Living with Linux

The discount codes are finally activated on the Danish Nokia direct shop, so I have now ordered my new N810 tablet. It should be here in a few days time. I can hardly wait

I’m on a three month kayak journey around the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily. Our only computers on this trip are two N800 tablets which we use daily for email, checking weather forecasts and for blogging. They keep us connected and updated wherever we go.

Our blog is at www.kayakislandquest.com.

We’re bringing two N800 tablets and several accessories. I have my own N800 which I got through the N800 device program. My paddling partner, canadian schoolteacher Wendy Killoran, has received a sponsored N800 from Nokia Nseries, which has also supplied us with a foldable keyboard, a gps receiver and a car charger.

We’re currently at the NW tip of Sardinia, having done just over half of the circumnavigation of Sardinia.

So far we haven’t found many usable wifi hotspots, but we have a good deal on EDGE traffic via Telecom Italia Mobile. We use my old worn Nokia 6131 to connect.

The only downside so far is that I have fried the charging circuits on my tablet by connecting it wrongly to a solar panel. It now says its charging but it doesn’t charge the battery at all. We charge batteries in Wendy’s tablet and swap them when mine is depleted.

It is quite fascinating trying out the ‘internet anywhere’ for real. Here’s Wendy writing an Icelandic friend while sitting on an iron-age nuraghe in northern Sardinia

Nokia released a new firmware for the N800 tablets, and I flashed mine yesterday. It was by far the easiest upgrade ever.

I took a backup first and stored it on the internal flash card, and flashed the unit as per the instructions. One of the first questions asked was if I wanted a backup restored and I picked the backup made just before the flash.

The backup restored my gconf settings, and all the application repositories I had added, so while the non-standard applications weren’t restored automatically, all it took was to go to the Application Manager and install the ones I wanted. Applications that use gconf for user preferences had their preferences set already so I had to do nothing. For example, the FM radio applet had all the same stations as before the upgrade.

I reported here on my recent upgrade of the system on my 770. Initially I wasn’t very happy, but things are getting better, and I have found out a few things in the process. (more…)

I flashed my Nokia 770 last year, with the latest image from Nokia Europe, marked 2005_51-13, but I’m not happy with it at all. There are some minor improvements, but on the downside I’m seeing many spurious crashes, on the order of ten crashes in the last day and a half, and I really didn’t use it that much on new year’s eve.

I’m not a happy camper. (more…)

I hope you’ll find a lot of Nokia 770s under the trees

After having given up on the email client on the Nokia 770, at least for now, I have tried Gmail as several has recommended me.

I’ve used Gmail for some time since I can use it at work, and it does work very well with Opera on the tablet.

Until now the only thing that doesn’t work, as far as I can tell, is editing messages with rich text. The options simply aren’t there. This is, however, an issue with Opera rather than with the tablet per se.

One of the very nice things about using the Google Mail interface is that you can see msword attachments as plain text, something that would be a lot harder on the Nokia 770, given that it would have a hard time running the email application and an msword reader at the same time.

I hardly ever read my mail on the Nokia 770. I tried many times, sometimes forcing myself to do so to figure out why, but it just doesn’t work for me. The email application on the tablet simply doesn’t match the way I read my mail.

Here are the reasons why.

(more…)

I’ve had this thing for almost a month now, and I never managed to make a hyphen with the handwriting input, but today I made one by accident. Talk about the little pleasures of life.

Anyway, a hyphen is made by first writing it forward and then backwards on top without lifting the stylus. Just a short line forward and backwards on the same spot.

- – - (see

Other little things about the graffiti come to mind.
(more…)

The Nokia 770 has limited storage capacity. RS-MMC cards exist up to 1Gb and phones seldom has more, most a lot less.

To watch movies or listen to music you need more storage capacity.

Looking a bit around on a 770 with an Xterm reveals that the kernel has support for both ext2 and ext3 filesystems often used on harddisks, and it has support for the nfs network file system.

On a system with limited ressources like the tablet such features would not have been enabled unless they serve a purpose. (more…)