Posted by George Wright
Wed, 22 Nov 2006 01:31:00 GMT
As some of you may know, I have a Windows Mobile 5 based phone. It’s possibly got the worst software I’ve ever used in my life but the hardware’s really nice so I put up with it.
One of the major things I use the phone for is as a modem for Linux because I have an (effectively) unlimited data tarriff on my contract, so being able to use it with my laptop is incredibly useful.
Previously, I have been using the USB cable and using wvdial to treat the phone as a dial up modem to connect to the internet. This wasn’t without complications as Windows Mobile seems to require an initialisation string which no other phone uses. This is:
AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","APN",""
Where ‘APN’ is the access point name for your data carrier. In my case (T-Mobile), it’s “general.t-mobile.uk”.
To connect via USB though, you first need to load the appropriate module to give you a serial interface (/dev/ttyUSB0) to communicate through. You’d think this was as simple as running ”modprobe ipaq”, but no - it’s more complicated.
First you have to modprobe ipaq then run lsusb -v. You then need to look up your phone’s entry and record the hex numbers for the vendorID and the productID then rmmod ipaq and load it again passing those identification numbers as parameters to the module, so in my case:
modprobe ipaq vendor=0x0bb4 product=0x00cf
This will then give you /dev/ttyUSB0 to play with. However, it’s still isn’t that simple from here. You need one more fiddle to get it working. You need to set “Stupid Mode” in wvdial to force pppd to start as soon as the modem connects. Thus, the final wvdial.conf is as follows:
[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 115200
Init = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","APN",""
Phone = *99#
Username = USERNAME
Password = PASSWORD
New PPPD = yes
Stupid Mode = yes
So, after setting up Linux you just need to run the “Wireless Modem” program on the phone and start the softmodem.
Unfortunately, trying to get it to connect via bluetooth appears to be infinitely more difficult. Luckily, I finally managed to get it to connect today after a few hours of research and fiddling, and it now seems rather trivial.
Firstly, Edgy’s bluez packages appear to be sufficiently broken that it doesn’t bring up the bluetooth adapter in discoverable mode - thus resulting in severe breakage when trying to connect the phone. This is fixed by running the command:
hciconfig hci0 piscan
You then need to fiddle some values in /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf to allow the phone to pair.
I set a default passkey using the passkey "xyz"; option in hcid.conf as I couldn’t be bothered to set up a helper application. However, it should work just fine if you do set up a helper application. That’s basically all that needs to be altered.
Now onto the phone.
Going into Settings -> Connections -> Bluetooth, make sure the phone is discoverable and pair it with the computer. Once it’s paired, the Linux box’s ID should appear in the list on the “Devices” tab. You then just need to go into the “Internet Connection Sharing” program and start the connection using “Bluetooth PAN”. Once that’s done, it’s fairly trivial. On the computer, run the command:
pand --connect BADDR -n
Where “BADDR” is the 6-element bluetooth address of your phone, which can be obtained using the command hcitool scan. After that, it should splurt out something like:
pand[8361]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.7
pand[8361]: Connecting to BADDR
pand[8361]: bnep0 connected
This means that pand has brought up a new ethernet interface called bnep0 for you to play with. After this, it’s just standard networking. Run a dhcp client on bnep0 and it will give you an IP address and NAT you across to the phone.
Hooray - the phone is connected via bluetooth to the internet. I still haven’t worked out how to get it to act as an actual modem over bluetooth (taking AT commands etc), but to be honest, I fail to see any point if we have Bluetooth PAN instead.
Posted in Computing, Misc | 11 comments
Posted by George Wright
Sat, 18 Nov 2006 01:27:00 GMT
On Thursday, Google’s London office hosted the first “Open Source Jam” - an invitation-only event designed to bring together members of the free software community to hack on stuff at Google’s office.
I was the only person in KDE there as John Tapsell, in his infinite wisdom, forgot it was Thursday and didn’t show up. It’s a really nice office in Belgrave House a few minutes walk from Victoria underground station. They were very hospitable and there was free wireless internet for us - although it was very erratic and the lack of a DNS server didn’t help. To be fair I didn’t really use the wireless as it was such a short event that I ended up talking through the whole evening instead of geeking.
Among the people there were a couple of guys I already knew, namely Alasdair Kergon (agk) of LVM fame, and also Paul Nasrat, a Red Hat employee.
The employees themselves were really friendly - and ridiculously good at table football. The room we were in was some sort of a hybrid cafeteria and recreation room, sporting lots of drinks refrigerators, a pool table and a table football table.
All in all, it was quite a fun event and they’re thinking of making it a regular thing on a monthly basis. Unfortunately Cambridge is a bit far to come from for a three hour session but I’ll certainly endeavour to go a few more times.
