Htc Universal

[Foxdie]

FINALLY my HTC Universal has a purpose

This thread contains a wealth of information, it's taken 3 days to read through it all, but man was it worth it.

Thanks to Neil and everyone else who has contributed to this thread, let's keep it going

[ShiroiKuma]

FINALLY my HTC Universal has a purpose

Not for long, I'm afraid.

I've been running debian on the Uni for a long time now, but the biggest problem is the overall slowness of the system, there's no way you can play movies satisfactorily for instance, and emacs runs, so this is a godsend, but still if you have lot of stuff in .emacs, the startup takes ages etc.

The Nokia N900 has, it seems, started shipping to stores now, and it's gonna be reaching the endmarket somewhere around the beginning of December - and that's gonna be GNU/Linux for your mobile phone! If you'll wish for Debian, you'll run it from chroot no prob. It should be, judging by the videos, super fast, so another dimension for mobile GNU/Linux it seems.

I think I'll put my Uni to rest right when I get this new Nokia in the mail.

Granted, the keyboard on it sucks bigtime, compared with the Uni, but just the keyboard won't be reason enough to hold back and stick with the Uni, I think...

[Foxdie]

FINALLY my HTC Universal has a purpose

Not for long, I'm afraid.

I've been running debian on the Uni for a long time now, but the biggest problem is the overall slowness of the system, there's no way you can play movies satisfactorily for instance, and emacs runs, so this is a godsend, but still if you have lot of stuff in .emacs, the startup takes ages etc.

The Nokia N900 has, it seems, started shipping to stores now, and it's gonna be reaching the endmarket somewhere around the beginning of December - and that's gonna be GNU/Linux for your mobile phone! If you'll wish for Debian, you'll run it from chroot no prob. It should be, judging by the videos, super fast, so another dimension for mobile GNU/Linux it seems.

I think I'll put my Uni to rest right when I get this new Nokia in the mail.

Granted, the keyboard on it sucks bigtime, compared with the Uni, but just the keyboard won't be reason enough to hold back and stick with the Uni, I think...

Well, my Uni has been sat in a drawer for years not doing anything, I feel with this it has a purpose again, something I can script / program and easily work with, FAR easier than WinMo.

I plan to use it in my car for GPS tracking and listening to online radio stations, one of my peeves about listening to streams in WinMo was that if you went through a patchy coverage area, the phone would disconnect UTMS and sometimes fail to reconnect, I could write a crontab to check the connection every 60 seconds and reset it, as well as then restart the music stream

Just one of the many uses I'm going to have for it

[ShiroiKuma]

I plan to use it in my car for GPS tracking and listening to online radio stations, one of my peeves about listening to streams in WinMo was that if you went through a patchy coverage area, the phone would disconnect UTMS and sometimes fail to reconnect, I could write a crontab to check the connection every 60 seconds and reset it, as well as then restart the music stream

Which programs are you gonna use for these two on the Uni?

[Foxdie]

Well, for listening to streams, I currently use mplayer as that was already installed, it works well but the volume seems to be way too low, even when I set mplayer to 100% by repeatedly mashing the asterix (*) key..

I plan on writing a Perl script to automate this, just a simple while-loop that'll call mplayer, then if mplayer dies, bring down ppp0, wait 5 seconds, bring it back up again, wait another 5 seconds and then relaunch mplayer.

As for the tracking, I've installed bluez-utils and wrote a perl script that does the following;

1. Open the GPS device using the rfcomm util
2. Open the serial device step 1 creates; /dev/rfcomm0
3. While-loop through the data, whenever it receives a $GPRMC line, store this in a variable
4. As part of the above while-loop there is a check on the last time it submitted the content to an external API via a HTTP GET / POST request, it will do it once every 5 seconds (configurable).

To do this I've had to apt-get update the system, and then install the following CPAN modules;

* Device::SerialPort
* HTTP::Request

It's still a work-in-progress, it works fine but the coordinates appear offset slightly, I think it may be due to me just shifting the decimal place on the DDMM.MMMM request, maybe I need to use another formula.. heh

I'll post up all my work once I'm satisfied it's bug-free

Ps. Installing CPAN modules with Perl is a complete nightmare, you have to create at least a 128MB Swap File and it's PAINFULLY slow, it took 45 minutes to install HTTP::Request, I think I'll release a gzipped tarball of my filesystem once it's done.