Just found out that I had to change my udev rules for my Nexus One to work with my laptop, which I had made rules for to work with my HTC Magic – the vendor IDs have changed a bit for the Nexus One, so for the Nexus One I use the following rules which reside in /etc/udev/rules.d/50-android.rules

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SUBSYSTEM=="usb|usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="18d1", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb|usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb|usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1", ATTR{idProduct}=="4e12", SYMLINK+="android_adb"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb|usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTR{idProduct}=="0fff", SYMLINK+="android_fastboot"

This works well with both adb and fastboot.

Oh and for reference I had the following rules for my Magic which ought to work with the Dream as well:

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SUBSYSTEM=="usb|usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb|usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTR{idProduct}=="0fff", SYMLINK+="android_fastboot"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb|usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTR{idProduct}=="0c02", SYMLINK+="android_adb"

So I have been using a HTC Magic for quite some time now. I got mine imported and got the whole Android experience before a lot of other people got to try it. I must say it has been great so far. More and more mods and apps appear all the time, which just helps promoting the whole platform. This popularity leads to manufacturers getting interested the platform and starts creating interesting devices, just like Google did with HTC – the Nexus One.

This device is truly one beast with its very good specifications along with probably the best screen I have seen yet on a smartphone to this date. Also not to forget the Android OS 2.1, which comes with it, which I tried on my Magic a while ago, but because of the hardware didn’t run as fast as it does on this speed demon. Everything is snappy and fast, you do not have to wait long for things to happen on the device. You can only love this device. I can keep on praising it, but there is one minor thing that annoys me, which is the battery time, which seems very short to me, but I guess that is normal on a powerful smartphone like this one. I am just used to my HTC Magic running for almost two days, finding the Nexus One lasts a day maybe less depending on the usage.

Though I can conclude that this is one hell of a phone, if you like Android you should consider buying a Nexus One or maybe the soon to be released in Denmark, HTC Desire, which is supposed to be very similar, just with HTC’s popular sense interface.

So it has been a while since I last wrote about this application, and since then there has been some modding to it. A guy called jonasl on XDA-Developers.com, did some modding to it.

Some new features include that you can now change language inside the application, which you could not do before because it required the HTC Framework, which could only be done by changing a configuration file by hand. A lot of other hacks and mods has been done to it, which you can all see in the tread on XDA-developers.com

A new thing is that there are now two versions of the HTC_IME, one for low res screens such as the G1 and Magic and a high res version for Nexus one and other similar devices. But you can read all that in the thread.

This also means that the instructions in my old post about changing language in HTC_IME, is not releveant anymore, and should be considered obsolete, though you are still welcome to use them.

So I tried out the OpenEclair 1.2.1 ROM, which runs on the Dream and Magic HTC devices, yesterday. It was quite exciting trying out a 2.1 ROM on my phone, since it has so many new features and stuff that I wanted to try out. Though I must say, it was a pain in the ***!
It is a cool initiative, but the ROM is just too slow for my likings everything was so choppy, pulling up the drawer and what not was forcing the hardware to its knees, the first 30 minutes the ROM was super slow and I decided not to mess with it anymore.

Though I have to say, I liked the animated backgrounds a lot, it is fun to have interactive stuff in the background without even starting a new application, and you can have all kinds of stuff going on there, either for show or for real use, like the VU meter and so on.

I guess I just have to get a new phone soon, I’d just wish that an operator in Denmark was selling one of these lovely Nexus One devices. I guess I will either have to wait or get it from abroad.

I just discovered Issuu for Android through the Android Market, which is a pretty nice place to read magazines, newspapers, articles and lots and lots of other publications on your computer or your mobile phone. They have recently released a client for Android and a client for iPhone will soon be available for download.
The page and app are really easy to use, you have easy access to a lot of stuff and it is read easily through the browser. You can zoom and see pictures, subscribe to publications, rate stuff and lots and lots of other cool stuff. It is really recommended!

Scan the barcode to go to the application download for android.

Click on image for bigger version

I made a small script just to test the syntax highlighting plug-in I installed for WordPress. So here it goes:

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#!/bin/bash
# Scipt that installs a batch of apk files on an Android device,
# through the adb tool from Android SDK.
adbPath="/home/tomasz/android/android-sdk/tools/adb"
 
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
        echo "usage: `basename $0` foldername"
        exit 1
fi
 
for f in $( ls "$1" );
do
        $adbPath install "$f"
done

The script is very simple and installs apk files in a folder through adb (Android Debug Bridge). This of course requires the Android SDK and a some kind of a Linux distribution.

I have made a script for pushing files and folders through adb to the SDcard of an Android device. This can be used in combination with nautilus for right-clicking on folders to push it.

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#!/bin/bash
# Script for pushing files and folders through adb.
# Can also be used without nautilus.
# Feel free to edit and distribute as much as you want.
 
# if you want dialogs set dialog_enable=1 else dialog_enable=0
dialog_enable=1
 
# Write the entire path to adb here
adbPath="/home/tomasz/AndroidSDK/tools/adb"
 
function dialogs {
        if [ $dialog_enable = 1 ]; then
                if [ -e "/usr/bin/gdialog" ]; then
                        gdialog --title "adb push" --msgbox "$1" 200 200
                elif [ -e "/usr/bin/Xdialog" ]; then
                        Xdialog --title "adb push" --msgbox "$1" 0 0
                else
                        echo "No dialog program present"
                fi
        fi
}
 
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then    # If arguments not equal 1, complain!
        echo "Usage - $0 file"
        echo "or - $0 directory"
        exit 1
fi
 
if [ -d "$1" ]; then
        $adbPath shell mkdir "/sdcard/`basename "$1"`"  # Create the directory on SDcard
        $adbPath push "$1" "/sdcard/`basename "$1"`"    # Push files in the folder to folder on SDcard
        dialogs "Folder $1 was pushed"
elif [ -e "$1" ]; then
        $adbPath push "$1" /sdcard/    # Push single file to SDcard
        dialogs "$1 was pushed"
else
        echo "Gurumeditation!"    # Oops!
fi

Download the script by using this link: http://ostebaronen.dk/android/adbpush.sh

In order to have it in your right-click menu in Nautilus place the script in: ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ and run chmod u+x ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/. Now you should see the script in your right click menu under scripts in Nautilus.

