One of my earlier posts describes how to mount your unsupported time machine backup disk within the OSX Installer, allowing you to restore from a Time Machine backup.
well, now I’ve found a guide that tells you how to craft an Avahi service file that will allow you to avoid having to mount the share manually, making it appear to your mac as a standard time capsule
You can find the info on this here: http://www.bootc.net/archives/2010/11/07/apple-time-machine-and-netatalk/

Hey all,

I’ve seen a lot of people running linux on their xoom and other android devices but chrooted under android and using a VNC client to make use of the chrooted install. quite messy and less than efficient IMHO, so I set out to install it natively on my Xoom

I’ve managed to get Debian installed on my Xoom with the only issues being no sound and no Bluetooth, this is due to the proprietary nature of the sound drivers for the Tegra, and the lack of documentation for the BCM4329 Bluetooth under linux. if anyone has any tips with these I’d love to hear them.

Anyway, since the Xoom is an android device with an unlockable bootloader from the factory this wasn’t too difficult. the only issues were with the TegraFB and Touchscreen drivers. Thankfully Lilstevie from GalaxyLinux helped me out with the touchscreen driver and Robert Morell from NVidia provided a patch to Chromium for the FB which is here http://codereview.chromium.org/6672056

(Todo: Add guide for using WIFI, upload prebuilt images)
(Update: Fixed the links)

Basically all you need to do is build a root fs and a kernel for your Debian install. this is actually quite easy. here’s how..

Contents:

1. Requirements
2. Building the RootFS
3. Building the Kernel
4. Preparing the SDCard
5. Putting it all together
6. Rolling back to Android
7. Acknowledgements

Disclaimer

YOU DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGES TO YOU, YOUR DEVICE,
YOUR COMPUTER, OR ANY OF YOUR PROPERTY OR SOMEONE ELSE’S PROPERTY

Requirements

• A Rooted Xoom with ClockWorkRecovery Installed
• Make sure you have a nandroid backup. you will need this to boot back into Android!
• A running install of Debian, Ubuntu might work too
• An SDCard with at least 4GB for the install, preferably separate from your main SDCard and an SDCard reader for your PC
• Android–SDK
• An Arm–linux toolchain to compile the kernel, if you’re lazy like me you can just use the one that comes with the Android NDK
• This Xorg Config
• These Kernel sources, based on the Tiamat-AOSP kernel
• Fastboot tool
• mkbootimg

Building the RootFS

Before we do anything we’ll need to get the Wifi Firmware off the default install of Android

To do this run the following commands

# adb pull /system/vendor/firmware/fw_bcm4329.bin
# adb pull /system/etc/wifi/bcm4329.cal

MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR SDCARD AND YOUR XOOM USING CLOCKWORK RECOVERY BEFORE CONTINUING AND KEEP IT SOMEWHERE SAFE!

Now lets install the tools you’ll need to create the rootfs

# apt–get install binfmt–support qemu qemu–user–static debootstrap

Once that’s done, make a directory for the rootfs to sit in until it’s ready for the SDCard and start installing the debian base

# cd ~
# mkdir deb_arm
# mkdir deb_arm/boot
# sudo /usr/sbin/debootstrap ––foreign ––arch armel squeeze deb_arm/ \ http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian

Once that’s done you’ll need to copy across some qemu files so you can chroot into the deb_arm folder and finish the installation of the base system

# sudo cp /usr/bin/qemu–arm–static deb_arm/usr/bin
# sudo chroot deb_arm
# export LC_ALL=C
# export LANGUAGE=C
# export LANG=C
# cd /debootstrap
# ./debootstrap ––second–stage

once that’s done you’ll need to edit your apt sources, to do so run the following

# echo debandroid > /etc/hostname
# echo “deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non–free” > /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt–get update

And then install any of the apps you’ll want to run on your xoom, I’d recommend at least xorg, gdm3 and gnome, so

# apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-input-evdev gdm3 gnome-session gnome-panel metacity gnome-terminal network-manager initramfs-tools wpasupplicant iceweasel network-manager-gnome

You may find that you get an error like the following

Errors were encountered while processing: bluez gnome–bluetooth gnome–user–share gnome–desktop–environment

If you do, it’s safe to ignore this for now. you can always complete the installation of any non–critical packages on the device. it seems to be something weird with the chroot or the qemu emulation of ARM (if anyone knows a way to fix this I’d be glad to hear it!)

