Geek hardware, for a change

Wireless router

Urgh. After having been fighting with my ISP about connectivity problems, they announced that the problem I was plagued with (a bug in a Motorola UBR on their network) was fixed. I was still getting dropped connections though. Turns out the software on the provided D-Link DIR-615 is DIRe (see what I did there).

Here comes DD-WRT. I followed the instructions from this forum post (just the “How do I install DD-WRT?” part), with a firmware grabbed from the DD-WRT website itself.

After the initial setup, I also switched off 802.11B support, as the last device I have to require this is a Nintendo DS that doesn't even do WPA.

New phone

I got a new phone on Friday, and managed to steer clear of iTunes for now. First off, I exported all the contacts from my old Sony Ericsson phone using obexftp:

obexftp -v -b 00:11:22:33:44:55 -U synch -S -g telecom/pb.vcf

This will give you a pb.vcf file with all your contacts.

With the new device still missing a micro-SIM, I fixed a bunch of nautilus-ideviceinfo bugs. With the micro-SIM inserted, I activated the phone with Free Software. After setting up a minimal network, I sent my pb.vcf file to the new phone via e-mail, and reinserted all the contacts.

Still plenty more integration to be done, though a visit to jailbreakme.com will make this easier.

iDevice changes

If like me you jumped the queue of soccer moms, divorced middle-age business men and fanbois on Friday morning, you might have had a new toy to play with this week-end.

The good news

If you use Fedora 13, we fixed up some bugs and you can now mount your iPaid (private joke) on the desktop, and have it show up with a spiffy icon. All the updates are in updates-testing.

upower got the ability to tell you your battery status when plugging in an iDevice, though you'll need gnome-power-manager from master to see it, and even then, it won't show up on a desktop system without a UPS. Still some UI problems to iron out there.

gvfs will now warn you about the device being locked. Again, this change is only on master as it adds new strings.

nautilus-ideviceinfo is nearly ripe for consumption after my wad of bug fixes. I expect the code to move into the GNOME repos soon after the first release.

The bad news

Still no video, music or e-books syncing on the tablet iDevice.

No support yet for the per-app documents syncing. If you have a jailbroken device, you can use iFile to move your documents to the Documents sub-directory of /var/mobile/Applications/application-UUID (make sure to turn on "Application names" in the preferences).

iPhone and iPod touch support in Fedora

As Martin posted recently, libimobiledevice hit 1.0.0 earlier this week.

As a timeline of what's available in Fedora, here's a list of the features available in each Fedora release for iPhone and iPod Touch users:

- Fedora 11 contains libimobiledevice 1.0.0 and filesystem access through ifuse

- Fedora 12 was the first distribution to ship with out-of-the-box support for gvfs-afc, presenting you with your device on the desktop as soon as plugged in.

- Fedora 13 (and the upcoming Beta) will contain libgpod and Rhythmbox with music syncing support for those devices.

Loads of tweaks are happening now in Fedora 13 to make the experience smoother. Feedback in the bugzillas, as per usual.