Awesome, I got it working. My own compiled Linux Kernel from CyanogenMod’s repository. It boots and wlan does also work. Great success!

The process of doing so is pretty straight forward. I followed a post, by a guy called bcrook at XDA-developers had made to help some other person, with slight modifications.

This guide requires you to run a Linux based system, since the compilers are made for this system. You might as well have some luck with Cygwin, but I wouldn’t count on it.

So here is what I did to get it working.

1. First get the android source and build it. You will need JDK, curl and git and probably also some other tools to get this working.
   curl http://android.git.kernel.org/repo >~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
mkdir <Android source dir> && cd <Android source dir>
repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git

   When it is done build it.
make
2. Now we have the tools and compilers ready so we just need to add them to our PATH.
export PATH=$PATH:~/<Android source dir>/prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.4.0/bin

3. Grab the CyanogenMod kernel from his GIT repo. Make sure to get the correct branch or you will see a lot of errors while compiling!
   git clone git://github.com/cyanogen/cm-kernel.git
git branch -r
git checkout --track -b cm-2.6.29-bfs origin/android-2.6.29-bfs
4. Now get a configuration for the kernel. You can pull an existing one from you phone, it is found in /proc/config.gz or you can use your own. This needs to be put in your cm-kernel dir, where you will se a lot of folders and such.
   zcat config.gz > ~/cm-kernel/.config
5. Apply any patches to the kernel now.
6. Build it! This is done easily it is here the PATH we exported earlier comes in handy.
   cd ~/cm-kernel
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-eabi-
   Wait for it to get done. The built kernel will be in arch/arm/boot/zImage
7. Now we just need to build the wlan.ko module, so we can get some WiFi on our phone.cd <Android source dir>/system/wlan/ti/sta_dk_4_0_4_32
make KERNEL_DIR="<kernel source dir>" ARCH=arm
   The kernel is now built!

Last thing to do is to pack it into a boot.img instructions can be found on android-dl’s Wiki.

This blog post is not relevant anymore since a new version of HTC_IME is out with big changes. See more in the blog post covering this.

Prerequisites are to have had started the program once, so that it has made the configuration files and a properly installed AndroidSDK on you computer.

OK, so there are two ways of achieving this. On ROM’s that support Danish as a system language you should go choose that in Settings>Locale & text>Select locale, here you will find your language. Change to it and HTC_IME should also be in that language as well. Super easy. Now you might want to have the UI language to be English. If you change it back to English in the Locale picker, the HTC_IME language will revert to English also, which you don’t want if you want Danish word prediction.
What we have to do then is to echo “en” to /data/property/persist.sys.language, which contains the information about what language the user UI should be. This is done by executing following commands in your command line.

adb shell
echo en > /data/property/persist.sys.language
reboot

You can also do this without changing any locales and change the settings only for HTC_IME, and not making them system wide.
This is done by pulling the configuration file for HTC_IME to your computer, editing it and pushing it back.

adb pull /data/data/com.htc.android.htcime/shared_prefs/com.htc.android.htcime_preferences.xml . (remember the dot!)


edit the line saying <string name=”keyboard_language”>x<?string>, where x is the value we need to change to 8 to get Danish dictionary (see bottom of post for other languages). Save the file and push it back to the phone and reboot.

adb push com.htc.android.htcime_preferences.xml /data/data/com.htc.android.htcime/shared_prefs/com.htc.android.htcime_preferences.xml

Now you only need to either reboot the phone or change the layout to Compact QWERT and back and you should have your chosen dictionary and word prediction. This ofcourse works for other languages aswell. Here are the following values that seems to work for the last method:

English 0
Arabic (Egypt) 14
Arabic (Israel) 14
Czech 7
Danish 8
Dutch 11
Spanish 4
Finnish 12
French 1
German 2
Greek 17
Italian 3
Norvegian (Bokmål) 10
Polish 13
Portugese 5
Romanian 16
Russian 6
Swedish 9
Turkish 15

This was tested on CyanogenMod 4.1.11.1 and up and will most likely work on other ROM’s aswell. Also notice that it will keep saying English in the Settings menu.

Latest version of HTC_IME for donut can be aquired on XDA-developers – thanks to Cyanogen.

Yesterday I tried out the newest version of Cyanogen’s experimental branch of his ROM, which includes a lot of new features and code from Donut, but also a lot of nice Linux kernel tweaks such as BFS, which is a scheduler aimed towards slow hardware. It seems that it looks up to it’s promise because the experience with the Linux kernel with BFS was pretty good.

Everything about the whole system feels a lot snappier. Menues are not choppy, scrolling the app list is fluid, switching between the desktops is painless aswell. Execution of applications is very fast aswell! I really hope that Google implements BFS or a simillar scheduler in their future kernel releases, because this really kicks ass. And with the new HTC Tattoo comming with a more optimized CPU, I think it will kick a lot off buttocks when it gets combined with a better scheduler.

So all in all. BFS is awesome. If it does not work for you as I state, you might be doing something wrong

Read more about BFS

Read more about Cyanogens ROM