770 Periphery

Joy, I finally have USB host mode working, now I can start on one app I’d like for the 770 (to be announced…) I soldered +5 inside a powered Iogear GUH274 micro hub, and then used an adapter from a USB connector kit I bought at a bargain store strictly for its humor value. In addition to the connector I used, the kit included adapters from USB to RJ11 and RJ45, that let you turn the included USB male to male cable (an abominination in and of itself) to a phone cable or ethernet extension cable. I can just imagine someone relatively unskilled at computers trying to make their own USB to ethernet adapter with the kit… Fortunately. it worked quite well for connecting up the hub. At some point, I may replace the short lead from the USB hub with half of a USB cable with the proper connector…

One of the first things I checked out on the 770 was how serious Nokia’s attitude was towards making it a secure system. I was pleased to find that there is decent privilege separation for the 770 and there was at least an attempt at shipping a secure system (albeit one nerfed for development purposes…) After a brief look around the system I found nothing embarrassingly obvious. Contrast this to Sharp’s Zaurus which had an empty root password, and even setting one was nearly useless, as I discovered /etc/shadow was world readable (why even use a shadow file then?) and there were world-writable configuration files that were executed in scripts run as root.

I would rather prefer an easier way to get root than the flasher method, I mostly never used the Zaurus’s dock, preferring to transfer data using scp, even doing upgrades using a compact flash card. The Zaurus had a number of applications that required root access, and installing them wasn’t a major hassle.  I think the 770 could benefit from a happy medium between the Zaurus’s total openness and the locked down configuration the 770 ships with.

One of the more curious things that I’ve seen from the 770 is “Web – loading” when you start the browser. If I had been tasked with creating a portable browser, I suspect that I would have found a way to pre-load the browser. It makes me wonder, is this a sign that Nokia has bigger plans than just browsing, or is it a lack of confidence in the device as an internet tablet?

I’m hoping for the bigger plans option, Maemo and Scratchbox are right in all the ways that the Zaurus dev environment was wrong, especially for cross-compiling applications. If Nokia sticks with the 770 for as long as they did the N-Gage, I suspect it will have a bright future indeed.

I have a Nokia 770. Finally. After waiting a month or so for nokiausa.com to ship a backordered one, I cancelled that and bought one at CompUSA. I’d rather pay more than reward Nokia’s broken order fulfillment system…

I’ve been looking for a Linux PDA for some time, as a replacement for a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 that is no longer with us… I wasn’t happy enough with the Zaurus to buy another one, and I waited for some time for another decently supported Linux PDA to come along, with a decent display and the features I felt the Zaurus sorely needed, namely built-in 802.11 and bluetooth, USB host. The 770 was the first thing to come along that really delivered on these (except for the USB host part) and I was interested to hear that it was based on Debian. After seeing the price, it was an easy decision. Sharp had wanted $600 or so for their SL-6000 with similar features (though I miss the hidden thumbboard) and comparing capabilities wiith similarly.priced Palm systems, it seems like a great price.