As Tuesday and Wednesday were such busy days for me, I didn't want to risk bricking my phone. But today I bit the bullet and installed the upgrade, making sure to take backups first of course. Some random experiences, I will update this as I encounter more:
Generally the device responsiveness is lots better - scrolling is smoother, there are less delays etc. Feels very good now.
I restored backups. Upon completion it said something about not being able to restore everything, but then rebooted faster than I could read the notification.
To restore backups, I had to copy my backup file from my PC via USB, then manually move it from /home/user/MyDocs/Backup0 to /home/user/MyDocs/.backups so that the Backup application was able to see it.
After reboot, all Contacts were missing in Contacts app. However executing "tracker-search -c" on the command line revealed I do have some contacts. After waiting for a while, a part of my contacts started appearing in Contacts app. A few minutes later, they were all there - so if you're worried you lost your contacts, just wait.
There is now an official Twitter app and Twitter feeds show up in the feeds page
The famous swipe downwards to close an app gesture can now be enabled from Display settings.
There's a SIM menu (or what you call it) thats shows my operator's services that are on my SIM
Feeds view can show weather as well. Default is Helsinki, Finland for some reason
There is Angry Birds, and it works very fast and smoothly, much better than on WinPhones for example!
Developer mode now has to be separately enabled in settings, but after you do it, Terminal and the usual goodness reappears
Markings on "Developer Edition" are gone
Ovi Store app no longer crashes all the time, and there is Ovi Music.
Upon starting Maps, it asks me for an username and password. It doesn't say what service they are for, but I assumed it's the Nokia ID, which was correct.
There is a WiFi Hotspot app, which is very welcome!
Terminal app has gained new features, an ability to switch between an Shell and Arrows toolbar with the swipe gesture among them
Dealing with duplicated contacts on the N950/N9
I had problems with duplicated contacts. I tried a couple of different solutions, but the one that worked was: export all contacts as vcard files (.VCF). Then delete all your contacts in the contacts app. After that, you can delete .VCF files that match the pattern (?).VCF (because duplicate contacts will be dumped with file names like JANEDOE.VCF, JANEDOE(2).VCF, JANEDOE(3).VCf etc.) and finally, re-import these VCF files using vcardconverter. Watch out, vcardconverter will fail if you have "funny characters" in filenames, so it's a good idea to wrap it around in a for statement, something like this: for i in .VCF;do cp $i tmp.vcf;vcardconverter tmp.vcf;done;rm tmp.vcf.
I'm super-busy during the whole week, but I did manage to get some Nokia N950 unboxing photos taken, and I've made it my primary device right away, so I will find out all the good and the bad that there is to find soon enough. Maybe I'll write more during the weekend, but now, on to the unboxing pictures!
I've been very quiet on the blogging from because since August I have been getting married, quit my job, gone on a honeymoon trip around Australia, and moved to Berlin to work in a new job. Now that yesterday I got my ADSL set up I feel like writing some blog stuff again. I will be putting some MeeGo Conference 2010 / Dublin photos here soon, but first, please go and check out what I wrote about the MeeGo Conference on the Teleca "What Is Your Idea of Tomorrow" blog, parts 1, 2 and 3:
..or why/how to install and use CCache 3.0pre0 in Scratchbox
A few days ago, I was building and rebuilding a Debian package in Scratchbox to see if it builds, installs and works properly after my modifications. To make sure it works, I had to do a full dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot rebuild, which of course does a full clean every time. Each rebuild took 10 minutes, and I started wondering how to make it go faster.
Exec summary
Use ccache 3.0 and make sure your regular build does not use compiler options incompatible with ccache! Read on for details.
A while ago I experimented running various operating systems on the Nokia N900. Now with the availability of N900 hardware emulation in QEMU (see http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/Meego_on_Qemu ) I decided to try this the other way around. The result: Regular N900 Maemo software straight out of the phone boots in QEMU, but no GUI since there is no SGX graphics emulation in the Maemo QEMU yet.
People have asked me to package the Bochs IA-32 PC emulator that I used for running Windows NT 4.0, and today I've done it. It is available from the Fremantle extras-devel repository: http://maemo.org/packages/view/bochs/
I have configured the package in the way that I found works best on the N900 and included a sample config file that works for running NT 4.0, as a starting point for others. Also the version is 2.3.7 and not the latest, since in my experience 2.3.7 was the most stable on the N900 - this might of course change or have already changed.
A while ago, Qt Software released some helpful software and instructions on how to make real homescreen widgets on the N900 using Qt 4.6. As I had already previously implemented my Luxus light meter widget as a sort-of homescreen widget - as part of an experiment if it's possible to do a Qt app for N900 from scratch in one day and get it published too - I was of course intrigued in finding out how easy it would be to enable it as a full-blown homescreen widget. It turned out to be pretty easy!
