Well its been a while since my last post, I had to RMA my pandora, it took a couple weeks, It had one faulty SD slot, but this is all another story. I have had it back for a few weeks and I have been a busy penguin, I have setup a cross compile environment and have installed compile tools on pandora. compiled a few things, started down the KDE 3.5 path, building qt, and arts, and ran into several problems. I really miss my scratchbox maemo environment which I hated, however its probably cause I am following 5 sets of instructions that all assume I know more than I do. Anyway this was all going pretty slow, so I started looking around and I ran into this http://pandorawiki.org/Debian_On_SD (Thanks Stuckie)

On that Debian on SD page you can download a bootable Debian image. I promptly did this and installed KDE4 against some warnings. It actually ran great, but the akonadi server which is required for KDEPIM and other fun things just hits mysql (disk) constantly and it kills performance and I ran into many other issues that I was able to overcome, but I really wanted to see how KDE 3.5 would run.

I then went back to the page and followed the build from scratch instructions building from lenny instead of squeeze. I ran into some issues not addressed in the wiki, but it was what got me threw it all, thanks again Stuckie!!
http://pandorawiki.org/Debian_On_SD

Anyway, So Here is what I ended up with: KDE 3.5.10

continue reading "Pandora + Debian = Happy Penguins :p"

On September 30th 2008, I pre-ordered my Pandora

continue reading "Pandora’s box has been opened!"

Well I have discovered Hermes, why is this not a built in function/application? I was able to use Hermes to match my SIM contacts with my facebook contacts. It pulled all their facebook profile pictures, links to their FB profile and added their birthdates to their contact information. Good stuff. I also loaded all my gmail accounts, and skype, aim, yahoo, MSN.

I must say, this is best collection of information on my contacts list I have ever had in one place (which I promptly exported). I can click a contact and choose, cell/work/home/SMS/gtalk/skype/aim/yahoo/msn/facebook, see your birthday which it added to my calendar, and a link to your facebook profile page. Again I love how contact goes and pulls the picture for gtalk/facebook/skype. One problem I did have was with AIM. I noticed when I am driving around and I lose signal and then it reconnects AIM will send me a notice telling me that I am logged in twice. No other services did this.

I am in desperate need of a new phone, I currently have a RAZR that is about 5 years old. I had been watching all the Android phones and looking at the Motorola Cliq specifically because of the facebook integration. The main reason I have not been looking at the N900 is the price. If Nokia had gotten a carrier in the USA I would have already bought two n900′s. I have been hoping that perhaps there were some dealings going on that would make this happen. Although now that Tmobile changed its plans, you can save 20$ a month on a family plan with no contract and no free phone. So thats 480$ over 2 years, so I guess I would only be paying 260-270 per phone which is MUCH more reasonable than 500-600 per phone. Although I would still have to shell out all the money up front and hope the phones lasted two years.

One MAJOR flaw in this wonderful phone is the flash support. I cannot believe this does not have flash 10. I can load facebook, but I can’t beat everyones score on bejeweled blitz, might as well pull out the laptop. I honestly am not a big player of flash games, buy my kids and wife all are and they all think it should have flash 10

Another thing that annoys me is the facebook widget, it is too small and cannot be stretched larger. At least no way I have found yet?

Some of what I have not talked about is the interface. Coming from previous maemo device it takes some getting used to. Mostly just because you expect the device to perform one way and it does not. If you have not had previous Maemo devices you would just have the learning curve without some of the wrong expectations. Once you get the hang of how things work though you will be flipping windows back and forth like a pro, wondering why it was not made to do this long ago. I still find that occasional CPU spikes will slow down the UI, but usually not for more than a second or two. Those coming from previous versions of Maemo are familiar with this and while it is better it is not gone. Please note again this is from my experience as a heavy power user with email / chats / multiple web pages, I think if you are only doing one or two things at a time things run pretty smooth.

One thing I really liked was while I was logged into Outlook Web Access (exchange webmail) when I went to a large list of email addresses to choose from, the system took over the list and displayed it for me fullscreen, once I chose, it went back to the webpage. This is very nice and beats the zoom in and zoom out approach. Thought the tapping gestures to zoom in and out do work pretty well most of the time.

Oh and the addition of the mouse cursor for menus on webpages, nice job, it was sorely needed.

I must say at first I was really just wishing the screen was bigger and it was just a tablet. However the contacts and the phone functions are growing on me. I really don’t care for the feel of it when using the phone, I think if I was keeping this I would be buying a bluetooth headset. What really amazes me is that for all the previous Maemo device that required a separate phone with DUN (Dial up Networking) the N900 does not include it. Now matter how great the phone is, I always want to be able to plug into my laptop and get online.

Overall 4 days in, I am loving it. I am not sure what my phone future holds, but if these go on sale any time soon, I may just grab me two of them

more to come……

The people at http://www.womworld.com/nokia/ were nice enough to offer me a N900 trial. I gleefully contacted them to find out it was only a two trial. I almost declined it, but I am glad I accepted. It has been two days since I received the trial and I can’t stop playing.

Please note this is my first two days with the device, and I have barely scratched the surface. Any comparisons, observations or biases have been formed over years of my experiences with Maemo based devices. I have not used ANY other smart phones.

It came with the latest firmware US loaded. It appeared to be a NEW phone. My first impressions were, TOO SMALL, TOO BIG.

