Skrrp's Android Blog

Absolutely loving this IME as it takes a lot of pain out of typing on the Nexus.

It also produces some amazing results:

Upgraded to Cyanogen 6 today and found the make-everything-work rebuild permissions option. Now working great with all my apps, root and busybox. Great bit of software.

I’ve already got the WordPress application for the Nexus so I can use it as a content creation device while on the move, but yesterday morning I put it through the most comprehensive administration workout so far.

On the train in to work I used the web browser and an SSH session to install a secondary WordPress build on my server.

It was fiddly, tricky and the on-screen keyboard did not help one bit in the SSH session, but I was able to copy and extract the tarball, set up the config file, install it, alter my vhosts setup and reboot Apache all from within Android on the Nexus.

It is a real computer.

On my first day out with Froyo it seems to be tanking the battery massively. Down to under 50% charge in half a day and needed a mid-day charge. It’s also getting a lot hotter around the base.

I’m going to keep an eye on it and possibly back the radio firmware down to an earlier release if this continues.

Or, why Steve Jobs can kiss my ring.

After many unsuccessful attempts to get a Cyanogen build to remain stable on the Nexus (*cries* so many good features) I have opted for the rooted Froyo build, available from here:

FRF50

Some goods, some bads. beebPlayer and Skype seem to be unavailable from the market for this build for the time being. On the up side, the new release appears to be a lot faster and I now have access to the official Flash app from Adobe. While there are many reasons to hate Flash, Jobs seems to have picked the wrong ones as it works perfectly on the Nexus.

Sound is exceedingly quiet in the video. Video quality is down to use of the G1 as a capture device.

Coming soon (when I can be bothered): Open Office on the Ubuntu build.

I have seen the question asked about what user agent the Nexus uses. If no one else has already answered it, it is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-gb; Nexus One Build/ERD79) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

Nothing major new to report. While I was downloading and extracting a large source archive Android was becoming sluggish and throwing up a lot of Force Close/Wait dialogs for standard services.

I kept hitting Wait but suddenly the Nexus rebooted, going to its shiny graphical X intro. Obviously my VNC died as the wireless rebooted but as soon as it was back up I could re-connect and my session was still live.

The importance of nandroid backups cannot be stressed enough.

Installed the 3G patch (early, impatient) and killed wifi by also installing the optional high memory kernel. The radio patch itself works amazingly, pushing the Nexus to slightly better than the G1 in overall terms. Still hit the blackspots where 2G and 3G are passing the buck, but that is exactly the same for my other radio devices.

I have re-partitioned my microSD to give 3.5GB total in the ext2 partition. At this stage, 2.1GB of that is used.

I always use a Linux box to play with the partitions and I am very careful about the order in which things are unmounted and unplugged. Two resizes so far and no data loss.

It’s not pretty, but it works.

The bug seems to be with the way that Gnome interfaces with the VNC server. There are a lot of different suggestions over the net to fix it. I have found one that works for me, but I will be trying the vnc4server one at some point.

Hugues Fournier posted a reply to Scrambled Keys in feisty ubuntu desktop which saves a working good keymap and then runs it in the Gnome session.

To do this you need to VNC in to your LXDE environment and run the command:

xmodmap -pke -display :1 > ~/xmodmap.map ( if your VNC display is :1 )

Then create a shell script in your filesystem containing:

#!/bin/bash
cat ~/xmodmap.map | xmodmap -

and chmod u+x it.

This is where I differ from Hughes’ instructions. You need to run this script while within the Gnome environment. For now, I have managed to use mouse control to edit the Menu. You can browse to the script and then enter anything as a name (you can tidy this later). Run the script from the menu and test. I will be looking at ways to auto-boot it later.