The phone is dead

I bought my first smartphone, a Nokia N900, just before Christmas, 2009. Chosen because its OS was the closest thing to a stock Linux distro I could find, the N900 has stood me in good stead for the last almost two years. I’ve used it to ssh into servers and restart failed services, stream video from a LEGO robot to my laptop, and Skype my family in the States while I was in Lebanon (if I remember correctly, it was the first smartphone to include Skype, though I may be wrong).

So fast-forward to a few weeks ago, with me sitting at my home in southwest Washington, enjoying my sabbatical. I glanced down at my phone and noticed something strange: The phone signal bar was gone, and in its place was a funky symbol that I finally realized was a SIM card with a red line through it. Restarting the phone fixed the problem. But over the next few days, the red SIM of death (RSOD) appeared more and more often and I finally reached the end of my rope.

Some research on the web, and a dmesg or two later revealed that the phone’s modem was constantly resetting, and, given the reset rate, was probably going bad. As I bought the phone in the US, it only had a one year warranty… and I was screwed. Bummer. Less than two years after buying it, my $550 phone had become an expensive unimpressive tablet. Thanks, Nokia. And now I had to replace it.

Long live the phone

During the HP Touchpad firesale, I managed to get ahold of one, and was really impressed by its ease of use, especially when it comes to multitasking. So I went to see what kind of WebOS phone I could get for cheap, and came up with the HP Veer. I managed to get it and a touchstone for just over $100, including shipping.

So far, I’ve been fairly impressed with it. Like Android, WebOS uses the Linux kernel, but not much of the higher stack. It doesn’t use X or any of the other standard applications that make up a normal Linux distro. Having said that, WebOS has strengths of its own. The N900 was great at multitasking, but the Veer takes it to a new level. WebOS’s card interface is not only easy to use, but also quite fun. There’s community-created software available from preware.org, and I’ve managed to overclock both the Touchpad and the Veer.

My main annoyance with the Veer is that it can sometimes be a bit unresponsive; I’ll tap the hang up button and it will flash, I’ll tap it again and it will flash again, but it won’t hang up until the third or fourth tap. I can understand that it may be thinking, but I find it a bit annoying to have the phone act like it received the event and then ignore it.

The most common complaint you’ll hear about the Veer is that it’s too small. And it is small, very small. But I’ve got small hands, so I don’t find the keyboard hard to use, and they do make good use of the space they’ve got on the display. And, after carrying around the brick that is the N900, it’s nice to have something so light that I can barely feel it in my pocket.

All in all, I find the Veer to be more fun and more intuitive than my wife’s new Android phone (which she is rapidly falling in love with).

Conclusion

So now I get to work out whether to try to get a few bucks by putting my N900 on ebay (but who would buy what’s essentially a two-year-old 5 inch tablet when there’s far better available), or keep it as a remote control for my media center in Lebanon.

And I get to see whether I can do the same kind of cool things with the Veer that I could do with the N900. Unfortunately the Veer doesn’t seem to come with gstreamer, so the LEGO robot idea might be out. But, I have hopes that the Veer will be at least somewhat as hackable as the N900 was.

Offtopic

For those who have been following along, Naomi (my wife) and I are currently on sabbatical in the States, following a month in Ireland. I was hoping for more time to work on Fedora stuff, but the last couple of months have been a bit crazy and I can’t realisticly expect the next few to be much different. I should be able to continue fixing the bugs that have popped up in yum-presto, but not much more than that.

I would love to meet any Fedora people in the area (I’m about an hour north of Portland on I-5), but haven’t had the time to track down if anyone’s actually in the area. I’d also love to do a conference, but, again, don’t know what’s in the area.

For those in Lebanon, we will be back at the end of this year, and I’m already looking forward to seeing you again.

We had a blast at the InstallQuest last Friday! I’d say that roughly 20 people showed up, and most of them were students from LES Loueizeh and LES Tyre.

We started at 4:00PM with a short introduction to Linux in general, and then Fedora and Ubuntu. David Correia (the Elementary Coordinator in Tyre), Paul-Marc Bougharios (a local Fedora Ambassador), and I presented Unity, KDE and GNOME Shell respectively. We then took a quick break, and started both the installs and the sessions.

The Sessions

My wife, Naomi, gave a talk on creating documents using OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, and then exporting them as PDFs so anyone with a computer can read them. She was only supposed to go for fifteen minutes, but there was so much interest that she ended up going over thirty minutes.

Hisham Hamdan, the Assistant System Administrator here in Loueizeh, then did a session on package management and system updates. We broke for pizza (generously provided by the school), and returned to a session on photo editing using the GIMP by David. He showed how to desaturate a photograph except for one small element.

Finally, I finished off the sessions with a short demo on how to use photorec (part of testdisk) to recover photos deleted off of an SD card.

The Installs

While the sessions were happening in the main computer room, where people could either use the school computers or their own, the installs were happening in the small computer room next door. We had cleared the computers from the room, leaving a few monitors, keyboards and mice just in case anyone brought desktops without the peripherals (which ended up being pointless; all of the installs were done on laptops). We left the network cables in the room and did PXE installs where possible.

Both Tyre and Loueizeh use Fedora with GNOME Shell as our default desktop, so I wasn’t too surprised that a majority of the guests chose to install Fedora. What did surprise me was the number that chose KDE. Paul-Marc did an excellent job of demonstrating just how functional (and pretty) KDE has become. For someone who hasn’t used KDE since my Mandrake days, and who hasn’t looked at KDE since 4.0 came out, it was quite the eye-opener! KDE has become very impressive, and, while I prefer the simplicity of the Shell, I can see why many are so passionate about it.

We probably ended up doing about fifteen installs, with the final one ending just before 11:00PM. We only had one failure, a laptop with a BIOS password that the owner didn’t know.

Lessons learned

While I thought the InstallQuest went well for the first time around, there are a few things I’d love to see done differently the next time around. The sessions were a big hit, but there was some disruption as people would have to leave their installs to attend a session, and then try to pick up from where they stopped. We may try to split the sessions from the installs next time around.

I would also like to see more people from the other Linux communities in Lebanon involved. We had good representation for Fedora, but only one person came to represent Ubuntu, and there was nobody from the other communities.

Related to this, we need to do a lot more advertising the next time around. While we did advertise on the Fedora and Ubuntu Lebanon mailing lists, and on a few other Lebanon-specific open source sites, I’m convinced we didn’t do as well as we could at reaching out to the schools and universities here in Lebanon.

We will be doing another InstallQuest, probably in January or February. By making some simple changes, we hope to make it an even bigger success.

A huge thank you to those involved in making the InstallQuest a success: Hisham, Paul-Marc, David, Naomi, Steve White, the principal of LES Loueizeh, and all those those who participated.

InstallQuest logo – Released under a CC-BY license. Modified from USB Flash Drive by Ambuj Saxena