. The version of Cisco’s VPN Client (5.0.4) I’m using doesn’t offer an option to start before the windows login. So far the searching I’ve done hasn’t yielded any solutions. I’m thinking I should be able to VPN into the network at work in Ubuntu, which gets me on the network but not on the domain, then login to the VM with my domain credentials… that should do it. But it hasn’t worked. I’m sure Cisco will come out with an update, just need to be patient.

For a preview you can look at some screens on crunch gear.

Virtualbox rules

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The beginning of 2009 I decided to move back to windows for work and with the laptop dead again it seemed like the right time. Yes I forgot, after getting a new power supply it again has decided to shutdown randomly. At times receeding the hard drive, or the memory, or the battery seemed to bring it back but nothing consistent. So I picked up a used IBM T42, added a extended life battery and maxed the memory at 2GB (from the old laptop) and it has been great. Hopefully I’ll get a year or so out of it.

So about Virtual Box. Since the T42 came with a copy of XP I had a license to work with. Installing was simple using aptitude, but I did grab a more current version by updating /etc/apt/sources.list with.

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lenny non-free

This was mainly since the T42 runs Debian and the desktop runs Ubuntu. From there it was.

aptitude update
aptitued install virtualbox-2.1

.. and I was ready to create a virtual machine.

With the virtual machine created I loaded XP, updated and added the software I needed from our servers at work. When it came time to move it to the other machine I did run into a problem. But after checking the forums I was able to clone from one machine to the other and things are working in both places.

Sweet !!

Fetchmail, Dovecot and OpenLDAP

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The last few weeks I’ve been working on a server that I can access mail from regardless of which machine I’m on, what OS I load or where I’m at. Now yes the thoughts running through ones head is you can also do it with about any of the major email hosts google, yahoo, hotmail, not to mention a number of ISP’s. The difference is I wanted to have the data in a place that I could physically touch on my own equipment to modify as I see fit. Not to mention it sounded like a decent challenge too. Applications already exist to do this and since I’m not going with an all in one solution I’ll need a few separate programs to do the job. That’s where Fetchmail, Dovecot and LDAP will do all the work.

I’ve read about Fetchmail for years but never took the time to put it to work. The same would go for Dovecot (IMAP) and LDAP.

How they all work is Fetchmail will “fetch” mail from the various addresses I have and store all the messages in one place. To read the mail with a standard client I needed IMAP, this what Dovecot will do. Lastly, which is a bonus, is LDAP for contacts and for this we can use slapd to implement OpenLDAP.

Fetchmail

Their is plenty of resources on the net for this already one that helped me was this post, simple and straight forward. My setup barley scratches the surface of what this app can do, but for now simple does the trick.

Dovecot

Dovecot is an IMAP and POP3 package it will take care of the access, it can be configured for unsecure, secure or both. This setup was a little more tricky for me. After installing I was able to get access but no mail or folders would show up. It took me a little time, in the end it was this that solved the problem. I enabled the following line in dovecot.conf

default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

.. and I had access. What’s nice here is all I have to do is create a folder on the IMAP side and copy / paste the messages from the folder on my machine. Now they are all on the server and I can access them from any machine / device on my network or if I’m travelling.

OpenLDAP

The most challenging of these has been LDAP. This is another protocol I haven’t had an opportunity to do much with. For this I installed slapd and immediately began fighting with the setup. LDAP is one of those apps that is very robust and with so many options and ways to do things it’s difficult to weed your way through. This article was very helpful. When I got to the section that talks about ldapadd I could not execute it, that app was not part of the slapd package. It took me a little time to figure that out and once I added it, and loaded the ldif file things were better.

But then the problems started with Evolution and accessing the LDAP directory. Response was slow and would only work a few times until I restarted. I was hoping this was a configuration issue but then I found this bug and was immediately disappointed.

However I figured their had to be a resolution and since I was using version 2.22 I thought maybe 2.24 had a fix. Both Ubuntu Intrepid and Fedora 10 come with 2.24 and I have a drive that I just loaded F10 on. Before swapping I did some more googling I found reference to a patch that recently had been applied so I was hopeful 2.24 was ok. Unfortunately I can’t find the reference and didn’t make note of it at the time. But I believe it was a thread on the Gnome Evolution Hackers list and the fix is included in this release. So after putting in my drive with F10 and adding the LDAP address book response was much better and no time outs. So far it’s looking good.

That leaves me with a question, move to 2.24 or live with 2.22. I’d like to keep all contacts in a central location so I’ll have to look into upgrading Evolution to 2.24 on Lenny. Regardless I’m pleased and it was an excellent learning experience.

Comcast using Zimbra

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A hockey buddy sent me a email recently where the mailer was reported as.

Mailer: Zimbra 5.0.9_GA_2533.RHEL5_64 (zclient/5.0.9_GA_2533.RHEL5_64)

I’ve always found it interesting what others use to manage their mail but I didn’t think he used open source, not to mention Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Zimbra. So that got me thinking he is a Comcast user and so am I, does Comcast use Zimbra ? I sent a message from my Comcast account then checked the mailer, nope it was AT&T Message Center. So I did some googling and sure enough I missed this one late last year.

The reason he has it and I don’t is it’s a feature of their Triple Play package, we only use TV and Internet. Regardless it’s pretty cool for open source software. I’ve been reading good things about Zimbra and was thinking about installing it on a test server about a month ago but never got to it. Five or six years ago when I was hosting my own mail server a product like this would have been sweet. Guess if I get crazy and want to go back I know now there’s a good option that’s free.