Now that Intel have a slightly less crap driver for the Poulsbo/GMA500 chipset, with the more recent EMGD driver, I've converted one of my O2 Jogglers to be a touchscreen media player in the kitchen. I'm using Arch Linux, and I've just released some AUR packages to support it. If you install:

• joggler-xorg-conf
• linux-joggler

It'll have a kernel and xorg support customised for the Joggler. I'm running bog standard KDE on it, and it works pretty well with hardware OpenGL support. I've not managed to get video acceleration working though, but smplayer/mplayer plays all standard definition files fine.

The linux-joggler package has my joggler-specific patches forward ported to 3.2, so if you need them for a different distro, you can grab them from the above link (download the tarball and extract).

Here's a pic of the setup :) 

A 15 minute walk in the winds currently battering Edinburgh.

NOTE: This is a binaural recording; you MUST use headphones to get the proper effect!

 

While I'm at it, Check_fus Downloader is a windows app, which can download and decrypt official Samsung firmware updates directly from Samsung's servers. Avoids having to hunt about on forums!

I've been happily using my Galaxy S II for the last few months, and of course I've replaced the original firmware with a custom one.

However, recently a colleague acquired one as well. His had the stock Orange firmware, and has a special app called "Signal Boost". Searching around, I found that this is actually an implementation of GAN / UMA. I'd heard of this technology, but wasn't aware it was available with Android. As it turns out, it has been implemented by Kineto. The net effect is the phone will tunnel through your local WIFI and use that instead of the GSM network. This is quite handy if you're in a crap signal area. Of course, your mobile nework has to support it, and luckily Orange do in the UK.

I'm using cyanogenmod 7.1 on my phone, and as this is a proprietary impementation of GAN, it is not included. However, they have included the kernel-side device, gan-eth required by the proprietary user space code, which makes things a lot easier.

Basically, we need to extract a few files from the Orange ROM and add them into the cyanogen ROM on the phone, and that's about it: I have it working on my phone now.

Instructions

The following instructions are using Linux for the extraction, and cyanogenmod on the phone, but I assume they'll be similar for other ROMs.

Oh, and obviously doing this is entirely at your own risk, will void your warranty and eat your gerbils etc etc.

You will need:

• 7zip


• Orange UK rom image downloaded from this page. Grab the BVKG3 one for Orange UK.


• The simg2img utility from here (you'll need to compile it). If you run Arch Linux, there's an AUR build for it called "ext4_utils".


• ADB, and developer mode enabled on the phone.

The following will extract the files on the Linux machine:

7z x GT-I9100_ORA_I9100BVKG3_I9100BVKG2_I9100ORAKG3.exe
tar xf GT-I9100_ORA_I9100BVKG3_I9100BVKG2_I9100ORAKG3.TAR
simg2img cache.img cache.raw
mkdir c
mount -o loop cache.raw c
cp c/recovery/sec_csc.zip .
unzip sec_csc.zip
umount c
simg2img factoryfs.img factoryfs.raw
mount -o loop factoryfs.raw c
cp c/lib/libsec-ril.so .
umount c

Now, copy and paste the following into a text file called "default.prop":

rild.libpath=/system/lib/librilswitch.so
rilswitch.vendorlibpath=/system/lib/libsec-ril.so
rilswitch.ganlibpath=/system/lib/libganril.so

After that, you'll have all the files needed. Plug in your phone to USB to push the files across with adb as follows:

adb shell remount -o rw,remount /system
adb push system/lib/libganril.so /system/lib
adb push system/lib/libkineto.so /system/lib
adb push system/lib/librilswitch.so /system/lib
adb push system/app/WiFi-Calling.apk /system/app
adb push libsec_ril.so /system/lib
adb push default.prop /system

Finally, reboot the phone, go to the Signal boost app, and enable it. After a few seconds (assuming your wifi is strong enough) the red house icon on your status bar should go green, and the GSM signal bars should drop to 0. If you use "adb logcat", you can see lots of output as it negotiates the connection.

Observations

I originally tried this using the libsec-ril.so that came with cyanogen, but logcat showed rild crashed as soon as I tried to enable wifi calling. The one from the orange rom solved this. I'm assuming it either needs some sort of co-operation from the hardware RIL, or unloading the RIL on the fly hadn't ever really been tested before.

It sounds like its switching the RIL implementation on the fly, which is quite cool.

I wish this was a standard feature of android; it might encourage more networks to support it.

just testing

Meet my favourite new backup tool: Duplicity. It can do incremental encrypted backups to a variety of destinations, for example ssh, webdav, Amazon S3. It also seems fast compared to other solutions I've tried, and its really really simple to get going!

Farewell, rsnapshot and rdiff-backup!

I've been following this project for a while; I've even contributed some reverse engineering work to it. (I bought one of the devices from dabs a while back). Note that the majority of the work has been done by Steve Kerrison and Antti Palosaari.

However, up until today I've been unable to use it as I didn't have a DVB-T2 signal. This changed on the 15th of June when Craigkelly's digital switchover was completed. Unfortunately the driver isn't available in mainline linux yet, so I've just forward-ported it to 2.6.39. The temp patch is available here.

It seems to work fine; I'm using (an unmodified!) tvheadend as a headend, and XBMC as a network client. Its a pity the actual content is still as poor :)