As recommended, I did the factory reset before upgrading and (just to be sure) after upgrade again, though I feel the latter one wasn’t necessary. I can recommend upgrading. Most things work more fluently than before. Upgrade didn’t leave a negative impression so far.

Positive things to mention (did the upgrade about two hours ago):

• Flash works (only tried a single game and it lagged but so what..?)
• Finally (!) no longer two different calender apps (both gmail and exchange displayed in one calender)
• Home Screen runs very(!!!) smoothly – so does the overall experience compared to 2.1
• Lock Screen’s ‘Silent’ slide turns phone to vibrate, not to completely silent
• Browser appears to run much faster

Negative things to mention:

• when setting up a lock-screen-pattern, then locking the screen means to make you BOTH touch the usual unlock-slide AND draw your unlock-pattern – so it is even more stupid than before. Using unlock-slide whenever screen is turned off and ask for the pattern after timeout would make more sense to me. Also, when setting timeout to e.g. 30min, you are not asked to touch the unlock slide either…

• the overall look and feel is the same as in Android 2.1 (Not quite sure if this is supposed to be different)

Overall: I (and many others) waited for ages, but it leaves a very good first impression. Maybe still some sort of thanks to Motorola.

P.S. ProTip: Write down the names of your installed apps before the upgrade and then reinstall them using the market web interface from your PC (just log on with your gmail account) – it will save you hours

I was wondering why there is no Firefox search engine for the Android Market so I wrote one myself. After trying to publish it, I might have found out why I couldn’t find one since ‘Plugin Validation’ resulted in the error message

“OpenSearch: Provider is not a valid OpenSearch provider”

Being to tired to figure out the reason, I decided to publish it here, since for me it works perfectly. Just save the xml-file in the according path (as in my case it is ~/.mozilla/firefox/w0k2yqfw.default/searchplugins/).

If you know the solution to the mentioned error, please let me know.

(Download here)

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/" xmlns:os="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<os:ShortName>androidMarket</os:ShortName>
<os:Description>Search the Android Market</os:Description>
<os:InputEncoding>UTF-8</os:InputEncoding>
<os:Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,AAABAAEAEBAQAAEABAAoAQAAFgAAACgAAAAQAAAAIAAAAAEABAAAAAAAwAAAABMLAAATCwAAEAAAAAAAAADz+/kARcqqADnGpAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMzMyIzIjMzMzMzIjMiMzMzMzMiMyIzMzMzIiIiIiIzMzMiIiIiIjMyIyIiIiIiMiIjIiIiIiIyIiMiIiIiIjIiIyIiIiIiMiIjIiIiIiIyIzMzMzMzMzMzMyIiIiIiMzMzIiIiIiIzMzMyMiIjIzMzMzMhIiIDMzMzMjMzMyMzP5n+Ai+Z8AAPmfAADgBwAA4AfkIiAEAAAgBAAAIAQAACAEAMAgBLnI//8AAOAHAADgB+Qi9C8AAPgPAAD37wwA</os:Image>
<SearchForm>https://market.android.com</SearchForm>
<os:Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="https://market.android.com/search?q={searchTerms}&amp;c=apps">
</os:Url>
</SearchPlugin>

• System Settings
• Local Settings & Language
• Keyboard Layout
• Set radio button to “Activate Keyboard Layouts”
• If necessary (not in my case): Add your desired layout to the list of active layouts
• Apply
• Restart Synergy Server

That’s it. But remember to follow this procedure on the server as well as the client(s). By the way: The original Synergy project by Chris Schoenemann and the maintenance fork Synergy+ finally merged. Here’s the new web site: http://synergy-foss.org/

The story in short (if you’re in a hurry):

Never ever (really: NEVER EVER) try to clean optical media with acetone!

The full story:I tried to clean a CD because it wasn’t readable in parts, which resulted in I/O-Errors. First approach was soap. But didn’t work. Second approach was TFT-cleaning-foam. Didn’t work either. Third approach: ethyl alcohol. No effect.

The fourth (and eventually last) approach: Acetone. Not quite sure whether it managed cleaning the CD. But the result looked like this:

The brighter, greasy looking areas are actually dissolved plastics. The CD got severly damaged by the acetone. Readability: None.

F*ck d*mn it!!

I finally realised, that some processes like nepomuk and virtuoso-t frequently occupied my CPU in a way that my computer was no longer usable (for the past two weeks, I only used it as a network-enabled, file- and print-serving heating device).

What worked for me was completely disabling these features – I’m rather sure, I won’t need them. In the ‘Extended’ tab in KDE’s ‘System Settings’ you’ll find sth. like ‘Desktop Search’ (I’m sorry for incorrect terms or names – I’m using the German UI). I disabled everything in the appearing dialogue including all folders. Clicking on ‘Apply’ took quite some time – seems like something happened.