Posted in Computing | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:46:00 GMT
LinuxWorld is looming ever nearer.. under a week now until it starts! I’ve managed to get at least one other KDE developer to come - Ivor Hewitt - to whom I am eternally grateful for taking time off to help out. We have quite a nice set up too - Torsten Rahn has kindly supplied us with two KDE floor posters and I’ve got a Kubuntu floor poster courtesy of Jonathan Riddell. We will also have 20 of the KDE 10th Anniversary t-shirts to give away for free and another 200 KDE pins to sell. Not only that, but Canonical have kindly stepped in and said that we can borrow a machine from them for the duration of LWCE. It looks like LWCE this year is going to be the best yet!
In other news, Cambridge is getting hectic. Work is starting to stack up and 9am lectures are getting more cumbersome by the day. I’ve decided to rearrange the furniture layout in my room to give myself more usable floor space and I appear to be fanboying a maths student in my college. Hrmm.
The computer science stuff is still fairly elementary. We’re doing functional programming in ML and it’s not so bad. It gets a lot harder though so I’m not complaining! Physics is still very easy as we’re only doing special relativity which seems to be fairly easy, but again, the pace picks up later apparently. Oh well - it was my decision to come here to study!
Posted in KDE, Cambridge | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:51:00 GMT
So the time finally came. I am now in Cambridge! I arrived on Thursday to shoot archery with Matthew Johnson who kindly invited me to the pre-season training “week”. I have a really nice room and the other guy on my corridor is friendly so it’s all great here.
Last night I was at Matthew Garrett’s house to celebrate Rob and Daf’s birthday which was fun. Rob got fairly drunk and hurled copious amounts of abuse at me for not drinking, after which I left because it was 4am and I needed some sleep.. It was great because some people I hadn’t seen for a while turned up, including the legendary Wookey (who we ascertained had lived in Cambridge for longer than I had been alive) and Paul Sladen, who turned up completely unexpectedly. I also met various minions of Rob^W^W^Wpeople who I had met previously at aKademy in Dublin.
Lastly, today was matriculation day. This is basically a ceremony where we all dress up in academic gowns and sign our lives away to the university, after which we become a student. Or it’s something like that anyway. We also had the matriculation dinner which was amusing, as red wine was served (which I didn’t drink as I’m not an alcohol-drinker), but there was much comedy to be had from some of the other freshers around me. Yay!
Posted in Cambridge | 5 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:47:00 GMT
The last day of aKademy for me - so it was rather uneventful. After sleeping the night on the bunk on top of Chris because of the bed cock-up the night before, we realised that we had overslept and that the cleaners were coming round to kick us out. I must say that I’m not disappointed to see the back of the accommodation.. I caught several illnesses and got very little sleep during aKademy this year.
Upon arriving at Trinity College Dublin, I just wandered around aimlessly for a while and then ended up in a pub eating lunch with Rich Moore and Richard Dale. Afterwards, it was unfortunately time for me to leave and get to the airport.
When people intend to leave, here’s some advice. There are buses that go to the airport from the bus station near the hostel, but they take a long time to get there and aren’t very comfortable. On the other hand, if you get to the road with huuuugggeee spike in it, there’s an “Aircoach” which will take you directly to the airport and it’s nice and comfortable. It took about 30-40 minutes in the middle of heavy traffic on Tuesday and cost me 7 EUR, as opposed to the 5 EUR the bus would have charged. I think the extra 2 EUR was worth it.
Finally, I’d like to thank Marcus for doing a great job with aKademy this year. There were relatively few mess ups and those that did happen weren’t his fault so much kudos to Marcus.
Posted in KDE | 2 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 25 Sep 2006 22:22:00 GMT
Day 2 of aKademy - the first day where no talks were scheduled. The joy of getting up at 10 instead of 8! The eV meeting happened today, but I didn’t attend as I’m not a member. Spent most of the time in the hacking room fiddling with Debian Sarge - on which I managed to get wifi to work. Thankfully it’s a fairly normal ACX100 chipset which appears to work quite well. Being able to remotely fiddle using ssh is a lot easier than trying to type on the keyboard that’s built in.
In the evening was the Google reception at Google Ireland. It was actually quite fun. On the way I talked to Rob Taylor who shares my weird obsessions with installing Linux on embedded things, and was very interested in the hardware on my phone (it’s an HTC Universal). I’ll probably be seeing more of him in the future as he’s based up in Cambridge (along with Rob McQueen and the rest of the Cambridge Debian/Ubuntu massive). Win.
The Google reception was rather fun. They had nice little sandwiches and various snacks to eat, but the major fun was obviously the large ice cream freezer they had full of snack size Ben & Jerry’s tubs. Hooray for ice cream when you have a sore throat! They held a raffle to give away an iPod, a laptop bag and a hoodie, none of which I won. I also heard amusing stories all evening about various members of staff at my future College from Rob McQueen.
