Android 2.1 on HTC devices

March 5th, 2010

A lot of 2.1 Roms with HTC Sense have been released for the Hero lately due to the availability of the HTC Droid Eris sources.

Stability and Speed is awesome!

Here is a quick review on VillainRom 3.1 for the HTC ( available at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=622468 )

  • very Stable
  • great Performance
  • new HTC Sense and Widget features
  • Screen Overview (press Home on the Homescreen or Pinch)
  • all working 2.1 features (Market, Navigation, Energy Manager)

The official release for the 2.1 Hero Rom is yet to come but regarding the VillainRom you wont have to wait any longer for the stable Android 2.1 with HTC Sense.

snap20100305_144933snap20100305_144941

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RFC 5782: DNS Blacklists and Whitelists

February 20th, 2010

The Internet Research Task Force has released a Request for Comments for the Usage of Black and Whitelists

The rise of spam and other anti-social behavior on the Internet has led to the creation of shared blacklists and whitelists of IP addresses or domains.
The DNS has become the de-facto standard method of distributing these blacklists and whitelists.  This memo documents the structure and usage of DNS-based blacklists and whitelists, and the protocol used to query them.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5782.txt

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Debian 4 Security support to be terminated on February 15th

January 26th, 2010

http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100121

Just a reminder!

Only one more server to upgrade for me since I have migrated most Debian Servers to Ubuntu LTS :)

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Android 2.1 AOSP Rom: CKdroid

January 26th, 2010

A new Rom for the GSM Hero has been released, this time its a AOSP based Rom without Sense UI. Android 2.1 has some great improvements on the widget making Sense Functions nearly obsolete, so AOSP should provide you with enough comfort.

The CKdroid also features LiveWallpapers, a function implemented on the Nexus one. If you want to waste your Battery and Performance for some useless show off crap… Here you go. I remove them via ADB.

Included in this release is a hack which will give you 2 more homescreens – summarizing it up to 5 on a standard Android device.

7 homescreens on the HTC Sense devices was a litle much, 3 was bearly working for me on the AOSP release, so 5 should do perfectly fine.

During the installation i had a rather annoying bug in the Android Market that sometimes stalls the installation for hours. I just wish the free apps were available outside the market. Good thing I had a backup of all apps with Astro. So I pulled the apk file for Astro from the default backup location /sdcard/backups/apps/ and installed via adb push. After that, I restored all my apps which still requires you to acknowledge each app when reinstalled which is still very annoying but at least i don’t have to wait for the market to work again.

CKdroid is very stable with some minor performance issues and will be my current stable Rom for everyday use.

The main projekt thread can be found here

Comparison: the Android 2.1 standard interface and the HTC Sense UI in Android 1.5

snap20100125_170240snap20091130_134504


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HTC Hero Rom overview

January 12th, 2010

So I spent the last 2 weeks testing available custom Roms for the HTC Hero. Here are my conclusions so far…

Notes:

- all Version used are for GSM Heros – please dont install them on non GSM Heros

- not tested with paid Apps since I dont use them, if you do buy apps from the market, its probably best to stick with the official releases

- havent tested any Facebook/Twitter kind of stuff

Modaco 2.x/3.x custom rom (Based on Android 1.5)

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=552591

I have been using this Rom ever since I unboxed my HTC Hero back in August finding the preinstalled Rom provided by HTC lacking performance making it very unpleasant to use for a touch device.

The features in this Rom make it the closest you can probably get to a true Linux device including a dropbear SSH server, busybox, a wide range of supported Filesystems (EXT2/3/4, NFS, CramFS, SquashFS), parted and sqlite toolset and many more.

Stability and Performance have a negligible price – The Roms are based on Android 1.5 which is pretty much out of date compared to the newer Android phones. If you don’t need the new Market or the Google Maps Navigation features – this is the Rom to go with.

Hero/Espresso Hybrid – v1.2 (based on Android 2.1)

http://htcpedia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1782

Since an official Android 2.x release is yet to come for the Hero, most 2.x custom Roms using leaked HTC Roms have limited Sense UI app and widget support. Many widgets will constantly fault close due to a lot of bugs waiting to be fixed.

This is one of the few 2.x releases with most of the Sense UI apps and widgets working quite stable. Since this release is based on a G1 port, performance is still a little sluggish but should improve with the next few releases.

If you are desperate for Android 2.x and in need of the HTC Sense UI functionality – this would be my recommendation.

Hero21 Community (based on Android 2.1)

http://htcpedia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1448

I have been putting my hopes on this one for a while. There are still quite some bugs in the HTC apps (Music, Alarm Clock, Weather)

Be sure to check with the change logs to make sure apps vital to you are working.

KaguDroid 1.0 (based on Android 2.0)

http://htcpedia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1743

Very fast and perform-ant Rom but no Sense UI. After using Sense for a couple of months now, i simply don’t want to miss it. If you like the standard Android interface – this is certainly worth looking at, as it is a lightweight Rom for your Hero.

Hik@Ri 2.1.0_0 (based on Android 2.1)

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=580339

This is a WWE release (stands for World Wide English) with a functional Sense UI in Android but some minor bugs in the HTC apps & widgets

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Welcome to the next decade – oh yeah and update your spamassassin rules ;)

January 1st, 2010

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/Rules/FH_DATE_PAST_20XX

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40 tips n tricks for new Android users

December 22nd, 2009

This is a compact startup guide for anyone just being introduced to Android:

http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=55788&PageMem=1

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Mobile (WordPress) version online

November 30th, 2009

Just installed the WordPress Mobile Plugin, so you should be able to view this blog from mobile devices. Just gave it at test on my HTC Hero. Not too fancy but functional ;)

Here is a Screenshot of Interconnecting Worlds on the Dolphin Browser taken with ShootMe (Android).

dolphin

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Karmic and BCM43 drivers

October 29th, 2009

Just booted up the new Ubuntu Karmic release in live mode prior to the installation. I always do this to check if there are any incompatibilities with hardware on a new release. This has happened a few times in the past due to driver and kernel module changes.

I checked the live mode to make sure the initial plug and play installed all the drivers needed for the basic operations. The hardware drivers assistant detected the BC4312 wireless card and offered either the free or the proprietary drivers.

If you have worked with Ubuntu in the past, you may have noticed that the free drivers for the BC43 chipsets are very buggy and often lack WPA connectivity so you will have to stick with the proprietary drivers to begin with and replace them later on.

So I rebooted and installed Karmic Koala on my HP550.

After the installation process the hardware driver assitant listed neither the free driver nor the proprietary one which can get you stuck if you are depending on a wireless connection.

In order to get the drivers running, you will have to install the b43-fwcutter package via

apt-get install b43-fwcutter

After the installation, the hardware driver should be listed (if this is not the case, simply reboot the machine).

Select the Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA wireless driver and reboot the machine and you are good to go.

There still needs to be some more improvement handling hardware drivers in Ubuntu to make it more accessible for beginners, but overall the plug & play regarding hardware has become very decent – in my experience even better than Windows 7 if you are not using the newest hardware.

Btw. 9.10 has gone official ;)

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Android mobile client for Nagios

September 25th, 2009

Nagroid is a mobile client that speaks to nagios via http/https licensed under GPLv2.

The client will let you configure category aware notification sounds for either Warning Alarms, Critical Alarms or Down/Unreachable alarms and allows you to filter handled problems.

This app goes along very well with ConnectBot (GPLv3) if  https/https access via SSH tunnel is required.

Pretty neat, but I guess the xmpp notifiaction is more practical to me when it comes to Nagios.

Posted in Linux, Uncategorized, free and open source software, gadgets, networking | No Comments »

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