Droid 1 rooted and ROM'd

I rooted my OG Droid a long time ago and just realized I hadn't put up a post about it. :/ It was really simple with all the tutorials out there and ROM installs are a snap to install and try out. Here's how I did it:

* Tips: Power button is Page-back in recovery screen, volume is up/down and camera is

1. Rooting - Followed instructions on www.droidforums.net/forum

      Files: MC1_A855_1282081087_Recovery-Only_SPRecovery_0.99.3b.zip

              MotoCache1_Complete_Root_v1.1-update.zip

              sbf_flash (run as sudo)

2. NANDROID - Instructions at www.simplemobilereview.com

1. Boot with X pressed
2. Option 5 is backup/restore
3. Pick one of 4 choices: Simple Nandroid Backup (and Restore), Advanced Nandroid Backup (and Restore)
4. Go back to the main Recovery Mode menu and chose 'reboot system now'
5. Copy the \SD Card\nandroid directory entire to your hard disk or somewhere else safe

3. Titanium Backup

• Must be rooted to use this
• Download from Android Market
• Do initial batch backup of your programs and data

4. Sapphire ROM - Download at Sapphire 1.1.0

Installation is performed using the standard update.zip installation method:

1. Download the update.zip file at the top of this page
2. Reboot your phone into recovery mode
3. MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR PHONE
4. Reset phone to factory default (THIS STEP IS REQUIRED FOR THIS VERSION
5. Push sapphire-1.1.0-update.zip to /sdcard/update.zip
6. Tell your recovery to allow update.zip installation
7. Install from /sdcard/update.zip
8. If you plan on installing a new kernel or theme, simply follow the same steps as above with those zip files.

5. Google Apps - Download at http://sapphire.ccroms.net/wiki/releases/sapphire-1.1.0

   File: sapphire-1.1.0-gapps-update.zip
   - All my apps musta been set to sync because market apps were re-installed!

   - Google took a couple minutes to sync but everything was back on in no time!

6. Different Sapphire theme

   Black Bar theme on http://sapphire.ccroms.net/wiki/releases/sapphire-1.0.0

   Black Bar Theme Download

   - update GEM Setting: change Clock, Date, Ticker Text to #ffffffff (was #ff000000)

**UPDATE**
Eventually updated by manually installing Sapphire 2.0.2

Wifi on HP 2133 working in Ubuntu Netbook!!

Installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 on the HP Mini Note 2133 and whadya know, wifi worked out of the box!! Finally!!
http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook

I really like the Netbook Remix. It has a simple, well laid out interface perfect for the small screen and it's the first OS that hadn't completely bogged down the processor.

Yet another attempt to get Broadcom BCM4312 working results in SUCCESS!!
http://hp2133.umsw.de/

Moto DROID Keyboard Alternative

I got the Moto DROID specifically for the hard keyboard. Unfortunately, it terrible! My fingers hit the little chiclet keys 2 at a time, the bottom of the screen blocks my fingers from hitting the top row of keys and the rocker is in the way of my right hand... The voice input method has turned out to be a lifesaver in many situations but the on-screen keyboard is lacking in many aspects and highly annoying to use.

On the positive, there are tons of replacement keyboards. I got ShapeWriter and it is an awesome swipe keyboard! Noticed the TO drop-down doesn't show contact list in landscape but otherwise it is incredibly predictive, accurate....and fast!

I just installed HTC IME keyboard and couldn't believe the difference! This is such an improvement, from keyspacing to setting options...WOW!

===
Install/Use instructions found at www.droid-life.com. Download HTC_IME.apk and Clicker.apk.

Then copy to sdcard via these instructions www.brighthub.com.

Long press an input field and choose TouchInput and you're all set.
===

I haven't played with any of the settings but the first thing I'm going to do is turn off the vibe on keypress option when I find it. Beyond that there are tons of settings to play with.

Anyone unhappy with the standard Moto DROID keyboard should try the HTC IME keyboard!

Motorola DROID

Got the Motorola DROID a bit ago and am loving it! My life is organized once again.

Came with Android 1.6 installed but shortly after, I woke up to the update notice for 2.1 and updated immediately with no problems.

So far my most used apps are Google Listen, Calendar Pad and GDocs. My most wanted app I plan on making my first coding project is a hook into Google Tasks.

This really is a small, portable computer you can carry in your hand. Having contacts, calendar, web, podcasts and notes at your fingertips is too convenient. Automatic Syncing to the web is something I've missed since I had the Sidekick II and III.

Upcoming posts will be app lists and specifics on why I like them and how I use them.

MINI 2133 XP Downgrade

In a word, FAIL!

Try as I may, never got a clean boot...

Ubuntu 9.04 on my work laptop

I am officially NOT a MAC guy! It broke so many times, work took it back, thankfully! I will say I miss one thing, the touchpad was incredible, but that's about all I liked about it...

I was given a Dell Latitude E6500 to work on and the hardware was totally linux compatible. Local linux guru partitioned 10GB out for linux for me to play with after he loaded the Windows image. :>

I installed the new Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. There were no issues with the install and the boot manager, I assume GRUB(?), works just fine letting me boot into Windows for work and Ubuntu for play. And you have NO idea how nice it is to have wifi finally work out-of-the-box with linux! This is the first non-Broadcom chip laptop I've had and I will never get another product with Broadcom in it...ever!

