Over the years we (the #botfu residents) have had quite a few entertaining encounters with the channel’s pet insanity, a markov bot called Boop. And now I have finally decided that it was time to skim through some logs and pick out some examples of her statistically generated gibberish. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but these are the ones I came across that work relatively well even when taken out of context. Have fun.
Nokia released a new version (0.2005.45-8) of their Nokia 770 software image today. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any changelogs around,
so I took the liberty of whipping together a small script that
compares it to the last, and lists files that were changed or added. The list can be found here.
(I have cleaned it up a bit manully; some gconf updates (which where mostly “mtime” differences anyway) and PID files have been removed.)
Next up is an attempt to upgrade my old installation to the latest one. I will hopefully get around to posting an upgrade how-to if I succeed.
I recently discovered and reported that packages and binaries from the ARMedslack Linux distribution work more or less out of the box on the Nokia 770. Even the package management tools worked perfectly, and I found this so handy that I decided it was worth a bit more attention. So I have written a small article about my findings, and you can read it here.
As a bonus, I have thrown in instructions on how to set up your Nokia 770 as an NFS client. It’s very easy. Instant storage space! 
So, I have played with the new toy over the weekend, and I must say that overall, I’m fairly impressed. There are some stability issues, but the software is still under development, so I’m not going to panic because of that.
Internet browsing was surprisingly convenient on this device. Despite its rather small size, it sports an 800×480 display, which is remarkably sharp and bright. (I work with the brightness turned way low, though, to save some battery, but it’s still very readable.) The e-mail application was a bit slow and unwieldy, but it gets the job done. The lack of a calendar application surprised me a bit, but considering it’s a handheld PC more than a PIM, I’m okay with that.
But the user level stuff isn’t what makes me warm and fuzzy. Behind the scenes it runs Linux, as we all undoubtably know by now, and this is where the fun starts. After using the flasher utility to enter Research & Development mode (to enable a root shell), and installing an xterm, you’re all set to explore. And possibly wreak havoc.
For me, speaking as both a user and developer, the free and open Maemo distribution is a bit incomplete compared to the official Nokia install. The free one lacks a few things, such as a browser and the e-mail application. Then again, the Nokia install lacks some utilities for software installation and development. I found it a bit disappointing to have to choose between these two options, but I’m trying to find a way to get the best of both worlds. And I think I might have found one that suits me.
As a part of that quest, I happened to drop by ARMedslack (an ARM port of the Slackware distro), just to see how well the binaries worked on the Nokia 770. And hey, they worked very well!
This is exciting for one good reason; The Slackware package management is rather simple, especially compared to the complexity of the native deb package system (which isn’t even complete on the Nokia image). So I unpacked some bits and pieces of the Slackware package management tools, and voila, I could suddenly install (and more importantly, cleanly uninstall) arbitrary packages. I also wrote a small shell script to convert deb-packages to tgz, to make them manageble with the Slackware tools. I recently tested this with the PythonForMaemo debs, and they worked perfectly. I also tried installing ARMedslack’s “nfs-utils” package, and bingo, I count mount my workstation from the 770.
Now, despite the success with the Nokia image, I haven’t abandoned the Maemo distribution quite yet. As soon as I find a decent way to preserve my current installation, I’m willing to take it for another spin and see if I can migrate the useful applications back. If nothing else, just to see if it’s possible. And because it would rock if it was.
So, to state some kind of conclusion, I’m intrigued by the potential of this gadget. It has a lot of usability as it is shipped, but the real potential for fun lies in the hacking and exploring, and eventually, starting to develop stuff to make it even more useful.
So, I got my Nokia 770 today. Liking it alot so far. More later.
Today, after having been left out of the initial round of the Nokia 770 Developer Device Program, I got a very uplifting mail from the Maemo team; My 770 has been shipped to me free of charge! This very nice surprise was thanks to the fact that; “we have no billing infrastructure in place for successful participants residing in countries other than that where Nokia 770 Internet tablet is
available.”
As Nokia is donating the proceeds from the developer program to the GNOME Foundation, they encourage me to donate manually instead, which I plan to do.
Thanks, Nokia!
So, it seems we have bought ourselves a new home. How’s that for a reason to hooray?
It ended up costing a bit more than we were prepared to pay, but it was a very nice house. According to our contact in the bank, things should work out nicely, though. Actually, after a bit of consolidation and parameter tweaking, we will come out with slightly smaller down payments than before.
Moving was a necessity at one point, since we’re expecting another family member soon, and we were running out of adjacent bedrooms in our current home. (We’re not too comfortable with letting Marius sleep two floors below us just yet. And I’m using that room as an office now, anyhow.)
So, there you have it. We’re moving to greener (more roomy) pastures.
And there was much rejoicing.