Android version 2.2 is finally out for the HTC Desire and installed on my phone! A quick list of what I have found new in this version follows.

• USB tethering
• Wireless hotspot tethering
• App sharing
• A torch application (wow!)
• 720p video recording (1280×720 resolution)

To all other Desire owners, be aware that there may be some app incompatibility with Froyo and anything you currently use with Eclair, so check before you install!

Being a regular reader of popular technology news and gadget sites however, I came across by accident a project dedicated to getting Google’s Android operating system (OS) running on these earlier devices. Herein I detail how I fared.

The Project

Head on over to connect-utb.com to find the project and also the latest downloads. The Android builds found here support the following HTC devices:

• Touch Diamond
• Touch Diamond 2 (Topaz)
• Touch Pro (Raphael)
• Touch Pro 2 (Rhodium)
• Touch HD (Blackstone)

At the time of writing the Android v2.2 (Froyo) release was Alpha and so left alone for the time being. Instead, the build dated 21st June 2010 was tried out.

The Method

The releases from the above site aren’t available as ROMs, which has the upside of meaning that you don’t have any risk of bricking your phone yet – but the downside of meaning anytime you switch it on you must boot Android from within Windows Mobile. After extracting and downloading the build of your choice, you will be left with the following contents in a folder:

HaRET, the Handheld Reverse Engineering Tool is a Windows Mobile application capable of acting as a Linux bootloader. What we need to do now is copy all the above data to the Internal Storage (4GB flash) on the Touch Diamond from a computer in order to start the ball rolling.

Wait just a moment though, because we now need to place the startup configuration file in the root of our flash drive to tell it which phone we’re using. By removing the phone’s cover and battery, I found the label read “DIAM100″. This meant I needed to look in the STARTUP CONFIG folder labelled above and copy the startup.txt file from within the DIAMOND100 folder to the root of the phones Internal Storage as well.

Finally, all we need to do is run HaRET!

Goodbye Windows Mobile…

…hello Tux…

Welcome to Android

Now you must be patient on the first boot, as there’s a lot for the little phone to do the very first time. Everything’s surprisingly snappy immediately though, but even better the second boot in. You may get some messages saying that some applications are not responding, giving you the option to either Force Quit or Wait – I strongly suggest the latter.

First Impressions

Wow. These guys really have put a lot of work into this, everything bar the camera works very well indeed. I was able to connect to my home wireless network, enter my gmail account details and synchronise my contacts, calendar and email.

Unfortunately it seems as though battery life is taking quite a hit in comparison to the stock Windows Mobile system. I think performance is held back as everything runs from the flash storage right now too. I’m confident however that with ongoing work, Android will really show off its’ superiority despite the age of this phone.

Keep up the good work!

If nothing looks any different, that’s a good sign! Enjoy

An error!

The .xpi Firefox extension downloaded quite happily (the getPlus+ utility which is referred to as the Adobe Download Manager) but after allowing it to restart Firefox, the plugin failed to install. After messing around with a few approaches of trying to disable and uninstall the current version, I was left with no Flash plugin at all! This is what it normally looks like when it succeeds:

Time for plan ‘B’

Here’s what I eventually did to solve the problem, guessing that there was something wrong with my Firefox profile.

1. Close all instances of Firefox currently running.
2. Click Start and type: firefox /profilemanager For earlier versions of Windows, select Run from the Start Menu and then type this into the dialogue box which appears.
3. In the window which opens, select Create Profile, click next, enter a name such as “test” then Finish.
4. Untick Don’t ask at startup
5. Highlight your newly created profile, so “test” in this example.
6. Click Start Firefox
7. Visit http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer as before and try the same installation process.
8. If you succeeded, close Firefox, run it in the normal way (desktop shortcut or similar) highlight your normal profile “default” and tick the Don’t ask at startup option again.

You should now have functioning Flash v10.1 in your normal profile!

I saw that one coming…

Now call me cynical, but I had a feeling updating so unnecessarily would not be so plain sailing. After a few days i noticed that standard definition videos in the AVI container format containing (ha-har) XviD and DivX in some cases would skip and generally play back like a slideshow. This happened in my favourite player, Media Player Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC).

At first I thought perhaps my codec pack or ffdshow itself might need reinstalling, but a quick google resulted in finding this post:

In NVIDIA Control Panel – Video – Adjust video image settings – Edge Enhancement, Click ‘Use the NVIDIA setting’, then set the slider to 1%, then click Apply. You are welcome.

