abology

I found the following gem on talk.maemo.org: “For the slightly above average user, the N900 is great. For Linux users, the N900 will replace your fleshlight”. There is really not much to add: it’s almost an haiku, so kudos to livefreeordie

As you might know, a pristine N900 supports tethering over USB only. To make it work over BT, you need to follow the instructions for adding a DUN server on Maemo.org’s wiki. Being always in a hurry, I never actually tried it until I came across Philip’s post on controlling Bluetooth DUN with upstart on the n900.

The good news? Using Upstart is the correct approach and obviously works perfectly as far as the data connection is concerned.

The bad news? Apparently, there’s some weird interaction going on with tethering and the phone data counter:  the traffic caused by the attached computer is not added to Settings->Phone->Data counter, which is simply overwritten. According to the dataplan monitor applet, before tethering I had used 24MB out of my monthly quota of 3GB but when the connection ended the counter was reading 2MB instead of 26MB. The reset date for the counter was unchanged, though, so I’m inclined to think this is not the intended result.

Bottom line: if you rely on the applet to monitor your quota usage and wish to use tethering, be aware that you need an alternate way to check your situation, such as 3 Wired Portal

EDIT: apparently the data counter is clobbered also when using DUN over USB

I’ve been following Maemo for a while now since buying my N810 on eBay before summer and even participated in the Amsterdam summit last october, where Nokia graciously gave all of us a pre-production N900 on a 6 month loan.

As a wannabe developer, the experience with Maemo 4 (Diablo) was great and it looks like it will get even better with Maemo 5 (Fremantle): coming up now is the Maemo Barcelona Long Weekend, a 3 day event where developers will meet UX specialists to further improve the usability of the interfaces.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend (can’t take enough days off my day job) so when qgil mentioned the mere possibility of a similar event in Italy I jumped at the chance and started organising it!

You’re welcome to join the discussion on talk.maemo.org and also to spread the word to as many Linux developers as you can: we need mindshare, we need ideas, we need locations and dates. Oh, well, at least we have an idea of possible dates but everything is still very fluid so, please, do give your contribution.

After much tweaking and fiddling, my port of OpenVPN is now in the extras-devel repository for Fremantle. This means you can now run a vpn on your Nokia N900, as shown below. Just download Mikko’s great OpenVPN applet and you’re set! Oh and try using port 443 instead of 53, higher chance of being unfiltered over your typical 3G connection.

OpenVPN applet

Following a request on talk.maemo.org my friend Matteo and I organized a quick demo for a couple of forum users, Andrea and Rodrigo. As it happened, the location selected for the demo was a nice store in the city centre, with large fruity logos everywhere

We spent a nice hour or so chatting together and demonstrating the capabilities of the Nokia N900 and even took some pictures of the event. What made it particularly funny in my opinion was the location and the white/black contrast of the products on display and our N900’s. Maemo über alles!

So, here are the pictures!

N900 box in a fruity store

Rodrigo and me

N900 and a white fruity mouse

Guys, be patient: this beauty will soon hit the stores!

There’s no nice way to put this: the initial version of my OpenVPN package for Maemo had a couple of nasty dependency problems and should not be used. You can read it all on Maemo Talk.

The newer version will hit the Extras repository as soon as possible. For the time being, here is the version I built on my sdk.

Following a tip from a fellow blogger, I tried customizing the backup config in Maemo, with mixed results: on one hand I am extremely pleased that the system is smart enough to realize that you probably wish to restore one of the backups you have and prompts you to reinstall all those apps that you had after reflashing, on the other hand I am a bit puzzled that not all files have been properly saved and restored.

More specifically, this is supposed to backup all of /etc/openvpn:

<backup-configuration>
 <locations>
   <location type="dir" category="settings">/etc/openvpn</location>
 </locations>
</backup-configuration>

instead of leaving out the key file, forcing me to regenerate it. No, the file was not even saved while the following files were saved but not restored:

/etc/osso-backup/my-custom-backup.conf
/etc/hostname, hosts
/etc/systemui/systemui.xml

Something fishy is going on… will investigate.

EDIT: backup is missing those files which are not readable by user.

I wanted to try out the new “subnet” topology in recent versions of OpenVPN, but this required that all clients be running a version that supported such option: unfortunately, on Maemo “Diablo” the available version was v2.0.9-4etch1maemo1… close, but no cigar.

Easiest way besides having someone else do it for you is to download both the older Maemo version and the current Debian one and manually compare the patches, a long and tiresome proposition. Fortunately, there is a tool called the Debian Patch Splitter which can split your typical jumbo-sized Debian patch into more manageable chunks. Using it, I was able to determine that the changes required to “maemify” the package are rather small: openvpn-debian2maemo.diff.gz is just a couple of screenfuls and applies to the Debian-patched source directory.

As you can see in my patch, I removed the dependencies on the two blacklist packages (they’re quite big for the NIT) and changed a few minor options in the debian/rules file. Also, I edited /etc/default/openvpn to inhibit autostarting (password-protected keys and booting do not mix well), added a backup configuration entry and an adapted version of the resolvconf script.

Did I mention that the newer OpenVPN that we have just built here requires a more recent libssl than the one shipped with Diablo? Ouch. Luckily, the version in Maemo “Fremantle” works fine, after rebuilding from the sources.

Happy hacking.

EDIT: removed broken patch link.