From the "just for fun!" department: Full version of Mac OS X 10.3 running on the N900! I believe this makes the N900 the first smartphone EVER to run the full version of Mac OS X (at any speed, slow or otherwise). Youtube video below.
I thought to give it a try if one could make a Maemo 5/N900 app from scratch, and publish it on the Maemo.org extras-devel repository, all in just one day. Well, it was possible! The result is the Luxus 0.1 light meter desktop widget, and you can get it from extras-devel today.
Randall Arnold has created an excellent Maemo Community outreach flyer, and I am especially happy about it since he has chosen to use my Maemo Summit 2009 pictures in it. Go and check it out at: http://maemo-daemons.org/maemo-org_community-flyer1_Maemo5.pdf !
People are asking me just exactly how does one install ScummVM? Well, the answer has changed. With my version, you pretty much had to know some basic Maemo hacking to get it installed. However, now as the official version of ScummVM is available from the Maemo Extras-devel repository, all you have to is:
Install scummvm from Application Manager: Select Download, then Games, then scroll until you see ScummVM. Click, follow instructions, and that should do it!
It was only a matter of time, after I got the Bochs PC emulator working on N900, I just had to try how slow Windows NT 4.0 would be inside it I'll post further details of how exactly I did it later, but for now, here it is:
I've received some questions and would like to post the answers right here in case others are wondering the same things about the N900:
Yes, the memory on the device is partitioned so that you have around 1.5GB or so for applications, and the rest for data (images, videos, music, maps, software you use with DOSBox, etc.)
To install Dosbox you have to add one or all of the extras repositories in your device App manager: extras, extras-devel, extras-testing. More instructions about that are available at: https://wiki.maemo.org/Extras
I did some tweaking and uploaded a faster Windows 3.11 running on N900-video to Youtube. The most important changes were setting frameskip=6 in dosbox preferences and installing of S3 video drivers in Windows, which had a huge difference in speed. I would have liked to test how well it would have worked with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, but I still don't have any to try it with.
For laughs, I just had to try running Windows 3.11 using Dosbox on the N900.. worked ok except for the mouse cursor, which was simply all over the place, so I used X11VNC for controlling the mouse remotely..
UpdateI changed Dosbox settings to use Frameskip=2 and now it's running faster, though still not fast.
Come up with new keypresses for the essential features like saving and loading game
Upload the binary package to maemo.org Downloads and fremantle repositories
Submit things to the mainstream project in case I actually do any
production-quality code changes, instead of random hacking around
(though I'm not hiding anything, all my stuff is available upon request
if someone really wants.)
Try to get the screen centered (already happens in fullscreen)
Display the mouse cursor (actually already seems to happen in AGI games like Larry 1)
I have posted my Maemo Summit 2009 photos on flickr. If someone remembers I'm that guy with the weird old-fashioned film camera.. (click picture to open set.)
I have made an initial unofficial build of ScummVM for the N900. It seems to work OK.
It requires some additional packages, all of which are available in the extras, extras-devel or extras-testing repositories, such as: libsdl, libmad, libvorbisidec, libflac, libasound.
All I really did was:
Apply the supplied patch for the N810 (Maemo 4) devices and added the -lX11 flag to linking, since otherwise it could not find the symbol XStoreName which comes from libX11.
Add RX-51 (=N900) into the list of keyboard-equipped Maemo devices in the part where it figures whether or not it's running on a keyboard-equipped device or not
Fix the window focus - due to a Fremantle SDL bug (https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5153)
you couldn't use the keyboard at all since all keypresses went to
wherever you launched Scummvm from (homescreen -> calls up the
Contacts page, xterm -> keypresses appear on command line) otherwise.
I would like to stress out that this is completely based on the previous Maemo porting work and all I did was the abovementioned things on top of that.
Now that I have this running, things to do would be (in no particular order):
Figure out which parts of the Maemo 4 patch are still a) necessary b) working anymore. At least the part that adds the application into the launch menu is still working. The part about bypassing GCC 3.x bugs may not be.
Come up with new keypresses for the essential features like saving and loading games
change the default directory to /home/user/MyDocs (or something) when adding new games
Upload the binary package to maemo.org Downloads and fremantle repositories
Submit things to the mainstream project in case I actually do any production-quality code changes, instead of random hacking around (though I'm not hiding anything, all my stuff is available upon request if someone really wants.)
Try to get the screen centered
Display the mouse cursor (actually already seems to happen in AGI games like Larry 1)
Enable fullscreen mode with some key combo
Things I don't think I'll be able to solve:
Music playback is sometimes choppy
The file selector dialog is not very usable on a touchscreen device