Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

After restoring my Galaxy Nexus, all was fine except for sending email.  I could get email, but when I tried to send one, the message would go in the Outbox with “Sending…” next to it.   Rebooting didn’t help.  Neither did wiping the cache from Recovery.  The answer was to clear data for GMail in the Application Manager under Settings.  The link says to do this for the GMail Storage app, too, but I didn’t have one of those.  Just clearing GMail was enough.

I tried updating CyanogenMod 9 on my Galaxy Nexus.  The first step is to perform a Nandroid backup.  You can do that by powering off the phone, holding volume up and down and then power until the phone vibrates.  This might take 15 seconds or so.  The Android logo will appear on the screen with a big green arrow above it that says “Start”.  Let go of the keys.  Use volume down to select Recovery Mode and press Power.  Select “backup and restore”, then “backup.”

After loading the new CyanogenMod ROM, the phone wouldn’t boot right.  It would start, but not connect to the  phone network.  After a while it’d reboot itself.  I’d had this problem once before.  I rebooted into Recovery and tried a restore, but it failed with the message “Error while restoring /data!”  Googling recommends wiping the phone to factory state and reloading CyanogenMod.

The first step is to save the last Nandroid backup.  To do this, start Recovery, then select “Mounts and Storage”, then “mount /data”.  Then connect the phone via USB to your computer and on your computer, change to the android SDK platform-tools directory and
$ adb pull /data/media/clockworkmod/backup
You might have to run this command with sudo if you don’t have UDEV rules set up correctly.  Each directory in backup is a Nandroid backup that has a TAR file of cache, data and system, a boot and recovery image and an MD5 sum.

After the backups are secure, restore the phone to a factory state.

When the phone starts in activation mode, just skip everything it asks for, then in settings, under developer options, turn on USB debugging.  This will let you download su.zip:

$ adb push su.zip /sdcard/.

As mentioned in the Root instructions.

After you have the phone rooted, create the ClockworkMod backup directory:

$ adb shell

# mkdir -p /sdcard/clockworkmod/backup

# exit

And copy your backups to the phone:

$ adb push clockworkmod/backup /sdcard/clockworkmod/backup/.

Then on the phone (while still in recovery mode), Select “backup and restore”, then “restore” and choose your backup.  After the restore completes, reboot the phone.

Alternately, you can restore the data partition of the backups with Titanium  Backup.

Rooting instructions

These clarifications are for Linux:

Turn on USB debugging on your phone. This is under settings -> Developer options.

Power off your phone first.
On the phone, hold down Volume Up and Volume Down, then hold the Power until the phone vibrates (about four seconds). On the screen There will be a green arrow with “Start” written in it.

When they say “open terminal”, this is on your computer, not the adb shell. When running fastboot, you might need to run this with sudo. (The udev rules listed still don’t allow me to run the adb server as myself. See previous post about adb.)

Recover and Root section: Restart phone by holding volume up, volume down and then holding the power button until it vibrates. This might take up to 15 seconds.

You’ll see a screen with an open android and a green arrow at the top. On the bottom in small red letters, it’ll say FASTBOOT MODE.

1. Rip the DVDs with dvd::rip
2. Edit the .VOB files with Avidemux and save desired clips
3. Transcode for NTSC DVD with ffmpeg -i clip.vob -target ntsc-dvd dvdclip.vob
4. Create a project with DeVeDe and add each transcoded DVD clip in its own title. Select option to Create a menu with the titles

If DeVeDe fails to create the DVD structure, make sure you’ve properly transcoded the DVD clips with -target ntsc-dvd. If you haven’t, the error message misleadingly suggests you’ve run out of disk space.

Preview the ISO file with VLC and burn it to a disc with K3B (Tools -> Burn Image).

The standard installation of Ubuntu 11.10 doesn’t provide a graphical tool to edit user groups. For this you need:
$ sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools
$ users-admin

I’ve been using both Firefox and Chrome on different machines over the past year or so. In an effort to consolidate, I’ve been running Chrome rather than Firefox lately and a few issues have come up. On my laptop, installing an extension hangs after clicking the “Install” button. The text of the button changes to “Checking…” and stays that way. The fix seems to be to add a directory in your home called Downloads.

The HTPC mysteriously failed this week. After selecting a load in Grub, it complained it couldn’t read init files. I tried loading the Ubuntu live on USB, but that wouldn’t load. Then on boot-up it would say “error: hd0 out of disk.” At first, I thought this was a problem with the USB load, but that worked on another computer. I changed the SATA mode in BIOS from AHCI to IDE and then the USB would load. It seems the USB wouldn’t load in AHCI mode and the “out of disk” error was coming from the hard disk, as without the USB drive inserted, that’s what I started seeing. Now it’s looking like a hard disk failure.

After Ubuntu booted from the USB drive, I opened a terminal and ran sudo fsck /dev/sda1. It found a bunch of errors, which I told it to fix.