What do you know, it works… thanks carlcamper!

Note: It’s worth mentioning that you need to apply this workaround for *each* of your screens if you run a multi-monitor setup like me.

Unfortunately the game is not so distinctly a stealth ‘em up as previous iterations, but it still possesses the same style seasoned fans have grown to love.

Now if only I could find someone to play some co-op with…

XX by… XX…

There’s also a brand new album by the Deftones out – entitled Diamond Eyes.

Give ‘em a try.

I’ve been running XBMC with Ubuntu Karmic Koala v9.10 for a while now, but once I got the Intel X-25V 40GB SSD, I wanted to combine the upgrade with a move to Lucid. This post documents the installation process. Although an SSD would already improve boot speed, I wanted to take advantage of all the recent changes Lucid has brought to the table, not to mention being a Long Term Support (LTS) release to boot!

Within this post I have documented the installation process.

Install Lucid

There’s nothing hugely special to report about the installation of Lucid, which I did from a USB flash drive.  I setup the partitioning like so:

• 100MB /boot EXT4
• 2048MB swap
• 10GB / EXT4
• (the rest) /home EXT4

After installation, I used Jockey (System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers) to install and enable the Nvidia graphics drivers. Whilst I would normally do this via CLI package management, I’ve yet to have it go smoothly just by installing the nvidia-current package. I’ve a feeling Jockey does something a little more fancy to disable the nouveau drivers at the same time.

It’s a good idea to run System -> Administration -> Nvidia X Server Settings (or just nvidia-settings for the application name) to confirm all is happy after you reboot in.

Additional packages

Now, to make the following steps a lot easier, I would recommend having the following packages installed already via your favourite package management tool.

• curl
• dkms
• fakeroot
• mplayer-nogui
• libvdpau1

The last package there is the VDPAU libraries. For some reason I was lacking these after installing the main Nvidia driver and needed them before hardware accelerated playback would function in XBMC.

CIR Remote Driver

You can skip past this step if you don’t have or make use of the built-in CIR remote receiver hardware on the ASRock Ion 330. ASRock have now kindly updated their site to include a downloadable package which supports installation on Lucid. You can get this download here.

After downloading this package, I extracted and installed the .deb package named thusly:

lirc-nct677x-1.0.4-ubuntu10.04.deb

Follow the installation procedures documented within the PDF on the ASRock website if you are unfamiliar with the procedure. You can test the remote by first opening a terminal window,  Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal (or gnome-terminal) and typing:

irw

Now when you press buttons on the remote, you should see each input echod on-screen.

Install XBMC

Ok, now you’re ready to install XBMC itself! The currently working version for me on Lucid is available via the Team XBMC SVN PPA which you can find here. Configuration instructions are laid out there, but all you need to do is run the following in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc-svn/ppa

This will automatically add the package mirror and grab the required key for PPA verification. Once this is done, you can simply install the meta-package, again with your favourite package management tool:

• xbmc

Once installed, you’ll find XBMC on the Applications -> Sound & Video menu. To confirm all is working well with VDPAU, play an HD video and press ‘o’ on your keyboard to see the text:

DC: FF-H264_VDPAU

If this reads FFMPEG, you’ve got something missing.

It works! But wait, something’s not quite right…

Now, you may be wondering why the ASRock remote button mappings don’t quite work that well in XBMC. The default configs available seemed to be mapped pretty incorrectly, so I’ve spent a lot of time mapping these myself. Once complete, I transplanted these custom files I’d been using with Karmic in place of the ones available. You can obtain my current version… here.

Here’s where these files need to be placed:

• lircd.conf.mceusb to:
  /urs/share/lirc/remotes/mceusb
  /usr/share/lirc/remotes/lirc_wb677
• lirc.conf.wb677 to:
  /usr/share/lirc/remotes/lirc_wb677
• Lircmap.xml to:
  /usr/share/xbmc/system
• remote.xml to:
  /usr/share/xbmc/system/keymaps/

Once these are all in place, either restart the computer or open a terminal and run the following to restart LIRC in order to make use of the new configuration.

sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart

Now you’re all done, so get playing with XBMC! I must add, it rocks even more on an SSD

*UPDATE* – Problems

After having a bit more time to make use of my HTPC, I’ve discovered a couple of problems, mainly with audio and seeking through video during playback. It’s quite possible these two are related.