Eventually, I can use my computer again. Average CPU load decreased form around 98% to 3%.

Today, I happened to have a large ape-file with an according cue-file. After converting and splitting it with cueape.sh, I realized that the cue-file consisted of a bunch of crap that started like this:

PERFORMER "Unknown Artist"
TITLE "Unknown Title"
FILE "CDImage.wav" WAVE
 TRACK 01 AUDIO
 TITLE "Track01"
 PERFORMER "Unknown Artist"
 INDEX 01 00:00:00
 TRACK 02 AUDIO
 TITLE "Track02"
 PERFORMER "Unknown Artist"
 INDEX 01 03:35:30
[...]

Great… while the timestamps are correct, there isn’t a single piece of meta information so I ended up with

$> l
01 - Track01.ogg  04 - Track04.ogg  07 - Track07.ogg  10 - Track10.ogg  13 - Track13.ogg  16 - Track16.ogg  19 - Track19.ogg  22 - Track22.ogg  25 - Track25.ogg
02 - Track02.ogg  05 - Track05.ogg  08 - Track08.ogg  11 - Track11.ogg  14 - Track14.ogg  17 - Track17.ogg  20 - Track20.ogg  23 - Track23.ogg
03 - Track03.ogg  06 - Track06.ogg  09 - Track09.ogg  12 - Track12.ogg  15 - Track15.ogg  18 - Track18.ogg  21 - Track21.ogg  24 - Track24.ogg
$>

Of course, meta information of the created ogg-files was equally as helpful… So I ended up filling out the meatinformation manually. But still, there were these file-names bothering me in not saying anything. Since I already provided meta-information I wanted to use it for renaming these files. A quick and unpatient google search didn’t reveal anything, so I wrote a bash-script. Maybe this one comes in handy for some one of you out there.

#!/bin/bash
#
# rename_ogg.sh
#
# Rename all ogg files in a directory according to their metainformation
#
# v 0.1 - fixed string, $ARTIST - $ALBUM - $TITLE.ogg
#
# use arg -v for producing verbose output
#
# simply invoke this script from the directory containing the
# files to be renamed, e.g.
# ~/path/to/my/oggs$ /usr/local/bin/rename_ogg.sh -v
#

if [ "$1" = "-v" ]
then
 echo "Verbose Output"
 verbose=1
else
 verbose=0
fi;

for current_file in ./*
do
 TITLE=`ogginfo "$current_file" | tr -d "\t" | grep TITLE  | cut -d "=" -f 2`
 ALBUM=`ogginfo "$current_file" | tr -d "\t" | grep ALBUM  | cut -d "=" -f 2`
 ARTIST=`ogginfo "$current_file" | tr -d "\t" | grep ARTIST  | cut -d "=" -f 2`

 new_name="$ARTIST - $ALBUM - $TITLE.ogg"

 if [ $verbose -eq 1 ]
 then
 echo "$current_file --> $new_name"
 fi;

 mv "$current_file" "$new_name"
done;

So, this is what it looks like, when you use it:

