Nokia N810 and 770 Internet Tablets
To-Do List

Since this list was written, many of the questions have been answered, and new items have come up. This has been updated for Maemo-2.0 Mistral.

• What scripting language is used on this box anyway? Answser: Maemo-2.0 has Perl, and there is a port of Python. But Perl is rightsized and many of the intrinsic features and packages that desktop users are familiar with are absent. Probably Python is similar.

• Specific security policies:

  • Change root password. They can do SHA-1, can't they? I don't think so, but it can authenticate when the password is MD5. But I don't see how to influence passwd to create a MD5 hash -- you need to do that on another machine and then change /etc/passwd using vi. [Done, but I can't figure out any context where it asks for the root password.]
  • Suppress password authentication in SSH; I want it to take only public key authentication. Other sshd_config hacks. [Done.]
  • I want my normal loginID and numeric UID. [1/2 done: see here for how I at least got the right loginID.]
  • Find the script that runs upon suspend -- for clearing secrets. Despite a lot of searching I haven't found it yet.
  • Install my SSH secret key (encrypted) on Selen. [Done.]
  • Cryptographic vault for unencrypted secret keys of cert used with OpenVPN and SMTPS. (Which will be installed after the vault is set up.) Bummer, this kernel has no crypto whatsoever! Nor does the mount program (from busybox) do a loopback mount. This is going to take serious hacking.
  • Activate lock code (AFTER backups).
  • My home WLAN should use WPA. Set this up. Oops, read here what happened when I tried WPA.
  • Install network firewall. But the needed kernel modules aren't there; only the filter chain and a subset of the matches. Hiss, boo!

• Apparently it is possible to compile the kernel in Scratchbox, at least for Maemo-2.0. My plan: compile a complete kernel, but everything that could be a module, is a module. Of course there will be no Infiniband support, and no driver for 3Com 3c501, but I want IPv6 (available in someone else's hacked kernel), all the iptables modules, and crypto.

• Find WLAN monitoring software for the ITB. In Maemo-2.0 the provided WLAN connection manager has a search for connection feature which shows the networks in range, which is good. But I still want software so I can check for flaky access points at work. I'm trying Kismet; see here for a very brief discussion.

• I need to ask permission to use the otter picture. Message sent, but no reply yet. (I think there won't be one. So much for doing the right thing with intellectual property.)

• Bug report on panelclock: seems to interpret the DST switch as we're doing DST today which is bogus. To test this in Maemo-2.0 we'll have to wait for DST to return. Yes, it switched to DST on 2007-03-11 as it should.

• See if oggplay can handle playlists. No, it can't. But it can do multiple selection, which is almost as good. Project: to add the playlist feature to oggplay.

• System features to be hunted down and messed with:

  • I tried to use my otter picture for the boot splash image but it didn't happen. In Maemo-2.0 provide /usr/share/custom/custom.wav and custom.jpg (or custom.png). After the Nokia hands, your custom picture will be shown for as long as custom.wav plays. I've done it; it's cool.

  • Find a hook in power management suitable for the clam up or forget secrets action. I haven't found this despite much searching.

  • Discover and display whatever info the power controller gives -- battery voltage? current? That would be the ideal, to give a better estimate of remaining battery life.

• Software to be installed:

  • ed -- but I'll have to compile it myself.
  • Skype VOIP software. There isn't a port yet, but eventually there will be, so keep eyes open. A recent post on a Skype forum suggests that the holdup is that the Skype UI uses Qt, while Maemo supports GTK+ but nothing for Qt, and the Skype people aren't going to make a GTK+ version just for us. The official VOIP provider in Maemo-2.0 is Gizmo Project.

Finished Items

• Jigger /etc/profile to include /var/lib/install/{bin,sbin} on the path. This was necessary in Maemo-1.1, but in Maemo-2.0 software is installed in /usr/bin and similar normal directories.

• Essay on PDA security: here.

• Backup, backup, backup! Figure out a decent way to do backups. See the hacking page for the finished product.

  • Set up server-rsync on Fafnir (my house server) (already installed, be sure it works. Yes it does.)
  • Install PERL! I'm not re-writing everything in Python. SuSE's RPM package lists a size of 38 MB (and Python is 15 MB); got to shrink this bloatware. Maemo-2.0 has Perl natively, in only 0.5 Mb; it must have a lot of features turned off. This needs to be investigated.
  • Find out where all the important stuff is; make backup.pln files. Done except I'm using a rsync engine so it's .rsync-filter in directories that contain stuff that needs to be excluded.
  • Also look at Unison, which is a util to sync two replicas of a set of files, with independent modification of each replica.

• Order a second battery. There won't be enough juice in one battery to last flying to Europe. [Done, see the battery section.]

