November 7, 2008

iPhone under VMWare: still a pain

Christian Decker wrote this terribly early in the morning:

I’ve spent the last few hours trying to update the firmware on my iPhone to version 2.1 as most of the applications in the Apps Store are starting to require it.

First a bit of background info: I’ve been a passionate Linux user for the last 4 years and I don’t see why I should switch to Windows just to sync my iPhone (which btw. isn’t working as my Thinkpad T400 has successfully blocked as the Windows installation crashes with a BSOD) and I don’t see why Apple can’t support Linux too.

So I was thrilled when I heard that I could use VMWare Workstation v6.5.0 to sync my iPhone and all worked well for a while. But then I thought “why not try a firmware update?”, and all hell broke loose. After waiting for iTunes for more than an hour to give me back an absolutely generic failure message I gave up on my first attempt. Today on my second attempt I got a little bit farther. I now realize that it has something to do with the updater disconnecting the device and then waiting for it to reappear (why that is, I have no idea) but instead of the iTunes updater to respond to the device in recovery mode, it is Linux jumping in as it should and thus invalidating the update.

It’s getting really annoying by now, and resetting (15 seconds holding both home and power and then holding 2 seconds the power button, for those like me who can’t remember how) isn’t too nice…

When will Apple finally learn that there is a huge market for their devices if they’d only open up a little bit or provide us with the tools to use them under Linux?

*
Comments

September 9, 2008

Make Firefox more Chrome like

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
Like the look of Google Chrome but don’t want to ditch Firefox? Try the Chromifox theme, a “coat of Chrome for Firefox.” While you’re at it, why not enable more of Chrome’s best features in Firefox.

*
Comments

February 29, 2008

I moved to Firefox 3 and so can you

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:

I’ve been trying the newest Firefox betas for some time and I love its incredible speed and cleaner looks, but not having my extensions with me because they were incompatible with FF3 was a showstopper for me. Now however I have found a workaround:

extensions.checkCompatibility

With this value set to true in the about:config screen you can use extensions on FF3 that have not yet been enabled like the awesome Gmail Manager, All in one Sidebar and Download Statusbar. Be careful though that these have not been tested and you’ll probably run into some problems (like I did with FireBug).
If I conviced you to try Firefox 3 then there’s a super easy way to install it with one command:

wget -P ~ ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0b3/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 && tar xjf ~/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 -C ~

*
Comments

December 4, 2007

Getting touchy

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:

iPod TouchI got myself an iPod Touch, and I’m in love!

Now, some of you might remember that I’m not a huge fan of Apple Products, or better to say their users that far too often become Apple-Apostles, but even I have to admit that the new iPod is a masterpiece of usability and beauty (once you have unlocked it). Yes, that’s right, I had no other choice than to ask a friend of mine to unlock it, since it was impossible to do so on my Linux machine. Then I had to hack it to get it working with Linux, since the connector cable won’t work either. The only solution I have found so far involves jailbreaking, installing the SSH server and then use sshfs to mount the iPod’s Disk to my Linux box. It’s really a shame that Apple keeps ignoring the needs of so many of it’s customers! And why, oh why don’t they just put the VPN client and Mail client on the iPod…???

Enough of the rants, let’s get on with the good stuff: the browser, the Youtube app really kick ass and I’m happy that I can use some of my favorite webapps:

  • Todoist: the best task tracker there is.
  • Gmail: do I even have to tell you why?
  • Facebook: Getting social on the way
  • and being able to read the slides of my upcoming lections while not even getting up from bed is nice too :)

*
Comments

December 2, 2007

No good blogging tools for Linux

Christian Decker wrote this around lunchtime:
Don’t Linux users blog or why is it that there are no good blogging on Linux? The problem is that I often get ideas for a post while offline, on a train or plane, and usually I have no time or simply forget to write the posts to the blog. It would be so nice to have a specialised tool for Wordpress that had a richt text editor (although I often use plain text too, especially when posting code), that takes care of file uploads and supports tags. Anyone knows about such a tool?

*
Comments