$> ls
01 - Track01.ogg  04 - Track04.ogg  07 - Track07.ogg  10 - Track10.ogg  13 - Track13.ogg  16 - Track16.ogg  19 - Track19.ogg  22 - Track22.ogg  25 - Track25.ogg
02 - Track02.ogg  05 - Track05.ogg  08 - Track08.ogg  11 - Track11.ogg  14 - Track14.ogg  17 - Track17.ogg  20 - Track20.ogg  23 - Track23.ogg
03 - Track03.ogg  06 - Track06.ogg  09 - Track09.ogg  12 - Track12.ogg  15 - Track15.ogg  18 - Track18.ogg  21 - Track21.ogg  24 - Track24.ogg
$> ../rename_ogg.sh -v
Verbose Output
./01 - Track01.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 0 - 01 - Prelude.ogg
./02 - Track02.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 01 - No. 1 Introduction: "À l'heure accoutumée" (Nilakantha).ogg
./03 - Track03.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 02 - Prière: "Blanche Dourga" (Lakmé, Nilakantha).ogg
./04 - Track04.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 03 - No. 1 Bis - Scène: "Lakmé, c'est toi qui nous protégeons!" (Nilakantha, Lakmé).ogg
./05 - Track05.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 04 - No. 2 - Duetto (The Flower Duet): "Viens, Mallika, les lianes en fleurs ... Dôme épais, le jasmin" (Lakmé, Mallika).ogg
./06 - Track06.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 05 - Scène: "Miss Rose, Miss Ellen" (Gérald).ogg
./07 - Track07.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 06 - No. 3 - Quintette & couplets: "Quand une femme est si jolie" (Gérald).ogg
./08 - Track08.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 07 - Récitatif: "Nous commettons un sacrilège" (Gérald).ogg
./09 - Track09.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 08 - No. 4 - Air: "Prendre le dessin d'un bijou" (Gérald).ogg
./10 - Track10.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 09 - No. 4 Bis - Scène: "Non! Je ne veux pas toucher" (Gérald, Lakmé).ogg
./11 - Track11.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 10 - No. 5 - Récitatif & Strophes: "Les fleurs me paraissent plus belles" (Lakmé).ogg
./12 - Track12.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 11 - No. 5 Bis - Récitatif: "Ah! Mallika! Mallika!" (Lakmé).ogg
./13 - Track13.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 12 - No. 6 - Duo: "D'où viens-tu? Que veux-tu?" (Lakmé, Gérald).ogg
./14 - Track14.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 13 - No. 6 Bis - Scène: "Viens! Là! Là!" (Nilakantha, Lakmé).ogg
./15 - Track15.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 01 - Entr'acte.ogg
./16 - Track16.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 02 - No. 7 - Choeur & Scène du marche: "Allons, avant que midi sonne".ogg
./17 - Track17.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 03 - No. 7 Bis - Récitatif: "Enfin! Nous aurons du silence!".ogg
./18 - Track18.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 04 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Introduction.ogg
./19 - Track19.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 05 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Terana.ogg
./20 - Track20.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 06 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Rektah.ogg
./21 - Track21.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 07 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Persian.ogg
./22 - Track22.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 08 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Coda avec Choeurs.ogg
./23 - Track23.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 09 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Sortie.ogg
./24 - Track24.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 10 - Récitatif: "Voyez donc ce vieillard".ogg
./25 - Track25.ogg --> Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 11 - No. 9 - Scène & Stances: "Ah! Ce vieillard encore!" (Nilankantha, Lakmé).ogg
$> ls
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 0 - 01 - Prelude.ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 01 - No. 1 Introduction: "À l'heure accoutumée" (Nilakantha).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 02 - Prière: "Blanche Dourga" (Lakmé, Nilakantha).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 03 - No. 1 Bis - Scène: "Lakmé, c'est toi qui nous protégeons!" (Nilakantha, Lakmé).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 04 - No. 2 - Duetto (The Flower Duet): "Viens, Mallika, les lianes en fleurs ... Dôme épais, le jasmin" (Lakmé, Mallika).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 05 - Scène: "Miss Rose, Miss Ellen" (Gérald).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 06 - No. 3 - Quintette & couplets: "Quand une femme est si jolie" (Gérald).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 07 - Récitatif: "Nous commettons un sacrilège" (Gérald).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 08 - No. 4 - Air: "Prendre le dessin d'un bijou" (Gérald).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 09 - No. 4 Bis - Scène: "Non! Je ne veux pas toucher" (Gérald, Lakmé).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 10 - No. 5 - Récitatif & Strophes: "Les fleurs me paraissent plus belles" (Lakmé).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 11 - No. 5 Bis - Récitatif: "Ah! Mallika! Mallika!" (Lakmé).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 12 - No. 6 - Duo: "D'où viens-tu? Que veux-tu?" (Lakmé, Gérald).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 1 - 13 - No. 6 Bis - Scène: "Viens! Là! Là!" (Nilakantha, Lakmé).ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 01 - Entr'acte.ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 02 - No. 7 - Choeur & Scène du marche: "Allons, avant que midi sonne".ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 03 - No. 7 Bis - Récitatif: "Enfin! Nous aurons du silence!".ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 04 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Introduction.ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 05 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Terana.ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 06 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Rektah.ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 07 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Persian.ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 08 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Coda avec Choeurs.ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 09 - No. 8 - Airs de danse: Sortie.ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 10 - Récitatif: "Voyez donc ce vieillard".ogg
Léo Delibes - Lakmé - Akt 2 - 11 - No. 9 - Scène & Stances: "Ah! Ce vieillard encore!" (Nilankantha, Lakmé).ogg
$>

P.S.

Known Bugs:

• renaming fails if supposed filename contains a /

To Do:

• catch this error
• support more file types
• make resulting file name configurable

In my case, ‘exotic’ means the following:

• IDE, Primary Master: Partition 1: Windows XP, Partition2: Abandoned Linux (Will be deleted soon and joined into first partition), primary boot device, contains boot loader
• IDE, Primary Slave: Data
• SATA: Partition 1: Ubuntu Linux, recently upgraded from 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS (so, still old GRUB), Partition 2: Data

The primary boot device is IDE’s Primary Master.