Once that’s done, you’ll not only want to set your root password but you’ll want to add a standard user account too

# passwd root
# adduser liv2
# addgroup ––gid 3003 inet
# usermod –aG 3003 liv2

The addgroup and usermod are especially important, the android kernel doesn’t normally allow network access to non–root accounts. so we have to add the special group then give the user access to that group (or you could compile the kernel to not use the android paranoid network settings)

Clear up some space too

rm /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb

Once that’s done, exit out of the chroot by hitting CTRL+D and copy the xorg config to deb_arm/etc/X11/ and copy in the wireless firmware you copied at the start

# mkdir ~/deb_arm/lib/firmware
# cp ~/fw_bcm4329.bin ~/deb_arm/lib/firmware
# cp ~/bcm4329.cal ~/deb_arm/lib/firmware

Building the Kernel

For this part, make sure you’ve extracted the kernel sources, and the android–ndk to somewhere, in my case they’ve been extracted in ~/Downloads

# cd ~/Downloads/Tiamat–AOSP–Tiamat–Xoom–798572c/
# export CROSS_COMPILE=~/Downloads/android–ndk–r5b/toolchains/arm–eabi–4.4.0/prebuilt/\
linux–x86/bin/arm–eabi–

# export ARCH=arm
# export INSTALL_PATH=~/deb_arm/boot
# export INSTALL_MOD_PATH=~/deb_arm
# make tiamat_defconfig
# make menuconfig

Once you’ve got the menuconfig screen up, go to Device Drivers > Character Devices > and enable “Virtual Terminal”
go to Device Drivers > Graphics Support > Console Display Driver support > enable “Framebuffer Console Support”

once you’ve enabled that, exit out and save the changes

Build the kernel and prepare it for use

# make –j2
# sudo make modules_install
# sudo cp arch/arm/boot/zImage ~/deb_arm/boot
# cp System.map ~/deb_arm/boot/
# chroot ~/deb_arm
# mkinitramfs –o /boot/initrd.img.gz `ls /lib/modules`

mkinitramfs may show some warnings like “warning: can’t open /etc/mtab:” and “pkg: version ’2.6.36.4Tiamat_Xoom–v1.4.4–Full_Throttle’ has bad syntax: invalid character in version number” but it doesn’t seem to have caused any issues for me.

Preparing the SDCard

Plug your SDCard reader into your computer and insert the card, you’ll then need to partition and format it so make sure you’ve backed up the content of the card.

Partition it so you have two partitions, the first one being a FAT32 Partition for CWR and for anything you might want to use it for under Android.

Your second partition will need to be EXT3 and big enough to fit your debian install with some room to breathe (about 4GB in my case), you can check how much space you’ll need for this by running du -sh ~/deb_arm

Once you’ve partitioned it, format the first partition as FAT32 and the second partition as EXT3. once you’ve done that you should put the SDCard back in your Xoom and make a new nandroid backup just to be sure

# sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb2
# sudo mkfs.msdos /dev/sdb1

Putting it all together

First we’ll mount the SDCard on your PC and copy across the Root FS

# sudo mkdir /mnt/sdcard
# sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/sdcard
# sudo cp -arv ~/deb_arm/* /mnt/sdcard/
# umount /mnt/sdcard

Go to the folder you unpacked mkbootimg to  and copy in the boot.img from your CWR backup.

Once you’ve done that, follow the below steps to create the new boot.img for Debian to use

# cd ~/Downloads/mkbootimg
# cp ~/deb_arm/boot/zImage .
# cp ~/deb_arm/boot/initrd.img.gz .
# mkdir out
# ./unpackbootimg –i boot.img –o out/
# ./mkbootimg ––kernel zImage ––ramdisk initrd.img.gz ––base “`cat out/boot.img–base`” \
––cmdline “root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 console=tty0″ –o newimg.img

Now reboot your Xoom into Fastboot mode and insert the SDCard, this can be done by holding power + volume up until the screen goes black, then power it back on and hold down the volume down key

# cp ~/Downloads/fastboot .
# ./fastboot flash boot newimg.img
# ./fastboot reboot

Your Xoom should now boot up into Debian, on the login screen select the accessibility options and enable on-screen keyboard to log in.
Alternatively, if you happen to have a USB-OTG adapter you can just use a keyboard and mouse to interact with the system.