• Order a 1 GB memory card. Do I want two? [Done.]

• See if the memory card will work with a JFFS2 filesystem on it. Write this up -- see the hacking section. mkfs.jffs2 has to be compiled, preferably running on the ITB. Too bad, the JFFS2 filesystem will only work on a MTD device, i.e. hardwired, not on a MMC device.

• Science's PDFs are a disaster! Work on alternative ways to read Science. See here for the result.

• Make a script to do the whole job of downloading an issue of Science. [Done.]

• The Science Magazine download script missed some of the images [fixed]. Also I'd like to snarf the fullsize figures, not just the thumbnails [also fixed].

• I installed the whole enchilada: scratchbox SDK, goes on laptop. Installed size is 680 Mb with no rootstraps, 2.6 Gb with the i686 rootstrap, and 16.6 Gb (1.66e10 bytes) with i686 and ARM and with some stuff compiled in it (NTP). Oink.

• Compile NTP client, for the imminent timezone change (daylight saving time). (See the Scratchbox section.) Done, with these results:

  • Which root filesys do I have, 1.0 or 1.1? Answer here: it's 1.1.
  • There are no Debian metadata so I have to do some further work to make a Debian package out of this.
  • Compilation went smoothly (for ARM and i686).
  • Compiled code wants libelf.so; copied from Scratchbox.
  • ntpdate and ntpq work with no problems.
  • Sometimes when ntpd is started it gets a segfault; other times it keeps running. The difference may or may not have to do with the environment (bash?) in which it was started. In Maemo-2.0 the daemon just exits, reporting nothing useful even with debugging turned on. I suspect it wants some API from the kernel that isn't there.
  • I also compiled SNTP, but for some unknown reason it can't actually set the time.
  • So this project is at an unsatisfactory end, pending some debugging.

• Something is wrong with Plucker (the e-book reader). Figure out how to make it work. See here for the result.

• Sylpheed is a mail reader, the base for the one in Maemo. Have a look at Sylpheed-Claws linked from wolvix.org. It turns out that Sylpheed is natively based on GTK+. Sylpheed-Claws is a branch of that code base which includes many advanced features. The challenge to Maemo-izing it is probably to jigger the user interface, particularly configuration dialogs, to fit in the available screen space. Also for Sylpheed-Claws, it could make good use of dbus, e.g. for contact and calendar management, but someone has to do the work. (And I'm not going to.)

• Get OpenVPN working. (Depends on cryptovault.) The current version (openvpn_2.0-1maemo2_arm.deb) does not do LZO compression, but my server requires it. Cure: compile the packages myself with Scratchbox. It works. Maemo-2.0: someone else has compiled and posted the LZO version.

• Train the handwriting input method;

  • Decide on decent and consistent glyphs. The problem here is that the trainer has no negative training feature, i.e. I want to say that's not a lower case l, that's a digit 1, but I can't. Several of my designed glyphs match ones that the input method knows are something else. It also needs to display the user-provided training glyphs, so if a mistake is made or if one turns out to be unwise, it can be deleted. I have three single dots in the training set and I don't know how to get rid of them. I'm deferring training the regular letters until these two items appear.
  • Maemo-2.0 can now remove botched user-provided glyphs.
  • If you run the trainer but change nothing, you can see what glyphs the input method is looking for, and change your style to match.
  • The ideal would be like SpamAssassin: glyphs that get backspaced over are wrong; those that don't are right. Matched wrong glyphs get their score reduced. Matched correct glyphs get a higher score, and the glyph mutates (slightly) to more closely match the user's shape.
  • The glyphs for blank, backspace, return and tab should be trainable as shortcuts.
  • Most troublesome are digit 1 and lowercase l
  • Shortcuts for hyphen and star and colon and dollarsign.
    • Hyphen: kind of a horizonal lightning bolt.
    • Star: north to south, then southeast to northwest, then southwest to to northeast. The regular star is northwest to southeast, then any direction for the other two lines.
    • Colon is a square backward C.
    • Dollarsign starts with bottom to top, then the S over it.
  • I practiced data input, and now have it almost error free. Spaces are the hardest; they often come out as r.
  • Figure out the file where user training hides and back it up. I did find / -xdev -type f -mtime -1 -print, giving these files with relevant-seeming filenames:
    • /var/lib/gconf/apps/osso/inputmethod/shortcuts/western/%gconf.xml
    • /var/lib/gconf/apps/osso/inputmethod/shortcuts/%gconf.xml
    • /var/lib/gconf/apps/osso/inputmethod/%gconf.xml
    None of these actually have the shape data, though the first one appears to indicate which shortcuts have been defined (lacking any obvious primary key into a hidden database).
  • Document all this so it can go in the writeup.