a wanderer in transit

So thanks to some ingenious folks, I managed to install, what feels like a pre-release version, Froyo onto my Nexus One. The link to the upgrade image on the Google server is gone, but if you search hard enough, you will probably find a mirror somewhere.

There are already too many blog posts, videos out there on the broad improvements in Froyo, but for me, it was a little fix that brought a smile to my face.

Gtalk synch (almost)! I love that Gtalk messages typed on the laptop browser now appears in the mobile version automatically. It’s not a biggie like having Flash or a faster browser but it was rather annoying when it didn’t before. I frequently connect on both the laptop and the mobile at the same time and it’s nice to be able to pick up the mobile and continue the conversation without skipping a beat.

I do wish that the Gtalk messages from the mobile will sync automatically back to the browser chat window but half a loaf is heck-a-lot more than none.

Another cool feature, which incidentally was demo-ed during Google I/O 2010, is the Google Phone to Chrome function. This is supposedly arriving with the next version of Android, 3.0 “Gingerbread”, but an alpha-ish implementation is already available for Froyo with the Chrome to Phone extension. A really handy method to send website links to the phone and the setup instructions are relatively easy to follow.

Thanks to a side project, I had the chance to dip my toes into Google Maps API and some general geo hackery.

First up was a long dip in the Google Maps API developer documentation and API references. Mike William’s Google Maps API Tutorials were a god-send for getting up to speed on what’s possible with the API and a treasure trove of sample code for reference.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Go to System > Administration > Language Support > Install / Remove Languages
2. Select Chinese (simplified) and check all the components available
3. From Synaptic Package Manager, install scim and scim-pinyin
4. Start Terminal and run im-switch -c and choose “scim-bridge”
5. Reboot
6. Use control-space to toggle the Chinese/pinyin IME 就可以写中文了！

Help gleaned from here mainly.

My recent fail whale of an upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic made me realised that I have forgotten to note down a couple of stuff here. This girl geek cannot live without her vi/vim but the stock install of vim-tiny in Ubuntu is woefully inadequate for the CLI text-editing ninja. Please upgrade to vim (full) from the Synaptic Package Manager or using:

sudo apt-get install vim

For starters, this will allow you to use the cursor keys (up/down/left/right) properly in insert mode and you will be able to use custom colour schemes for syntax colouring. My favourite scheme so far is the wombat.

There are probably much better editors available if you do a lot of coding. I use Eclipse when I need a full IDE, but for my dabble-ish codes on the laptop, vim is usually quite sufficient.

Karmic Koala popped out of the oven recently, and I decided to do my first upgrade. My gut told me that it was not a great idea to jump on Karmic so early, but my itchy fingers got ahead of me.

It was a Bad Idea™.

I should have done a trial run with the Live CD, but against my better judgement, I decided to do a direct upgrade. Unfortunately, the upgrade through the Update Manager did not work for some reason (some silly reason I cannot remember). I then downloaded a copy of the alternate installer and upgraded from the mounted iso.

Perhaps it was the tweaking on Jaunty that did me in, but the new 2.6.31-14 kernel just wouldn’t go beyond the loading screen, not even in Recovery mode. I was able to get further with the original 2.6.28 kernel but had strange problems like the screen occasionally blanking out on me after logging in. Hibernate also stopped working completely. No amount of tweaking helped.

Sigh, not good. My only option was to do a fresh install; but will it be Jaunty or Karmic?

Being a sucker for punishment, I grit my teeth, backed up my home folder and started with Karmic from scratch. With a little hindsight from my previous Jaunty install, I set aside a swap partition this time to save myself a little heartburn and it seemed to have worked. Hibernate/sleep worked perfectly this time. I had to install configure-trackpoint again to fix the sluggish trackpoint but a major consolation was that settings stayed this time! No more lost settings after waking up from hibernate. Yay!

Lots of little stuff here and there I had to tweak again.

• configure-trackpoint
• Shiki-Colors – theme
• tp_smapi – for HDAPS (Thinkpad only)
• tpb – for hotkeys (Thinkpad only)
• Workaround to turn off the laptop backlight
• msttcorefonts – fonts
• Compiz Config Settings Manager
• Media streaming
• Google Chrome

There’s probably more to do over the next couple of days, but I am grateful for the little improvements I’ve noticed in Karmic over Jaunty:

• Boot up / hibernate / wake seems a little faster After a couple of reboots later, no it was not really faster. If anything, it actually felt slower. And there’s still a weird momentary flicker now and then
• Intel graphics worked better – no hack needed so far
• Windows key worked OOTB
• No more irritating beeps!

I am slightly bummed that there’s no option to customise the login screen anymore in Karmic, and I am not too comfortable with having the username displayed by default.

Overall, Karmic does feel a little improved over Jaunty, probably due in no small part to the Hundred Paper Cuts project (I love this definition of a paper cut). I really wished the upgrade wasn’t such a disaster personally, but I did know better than to jump in so early.

Fortunately, this was my personal laptop and didn’t really have that much data or software installed. So a wipeout upgrade was more annoying than painful for me. Still, I can’t recommend that if any “Joe Schmoe” do this without some technical assistance on standby.

In the meantime, if you intend to upgrade to Karmic, earn some karma points first and go read the release notes will ya?