On reboot, “error: sd0 out of disk.” Reloading from USB again, I ran the disk utility and looked at the SMART data for the drive. It showed 48 bad sectors, which is no big deal. The other parameters looked OK, so I ran the extensive self-test. As it was running, I noticed the read error count was 720,900! I think this disk needs to get replaced.

We got Ooma about a month ago. I connected it to one telephone to try it out before porting our phone number. Since all went well, I started the port last week. It was completed today. After we got an email telling us the port was done, the telephone connected to Ooma had our old landline number on it and worked fine. The rest of the house connected to FiOS could still dial out, but, of course, could not receive calls.

To hook up the rest of the house, I had to disconnect the house service from FiOS. This was done at the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) box, which is mounted to the outside of my house next to the electric meter:

To open it, I removed one screw on the right side and opened the two snaps. They were clearly labeled. Inside the ONT, the phone line (the blue and white wires) were connected to a plastic jack that kinda looks like a phone jack:

To open it, I pulled the bottom tab (where the blue and white wires go in) toward me. It pops out maybe 40 degrees. This freed the blue and white wires, which I pulled out and labeled “do not connect”. I also labeled the wires “left” and “right” in case I ever need to put them back. That was it for FiOS.

To get the rest of the house on Ooma, I disconnected the test telephone from the Ooma Telo and replaced it with an RJ-11 splitter. I plugged the telephone I just disconnected into one half of the splitter and connected the wall jack that used to be connected to FiOS into the other half. That was it!

This is a Linux blog, so these instructions are for Linux. You can do the same thing without Linux, either by copying the app list file, below, with your computer or moving the SD card between Android devices.

In the Android Market, download AppListBackup. This program saves a list (or subset) of your loaded apps to a file that you can use to reload the apps, either on the same device or a different one. It doesn’t load apps, just lists of apps. There aren’t any instructions, so here’s what you do:

On the device you’re moving from, run AppListBackup, select “Backup” and check off which apps you want on the new device. When it’s done, connect the device by USB and on your computer, run
adb pull /mnt/sdcard/AppListBackup/apps.alb .
(Don’t forget the trailing period.) This will download the app list to your current directory. ADB is the Android Debug Bridge. If you don’t already have it loaded, see the post Android Development Environment.

Load AppListBackup on the new device. Run it and save an app list. It doesn’t matter what apps are in the list, because we’re going to overwrite the list in a minute. The purpose is just to get AppListBackup to make it’s directory on the SD card. Once that’s done, connect the new device to USB and, on the computer, run
adb push apps.alb /mnt/sdcard/AppListBackup/
(don’t forget the trailing slash). Now the app list is on the new device. Disconnect the new device from USB and run AppListBackup. Select “Restore”. This will show your list of apps. If you select one, it’ll take you to the app’s download page in the Market.

I bought this phone yesterday from the Verizon kiosk at BJ’s Wholesale Club. Since I had a (since discontinued) new-every-two bonus, it was $250 with a two-year contract extension, rather than $300. What made the sale, however, was that there was no rebate nonsense!

This is my second day with this phone and I’m really liking it. My previous phone is an original Motorola Droid. So far, I don’t miss the hardware keyboard. Although this phone is wider and taller, it’s thinner and weighs less than my Droid (5.3 oz. vs. 6 oz.), making it feel much lighter. It feels much less obtrusive in my pocket, which surprised me.

Some folks have complained the 4.65″ screen is too big for them to operate one handed. This might be true, but I’ve always held the phone in one hand and used the interface with the other.

4G is very fast. I have FiOS 15/5 at home and this is quicker than that. Upload and download speeds are about the same, rather than tiered.

There’s a WiFi tether, but Verizon has borked it so you need to purchase a tether plan. It seems possible to root it and use android-wifi-tether, but I haven’t tried.

Scrolling is very smooth. At times, I think it’s an iPhone. The phone never seems to be working hard.

Reception is about the same as my Droid, maybe not quite as good. I have the misfortune to work in a building that’s a cell dead zone. Throughout the day, the phone will be able to sneak some data in, but it’s not reliable enough for actual use. The Droid on CyanogenMod would eventually give up trying to find a signal. I’d have to cycle it through airplane mode to get it to pick up the signal again once I got outside. The Nexus has the same problem, but it takes longer to get in and out of airplane mode. Earlier today, it got stuck trying to get into airplane mode and I had to restart it.

The notification light (for new email or text, etc.) is a little odd. It’s a white light in the bottom-center of the screen and only turns on when the phone is asleep. It blinks once every eight seconds, which is way too slow. At the general suggestion of a few Nexus forums, I downloaded LightFlow, which can change the color and frequency of the light by notification type. So far so good, but it has some permissions that make me nervous.

The car dock isn’t as nice as the Droid’s. I’d prefer if it clipped in. This one you smoosh into a rubber bezel. Once in the dock, the phone does not go into a car mode. Also, when making or receiving a call, it doesn’t go into speaker mode. That’s really inconvenient.

The USB charger fits in easily, which is a big improvement over the Droid. The Droid’s charger was so finicky to connect that I got the home dock just to make connecting to power easier.