Going Back to Android

To Roll back to Android, simply boot into Clockwork Recovery, go to Backup/Restore > Advanced Restore and restore boot.img only, reboot and you’ll be back in Android

Acknowledgements

Lopi from the IX Project was a great help, and so was everyone from #IX
Lilstevie from @GalaxyLinux provided the Touchscreen patches
Framebuffer Patch was originally provided by Robert Morell for the Chromium Project
RootFS instructions are based on info at the Debian Wiki

My Macbook pro decided that it was time for some irrepairable partition corruption tonight. as such I’ve had to restore from a backup

This post is a followup to my previous post about Time machine on unsupported network drives.

if you wish to do a full restore of a Time Machine backup from what apple considers an unsupported time machine device from the OSX install DVD you will need to open up Terminal from the Utilities menu then type

mkdir /Volumes/TM

mount_afp afp://username:password@ipaddressoffileserver/timemachineshare /Volumes/TM

then exit the terminal, go to Utilities > Restore this system from a backup and it should now appear in your list.

Basically what we have here is an article on Flash by somebody who self taught and has no qualifications or experience with anything else.
So, as I read it, it becomes clear to me that this fellow is afraid of change. Possibly because he will be left behind if he doesn’t learn HTML5 and also because he doesn’t seem to understand where companies like Adobe will really fit in when HTML5 replaces flash. Let’s explore this.

Open source they cry! A world wide web free of proprietary formats and buggy plug-ins they say! HTML 5 is here and finally spelling the end for Flash. It sounds like an Apple fan boy’s wet dream. A text pad wielding code monkey’s paradise too perhaps? But does the Flash platform need to die in order to achieve online Zenith where we ascend to a magical place where JavaScript libraries and cascading style sheets run wild and free.

Perhaps the issue people have is that Flash isn’t at all stable on OSX let alone any mobile device and even when running its performance is horrendous.
Why use a buggy slow piece of shit plugin when our browsers are capable of the same things flash is? this is more than just code monkeys. this is users and code monkeys alike.

I hope not. I have a soft spot for Flash. Fundamentally because it’s one of the most empowering creative tools of the digital age. It was a huge catalyst for content creation in the early days of the web, but flash also played a key role in the emergence of Web 2.0 through YouTube and Flickr technologies. It showed the web could have more than just static text and pictures, things like atmosphere, transitions and graphic style unparalleled in any HTML sites.

This is true, but it’s 2010 and the times are a changin’.

We now have an HTML spec that is capable of providing cross platform media in a way never before possible. without any proprietary plugins and without any performance hit or browser crashing caused by buggy closed-source plugins that will never be fixed. Flash did do a great thing for the web. but unfortunately for some its days are coming to a close. it pioneered some aspects of web media but HTML5 is going to take us forward.

Youtube understands this, and now support HTML5

I’d like to see HTML 5 do this. I remember I used to get a hard disk over this kinda thing 10 years ago when I was learning Flash. It offered an incredible insight into the potential of the platform and gave new meaning to the web. Sites like 2advanced.com would clearly translate well to the iPad given the obvious attention to detail and design. This is not possible with HTML 5 yet. Nothing the bashers have put forward argues otherwise.

Once Adobe releases their HTML5 designing tools. there shouldn’t be any problems with that.

Would HTML 5 be able to create TV shows like Quads or how about a full length feature Drawn Together movie.

HTML5 is a web technology, it’s focus is not to create Television shows. however the canvas functions should be more than capable of this. we’ll just have to wait and see.

The web is better with Flash. A richer, more inclusive experience.

HTML5 is capable of the same things Flash is.

What Adobe has done right is to plant the seeds of a very diverse and colourful ecosystem of content producers, tools, resources and libraries out there for free (mostly) to anyone who wants to learn.

That’s right, plant the seeds.

What Andrew doesn’t seem to realise is that anything that Flash could do with the web, HTML5 can do better.
Flash is a buggy, poorly performing pile of shit. Designing a site in flash makes it impossible for people link to things on the site, makes it impossible for blind customers to use your site. makes it impossible for a search engine to index any of the content on the page or for the site to work on a machine which is incapable of supporting flash.

It is not the duty of a web browser to support a site, it is the duty of the site to work on any browser. sure some functionality being lost due to small amounts of flash based content on a site but when you build a full site out of flash it’s your own problem when it comes to your customers being unable to view your site.

