Ok, this is a long one.  This was floating around my brain for a while, and it is time to lay it to rest.  Get a coffee and make yourself comfortable.

$ ls -l ./debian/rules
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mvo mvo 11 2008-11-27 02:50 ./debian/rules -> /usr/bin/dh

Lintian is not happy.

Actually,

$ cat debian/rules
dh $1


works, too, since everybody seems to run debian/rules via /bin/sh anyway.
Lintian still not happy.

Bruce Perens has a good reply to Ari Jaaksi’s keynote, but I am sure that the ‘bright line’ approach is not new to Nokia.

I have not heard the keynote and I haven’t seen a transscript yet, but unless proven wrong, I want to believe that Ari has been misunderstood: with enough determination, you can read what he says as an attack on the mobile phone industry: He might have wanted to say that parts of the Open Source and Free Software communities have a hard time imagining how utterly backwards and behind the mobile phone industry is.

(Just look at what happened when the 3G spectrum licenses were auctioned off.  Insanity.)

When Ari says “Why do we need closed vehicles? We do.”,  I read this as: “I know there are no good reason, only bad ones, let’s not waste time arguing about it and hope the bad reasons go away by themselves.”

When he says “As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules”, he can’t be implying that Nokia is not going to honor the licenses of code that they are using. They have to and they do.  Maybe he means that Nokia can not yet afford to speak out against DRM and device lock-down without being hypocritical, but he knows that people are hoping for such statements.

Yeah, I have nice rose-colored glasses.  I hope Ari clarifies his message in the near future.

(In any case, switching your code to GPLv3 seems like a good thing to do when you are worried about Nokia pulling a Tivo.)

Update: After taking off my rose-colored glasses, I saw this.  Well, what can I say.  Ari, I guess it is better if you let Quim do the talking.

I just upgraded a N800 from Chinook to a internal Diablo pre-release with apt-get. This was never supposed to work, but it just does anyway. Nice!

It’s also quite easy:

• Put the device into R&D mode and disable the lifeguard reset.
• Make sure you have a lot of free space in / and/or move the apt archive cache from /var/cache/apt/archives to a memory card.
• Run apt-get install osso-software-version-rx34-unlocked in a shell that doesn’t die when the network goes down.
• Make some coffee, walk the dogs, plant a tree.
• Updated: Run flash-and-reboot and let it flash the kernel and initfs.
• File bugs.

I hope we can soon announce the repository that you need for this, but I can’t make any promises.


$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
1 emacs


(If you read this in Planet maemo, the formatting is farked up. Please read the original.)

You might have noticed that OS2008 can now backup and restore the names of the packages that you have installed. The Application Manager can take that list and install them all at once. The catalogue configuration of the Application Manager is also backed up and restored, of course.

There is one (small?) snag, though: the pre-configured catalogues are not backed up. This seems to be the right thing to do since we can assume that the new image has a better idea of what the pre-configured catalogues should be than the backup. Unfortunately, the maemo Extras catalogue is pre-configured as “disabled”, and thus, since it is not included in a backup, you always have to enable it explicitly after flashing.

Let me say that again: after flashing, you need to enable the maemo Extras catalogue before being able to restore packages from it. Unfortunately, the first-boot procedure doesn’t give you the opportunity to do this. What will probably work quite well is to perform the restore on first-boot to get all your settings back, but to not accept the offer to install the applications right now. Then open the Application Manager manually, enable the maemo Extras catalogue, and select “Tools > Restore applications…”.

That’s an accident, of course, it’s not by design. Sorry for that. We’ll figure out something for the next release. The easiest thing is to just include the “maemo Extras” repository in the backup, I guess. But then again, why not include all pre-configured catalgues? What do you think?

[ The full blogging experience, this time drunken as a brick layer.. :-]