The phone itself feels like it weighs at least as much as my Nokia 810 Internet Tablet, if not slightly more. The Keyboard coming from the 810 was smaller and I initially HATED it. I seem able to adapt somewhat and I mostly stopped hitting “m” every time I tried to press spacebar. I do not like the layout of the keyboard, again coming from an 810, the lack of DPAD and the arrow keys on the right are frustrating for me. I am sure I could get used to it, again its been two days. Users without previous Nokia 810 device experience may not even notice any issues with the keyboard? Also the lack of hardware escape key and device menu drive me nutty, but people without previous maemo experience would not even be bothered by this. The screen is too small for my liking, size not resolution, (although I wouldn’t mind 1024×600), but again, a larger screen. If the screen had filled the phone face I think it would have been better.

Speaking of coming from the 810, am I the only one who constantly trys to put the stylus in the top, instead of the bottom of the phone?

When I placed my SIM in the phone and I fired it up, I was initially wondering where all my contacts from my SIM card were, but I eventually figured how to copy them off into my contacts. I had the 10$ USA Tmobile plan on the phone and when I brought up the internet it said that the phone was not compatible with the data service I had chosen. I called tmobile and they changed me to the unlimited 25$ per month plan, and I was online and mobile. I think I could have probably used the 10$ plan if I had entered an APN, but I did not test this out.

The first issue I ran across with the phone was trying to connect via WIFI. It kept finding my network, but it would not prompt me for my preshared key. It wanted me to press a button on the access point and press next. First of all this is stupid, but I got my ass up and went and pressed a button. Needless to say it never worked. I finally managed to find the “internet connection” options in the control panel, sorry “settings” icon. It was not fast. I was able to set it up manually and it worked fine. This needs fixing for sure.

I really think Nokia needs to spend some time on the user manual. It needs to be 4-5 times thicker. There is a lot of built in functionality and it should all be documented.

The second thing I did once I got up and running, was fire up KDE 3.5.8 which I had compiled for Diablo (Nokia 810 OS) some time ago.

About KDE 3.5.8 on the N900: It ran great, I fired up Kstars and it was very responsive. Additionally Konqueror web and filesystem navigate also was great. It ran better under the N900, than it did on the 810. No surprise faster CPU and more memory help for sure even without a recompile

While it can be made to fire right up, it is not optimized in any way for the n900. If you attempt to try, you will most likely be reflashing, I have a few times already.

Next I tested video calling
N900 < Wifi > gmail
N900 < 3g > gmail
N900 < Wifi > N810
N900 < 3g > N810

All worked although sometimes my Tmobile 3g was lagging, and one call over 3g sounded like aliens. This was all very cool, I will do some more road testing soon.

OK Nokia are you listening. I want to be able to stream video to my website, along with GPS information. I created this long ago (the upper right corner) used to be a streaming cam from my laptop. I had a Sprint card in a laptop sending GPS and cam data back realtime. This was setup 5-6 years ago, cmon already!!

My biggest complaint so far are my greasy fingers. I can only imagine what I could have this thing doing, had I gotten one months ago.

Thanks Again to Womworld , I am gonna be crying in about 12 days

more to come………….

I just wanted to post to give a head up to any users of my KDE 3.5 on the N810 or 800. KDE 3.5 install relies on tablethacker.com to install KDE. I just paid the 108$ for hosting tablethacker.com for the year, after this the install process will no longer be available. This gets you out to Dec 2010, so if you are using KDE, you should find a reliable backup and restore process to ensure you can use if beyond 2010 if this interests you. Using console-tool you can make backups and restore. I had planned on letting this domain go this month, but looking through the web logs on tablethacker.com, I can see people are still using the KDE install process. I was able to cover the costs for the next year, but after that it will be gone, and most likely nobody will be using this anyway.

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If you want to install this manually

look at http://tablethacker.com/software get these two files KDE358v2.tar.bz2 and SUPv4.tgz

As root user from the following

cd /
tar jxvf /path/to/KDE358v2.tar.bz2
tar zxvf /path/to/SUPv4.tgz

done!

As some of you may know, our friend lcuk (elsie UK) has recently lost his job. He is actively seeking employment, but has ended up a little short, and will not be able to attend the Maemo Summit 2009. lcuk is the creator of Liqbase and an active supporter of the Maemo community. There is an effort under way by the community to help out lcuk. If we can help him out enough, he will be able to pay his bills and attend the summit event. If not, I hope he will at least be able to pay his bills.

I encourage you to visit http://liqbase.net and make a donation (big, small, all are welcome)

Please also visit this thread on talk.maemo.org to show your support

Maemo Community Council now has four new members and one returning council member. There were 9 candidates and 5 open slots on council

Candidate line up
Gary Birkett (lcuk)
Andrew Black (AndrewFBlack)
Alan Bruce (qole)
Jay Carter (zerojay)
Graham Cobb (gcobb)
Stephen Gadsby (sjgadsby)
Matthew Lewis (penguinbait)
Valerio Valerio (VDVsx)

The voting system used for the Maemo Community Council elections is called STV (Single Tranferable Vote)

To say the least this was very confusing to me. You can get the details here —> http://maemo.org/vote/results.php?election_id=7

Election title: Maemo Community Council elections, Q3 2009
Method: Fractional Transfer STV with Droop-Static-Whole threshold
Number of total ballots: 303
Number of invalid or empty ballots: 5
Number of ballots used in the count: 298
9 candidate running for 5 seats.

Winners are:
Randall Arnold (Texrat)
Matthew Lewis(penguinbait)
Alan Bruce (qole)
Valerio Valerio (VDVsx)
Graham Cobb (gcobb)

Congratulations to all the winners, including myself

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Some of the things I plan to focus on as a new council member are:

Communication Channels
New Users experience
Get more voter participation in next community election

I am interested to hear what the rest of the world thinks I or other council should be working on?