Any web designer that designs a whole website out of flash is a hack, it’s simply bad etiquette to build a site that relies on flash. Any designer that I work with that uses flash so heavily is usually the self-taught kind. Like I said, sites should be designed to support the browser not the other way around.

However if you’re not particularly feeling like a hack then you’ll have no problems. your friends at Adobe are going to make it through the whole HTML5 thing just fine.

What some people don’t seem to realise is that Adobe will be one of the companies that brings HTML5 development tools to the market.

This is how people will deliver content using things like Canvas. they will provide the HTML5 video players etc. they will make it easy for the average simpleton to move from flash to HTML5.
If you’re capable of learning new things you’ll be fine, Adobe will give you all of the nice tools to make HTML5 development a drag and drop affair.

The reason being that as it’s used for 2D Drawing and would be a direct competitor to the bloated, buggy crapware we’re forced to use now (flash)

Because of this objection, the spec will most likely be put on hold for now while this political bullshit of theirs is sorted.

Seriously Adobe, HTML5 will replace flash. you can either waste it’s last breaths thrashing around trying to survive or you can get in on the HTML5 pie with some tools that will allow people to make great HTML5 content.

(Source: Daring Fireball)

UPDATED

Adobe are claiming that they have in no way hindered HTML5 or any of it’s related specs

Quote by Larry Masinter - Adobe rep

No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, “blocked” in the W3C HTML Working Group — not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video — not by me, not by Adobe.

Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5.

Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?

Not sure if I believe it myself. but who knows.

It could’ve been so much

Instead we get a half baked abortion of a game made by a company that seems hell bent on ignoring every support request their customers put in.

Well, almost all.

They seem to pop up in threads where some blind, neckbearded Star Trek nerd puts up a post praising the creators of the game and telling them it’s the best thing invented since cheetos. when one of those posts come up the GMs and Devs drop all their work and seem to suckle on the aforementioned neckbearded fellows cock.

You know, Cryptic would be better off spending less time sucking the dicks of religious star trek nerds who are blinded by their fetish for all things Star Trek and more time fixing the numerous bugs in the game, and replying to actual customers who have some valid input.

How about fixing the rego key issues? people (like me) can’t even apply their pre-order keys because the system claims not to recognise it.
There are extreme rubber banding issues
Regular disconnects and logouts
Missing items from the pre-order packs
Lack of content
Lack of diversity in missions. a majority of them are “go here, kill that”
Stop fucking bringing the servers down every night, during Australian Primetime.
Enough with the random disconnects, and the constant unplanned downtime
Give the game a death penalty, otherwise it’s like it is now, a never ending game of space lemmings where you keep going in to fight the valiant fight, die and then repeat.

Plenty of issues, instead we get bullshit patches for crap like spelling corrections.

I think the worst part is the community of unbathed blind neckbeard having e-heros who spend their time on the forums saying shit like “You should feel privileged to have a ST MMO” and to “stop whining”

Here’s an idea to those idiots, go fuck yourselves!

I paid something like $70 on the game, I’d like my moneys worth please! especially if these leeches want me to pay them monthly for a game based off of the star trek universe, even if they have physically violated it to the point they have and completely fucked with the canon.

The worst part is that I’ve essentially pissed away $70 on a game that I can’t play unless I want to give them more money for subscribing. 6 months down the track I might come back to it to see if the shit flinging monkeys at cryptic have managed to queef something out that resembles a playable game. right now we have a game that needs another year of development before it becomes playable. by then they could’ve gone bankrupt. making my $70 even more fucking wasted because I’ll never get a chance to play this bullshit.

An interesting article some of you might find interesting on the iPad.

I tend to agree with the post, many people allowed themselves to believe the rumours of the iPad being some mystical cure for cancer and were dissapointed when they didn’t get what they had hoped for. so ended up crying like little babies.

The iPad is a great device, maybe not exactly what you want in a tablet but that doesn’t mean it’s shit. I mean they are nothing like netbooks so what’s to hate?

http://snatchbot.net/2010/02/07/ipad-more-like-ifad-amirite-haha-im-funny/

I may or may not transfer the posts from the old blog across. depending on whether I can find a suitable database backup or not.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

hdiutil create -size 90G -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE HOSTNAME_MACCADR.sparsebundle