Audio

Even after fiddling with the settings, I can only get an analog stereo or a surround sound (passthrough audio) video playing during one launch of XBMC. If I play one type (e.g. an HD film with a dolby digital audio track), stop it, then attempt to play a normal stereo sound video – I will get nothing. There won’t even be any UI sounds at this point.

When this happens, I have to close and re-run XBMC to get audio back. Apparently removing pulseaudio will most likely solve this, but I haven’t tried this yet.

Playback

I play all my content over a gigabit network connection, from SMB/CIFS mounts to my file server. I won’t bore you with the stats of the storage volume there, but it can max out gigabit at 120MB/sec+ when reading. During HD video file playback under Lucid, it takes a good few seconds to sync and start playback back if i skip forward / rewind. This was perfectly smooth and functional in Karmic so something is obviously amiss here.

So what can we do?

Ultimately I think the best thing to do is for those with a working configuration – just leave it be! If everything works for you on Karmic or whatever other type of installation, there’s no need to update yet.

Personally, I am keenly awaiting the release of XBMC v10.05 which I hope to solve these problems. If it doesn’t, then I will get experimenting with workarounds.

I’ll keep you posted!

Without TRIM

It’s now pretty common knowledge that running an SSD with an OS which does not support TRIM results in performance degradation over time. Depending upon your usage style this might not influence you a great deal, but sooner or later you may begin to encounter this slow-down first hand.

For more information regarding SSD technology, check out Anand’s excellent articles here.

What can I do?

Whether you’d like to regain the performance your drive had when new, you’d like to wipe clean an SSD before use elsewhere or perhaps you’re selling one on – secure erasing your drive is a very good way of restoring it to tip-top shape.

Secure erasing simply tells the controller to forget about its’ tracking of used blocks and return every single one to being empty and ‘free’. This process can be performed using either of two utilities:

1. The ‘hdparm‘ utility on Linux
2. HDDErase – a DOS utility by the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR)

For the purposes of this article I will be focussing on the latter.

HDDErase

HDDErase is a small DOS application which in its’ version 3.3 edition is capable of secure erasing the Intel SSDs. The scenario for my testing of this application was the secure erase of my X25-V 40GB SSD which is to go into my ASRock Ion HTPC. So how do we make use of this program? First you will need:

1. A bootable flash drive.
2. The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (for Windows use)
3. Some old DOS or windows 98 boot files (such as from startup floppy disks)
4. Some patience!

I used a small 4GB Corsair mini flash drive which I have for these kinds of activities, but you can easily do this with far less than 8MB! I also had an ancient floppy drive to hand with a windows 98 startup disk which I used for the system files necessary to make the drive bootable. If you don’t have a disk such as this, you can create one using utilities found here. So here’s what I did:

1. Run the HP tool
   Here I selected the drive to be quick formatted using system files from the floppy drive, A:. After this is complete you’ll have a nicely bootable flash drive.
2. Paste the executable of HDDErase v3.3 onto the flash drive.
3. Boot your computer and run the tool!

It’s worth bearing in mind that HDDErase v3.3 does not seem to like nvidia chipsets, so my Ion based HTPC was unable to run the program… it just stalled when it was meant to be detecting drives.

After running the test drive on my Intel chipset based system, the drives were detected correctly. It must be mentioned that I had to change my SATA configuration in the BIOS to IDE compatibility mode however, instead of using AHCI mode. Here’s the process in pictures following booting to the command prompt and running HDDErase:

That’s all there is to it, many a confirmation and all is complete! After this process, the previously installed OS was long gone from the drive showing that if anything, it had definitely gotten rid of that!

Hopefully this will be of use to someone, given the lack of specific information on SSD erase procedures online.

After identifying the process, “av.exe” and fiddling around to remove it, the computer was left with no default file association for .exe files. This was quite the problem as you can imagine, since it prevented any program from running!

Restoring Default .exe Permissions

Thankfully as I was looking at the computer over a VNC connection, I was able to search for and find the following website:

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/file_assoc.htm

This page has downloads available for the default file association configurations found within the Windows registry for multiple file types.

The Fix

By downloading and opening the .exe configuration I was able to copy and paste it into a notepad document, which I was thankfully still able to run by opening a .txt file on the desktop.

After saving the file as a .reg on the desktop, I ran it and successfully restored the settings. Finally I could run programs and control panel items again! All from the comfort of home all the way up to England somewhere…