Afterwards, we (mainly GB people with a few other KDE people tagging along) ended up in a fairly small and random pub. The highlight of the evening was obviously when one of us (no names..) got completely and utterly drunk. We have video evidence. Note: if you can’t sing, please don’t. It’s embarrassing, but you will realise this when you see our videos. :)
After the pub, we decided to eat and ended up at a fast food pizza place somewhere in Dublin. I had a milkshake which required you to suck your eyeballs out of their sockets in order to try and get it up the straw - yes, it was that thick. Afterwards, there was much amusement at the hostel as Chris Howells and I discovered that our room had been double booked and that some fairly random strangers were sleeping in our beds and that our magnetic swipe card keys no longer worked. We were angry. Luckily they managed to give us new beds so it wasn’t a problem, just a fairly large inconvenience at 2am.
Posted in KDE | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Sun, 24 Sep 2006 20:20:00 GMT
Day 2 of akademy - things were smoother. I didn’t really pay much attention in the talks but instead decided to hack on embedded Debian and try to bootstrap Debian ARM on my phone. It was… interesting, to say the least.
Sarge appears to be hideously out of date (or the mirror I was using was out of date, but it was ftp.debian.org which would suggest this was the master mirror..). In any case, I managed to get it to boot fine after lots of fighting, but getting kdrive on there was slightly more difficult. I haven’t yet managed it, and I have decided that sarge is way too out of date anyway, so I’ll rebootstrap with Etch. More details to follow when I get somewhere…
In other news, Jessica Hall has decided that she has an irresistible urge to touch my hair. She will be duly punished.
Posted in KDE | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Sat, 23 Sep 2006 21:06:00 GMT
I arrived in Dublin last night, but because my flight was delayed by about 40 minutes (which is about the same as the duration of the flight…) I didn’t meet the KDE people at the airport I was supposed to meet. Thankfully, Chris Howells turned up about 20 minutes after I did, so we managed to get lost together.
The hostel is nowhere near as good as the accommodation we had last year, but it’s better than the hostel was in Ludwigsburg - so it’s not too bad.
So far there has been one talk - the keynote by Aaron Seigo. Charismatic as usual, he played really bad music whilst showing a slideshow of KDE developers’ photos. Luckily he only found one photo of me.
Trinity College Dublin seems to be a fairly nice place. There’s wireless access throughout the campus (it seems) and the we seem to be getting around 2Mbit/s of bandwidth. NX is rather speedy to my home ADSL line (which is on a 1Mbit upload). However, there is an issue with the network such that I keep getting my ssh connections reset randomly, which NX doesn’t like too much.
Lunch, however, was more of a disaster. I tried to hotswap the main battery in my ThinkPad (I have two batteries), and it managed to corrupt all the filesystems. After 4 hours of fighting I managed to get it back together though - without resorting to reinstalling Kubuntu.
Posted in KDE | 3 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:44:00 GMT
This year LWCE is slightly later - it’s on October 25th and 26th in Olympia 2 (as usual). However, so far nobody has actually put themselves down as a firm exhibitor to help out at the KDE booth. Last year only Ivor Hewitt and I pitched up to help so ideally I’d like to be able to get more people this year.
For those who don’t know what it is, we basically sit in a (rather nice) booth all day on the 25th and 26th and show off how pretty and functional KDE is to various attendees and hopefully increase the awareness of KDE in the corporate market. Last year we gave away a couple of hundred flyers and many, many Kubuntu CDs.
This year I’ve managed to get in contact with Canonical (those lovely people who do Ubuntu) and they’ve kindly offered to lend us a display machine with an LCD monitor for demo purposes. We have to pick it up from their South Kensington office but that shouldn’t be a problem.
I’m also going to place an order with the MWG to try and get things to sell there - mainly Konqis and shirts of various types. Booth gear I will pick up from Jonathan at aKademy in Ireland.
There’s an organisation page at the KDE UK wiki and if people who are likely to come could please add their names to the wiki I’d be very, very grateful.
Posted in KDE | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Sun, 27 Aug 2006 17:31:00 GMT
I have had several emails in the last few days about QtNX which all detail a common problem.
QtNX, as you should know, requires nxssh and nxproxy to function properly. These need to be in the PATH and their relevant libraries in LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Without that, QtNX will not function.
On top of that, QtNX requires nxproxy 1.5.0. Version 2.0.0 does not work, so please don’t use that unless you want to try and port QtNX to nxproxy 2.0.0. I will look into porting it to 2.0.0 but I do not see it as urgent right now.
However, even though nxproxy 1.5.0 is used, I am reliably informed that it will connect to an NX 2.0.0 server without any trouble whatsoever - so there’s no need to worry about that.
Posted in Computing | 8 comments