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= Software
========
Can't remember if I installed from browser or downloaded install, but I got FLASH plugin for Firefox installed and am keeping up with my subscriptions on youtube.com again. Had to do the backspace trick for Firefox I wrote about here.

Open Office (www.openoffice.org) came pre-installed and opens files off my thumbdrive with no problem.

Truecrypt now has a GUI for linux! The install was a little weird since it was a run file instead of a dpkg install... Download tarball from http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads. I had to gunzip, then tar xvf which leaves a script file. Run this file with "sudo ./truecrypt-6.2-ubuntu-x86" and it will open a GUI install, sweet! Followed the prompts and Trucrypt was install and available in Applications -> Other menu.

KeePassX on linux. This one was a little more complicated. Download .deb file from a mirror then go to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=357601 for dependencies fix.

1. cd to downloaded keepassx_0.3.4-1_i386.deb
2. Install dependencies: "sudo aptitude install libc6 libgcc1 libqt4-core libqt4-gui libstdc++6 libx11-6 libxtst6"
3. sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/keepassx_0.3.4-1_i386.deb
   

I was able to open the .kdb from thumbdrive I've been using on Windows without any problems.

That's it for now. Next I'm going to lookup how to move programs around in the Applications menu.

OS choices?

OK, the replacement laptop has Windows Vista already installed so the question is whether to wipe or dual boot. I decided to dual boot mostly so I could play with Vista Gadgets and also to still be able to help others with Windows.

Now lets get to the good stuff. Downloaded gparted-0.3.7 from sourceforge and ran from an external CD/DVD drive I borrowed from my bro (thanx man!). Keep an eye on the screen when the mini is booting and press F9 to get the boot options menu. Select the external drive and hit .

The details of gparted depend on what your goal is for partitioning your drive. I ended up with about a 45GB NTFS partition for Vista of which over 20GB is OS, sheesh 20+ really??? There is also a small HP_RESTORE partition that I left alone.

Then I created a 75GB FAT32 data drive where I'll keep everything like music, movies and general files for any OS to access.

At the recommendation of the linux guru at work, I made a 10GB ext3 root(/) partition for the linux OS and like about 5GB /home partition. He said this is separated out so you can recompile the OS without losing your /home settings and files. I will definitely be learning more about this as I dig deeper into learning the linux kernel.

Lastly, the general recommendation for swap space is to match your RAM so I made a 2GB /swap partition. The remaining unallocated drive space is for playing with other flavors of linux.

OK, slight bummer, HP SLED 10 DVD is full restore disk so it wanted to wipe the entire drive. You can download the iso from hp.com but wasn't impressed with Suse enough to go through all that. Alternative: Ubuntu!

Man there are some SMART people out there!! I followed the instructions on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HP2133 exactly so I won't repeat anything here. End result following site instructions step-for-step was that all worked perfectly.

Summary: I have a dual boot Windows Vista and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) mini laptop! Much better solution than all the UMPCs I've been looking at! :>

Oh and for fun I installed http://www.yawcam.com/ on Windows side and it worked without a hitch. Linux side coming soon.

Mount network share from linux

Was able to mount a NAS drive share very easily.

1. Open the Adept Manager
2. Install smbfs (which installed samba-common)
3. At the command line use 'mount -t smbfs //[Share IP]/[path] /mnt/nas
4. Add alias in .bashrc file for quickly mounting share
alias mountnas='mount -t smbfs //[Share IP]/[path] /mnt/nas'

I'll add more on samba as I do more with it...

Installing Truecrypt in Kubuntu 7.04

Truecrypt is a free, open-source, multi-platform encryption program. It has worked perfectly for me in Windows XP on multiple computers. The basic concept is you create an password protected encrypted file (volume) of a specified size that holds your private data. It is mounted and treated like another drive on your computer.
Installing truecrypt on Kubuntu was really simple:

1. Download the tarball from http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php to your home directory. I used truecrypt-4.3a-ubuntu-7.04-x86.tar.gz.


2. Move the file to /usr/src/ by typing "sudo mv ~/truecrypt-4.3a-ubuntu-7.04-x86.tar.gz /usr/src"
   


3. unzip and untar the file by typing "sudo tar -xvfz truecrypt-4.3a-ubuntu-7.04-x86.tar.gz"


4. cd into the new directory and check out the Readme.txt


5. I used the 'dpkg -i' command with no problems typing "sudo dpkg -i truecrypt_4.3a-0_i386.deb"
   

Pretty simple and I encountered no errors. I also added some aliases to .bashrc to quickly mount the volumes I use.

1. Make the directory where your mounted volume will be: 'mkdir /mnt/[mount name]'


2. Add an alias in .bashrc to mount the volume: alias mountvolA='truecrypt /media/ExternalDrive/PathToVolume/VolumeName /mnt/volA'

Next step is to figure out how to put shortcuts on the desktop to be able to easily open those mounted volumes.

Kubuntu 7.04 - Feisty Fawn

I installed Kubuntu 7.04 - Feisty Fawn on the linux partition and have been messing around with different things. Adept has tons of packages available for easy installation. I installed TrueCrypt and was able to mount a volume easily. Did some other things but that is what I can think of right now.

Linux kernel does not have native support for my Broadcom 43xx wifi card. I tried ndiswrapper with windows .inf file and the Broadcom drivers but nothing worked. Wired NIC works fine so at least I can get online.