Now, it turns out Ubuntu gets kinda mixed up with device.map and menu.lst when automagically updating them after installing a new kernel, which results in the error mentioned above. I will describe a solution that worked for me, dependig on my configuration (device.map and parts of menu.lst are included in this posting).

Before we start, some fun facts – they might be useful and some of them rely on assumptions which means, I’m not sure if they are true.

• The solution depends on using a live-distro (Knoppix 6.2 in my case). Any other should work as well, as long as it’s using the same architecture (32 vs 64 bit – I just read about that somewhere)
• If you are aware of that problem before rebooting, you can most likely skip the part with the live distro (since you are reading this, I assume, that you weren’t aware of it – but maybe, you remeber it next time you upgrade your kernel).
• Assumption: It seems as if grub insists on the harddrive which contains the boot loader to be mapped to hd0

Well then, let’s start. You have booted the live distro and you have  somehow figured out which device-file (e.g. /dev/sda) belongs to which physical hard drive. In my case, this looks like this:

cht@sibi:/boot/grub$ cat device.map
(hd0)   /dev/sdb # primary master, first boot device, so contains boot loader
(hd1)   /dev/sdc # primary slave
(hd2)   /dev/sda # SATA, contains active linux distro
cht@sibi:/boot/grub$

We must now fake our installed (currently not running) distro to be the active, running distro. This way, we can use grub-install. We achieve this by mounting it and using chroot.

cht@sibi:/media$ mount sda1 ./sda1 # dir already existed, live distro is aware of all my partitions
cht@sibi:/media$ sudo mount -o bind /dev ./sda1/dev
cht@sibi:/media$ sudo mount -t proc /proc ./sda1/proc
cht@sibi:/media$ sudo chroot /dev/sda1 /bin/bash

Now, we are (kinda) running our installed distro. This is the point where you hook in if you didn’t reboot yet. Now, make sure, that in device.map, the hard drive which is supposed to contain the boot loader is mapped to hd0 (see above). Then, edit your menu.lst accordingly. Another fun fact (ha ha):

I saw something like temporarily mapping hard drives like

title           Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-21-generic
root            (hd0,0)
map             (hd0) (hd2)  ## I guess, this is supposed to swap
map             (hd2) (hd0)  ## them...
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-21-generic root=UUID=068fa44c-39e6-4d81-814e-99636b0dac52 ro quiet splash
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-21-generic
quiet

which didn’t work for me. What finally did the trick was

title           Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-21-generic
root            (hd2,0)  ## HERE we go - hd2 is my SATA-hdd
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-21-generic root=UUID=068fa44c-39e6-4d81-814e-99636b0dac52 ro quiet splash
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-21-generic
quiet

Now, that you fixed all your entries, you write the new boot loader into the MBR of hd0 (/dev/sdb in my case)

cht@sibi:/boot/grub$ sudo grub-install /dev/sdb
cht@sibi:/boot/grub$ sudo update-grub # should only be necessary, if you messed something up seriously
                                      # before - however, I guess it won't harm you...

Now, that’s it. Leave chroot environment with exit, and reboot your machine with shutdown -r now.

Any comments are very welcome.

What won’t work is to just copy the vdi-file, which contains the image’s data. This is because the images have a unique ID (uuid) which would be copied as well. Several reports on the web say, that this won’t work.

What will work – and it’s not much more difficult than ‘copy a.vdi b.vdi’ is to use the command line tool ‘VBoxManage’ which is shipped with every installation of VirtualBox.

c:\Program Files\sun\VirtualBox\> VBoxManage.exe clonehd P:\ath\to\source\image.vdi P:\ath\to\cloned\image.vdi

does the trick.

Though it takes ages (as to copy several dozens of gigabytes) the cloned image contains its own uuid but data is (nearly) the same. Nearly, because for some reason I had to reinstall guest additions – but that’s all.

Whatever the problem is (feel free to answer this by means of a comment) you can work around it by

?> export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

Of course, you can use the statement in a short script, so the environment is adjusted every time you start eclipse:

contents of start_eclipse.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# Script to set envvar before eventually starting eclipse  

##################################
# put environment variables here
##################################
# prevent dialog buttons to behave strangely under KDE
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true  

##################################
# eventually start eclipse
##################################
/absolute/path/to/eclipse

Just save it in the same place with your eclipse executable, use chmod to make it executable and adjust your shortcuts. That will do the trick.

[Update:] According to this, you can get rid of using the script above and simply add

-DGDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

to your eclipse.ini

[Update2:] if

-DGDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

(which works fine for me) has no effect, try

-DGDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

(thx 2 Julien)

After suspecting some weird y2k10-bug (which I couldn’t prove), I figured out that reformatting is sufficient (though annoying).

In contrast to other articles I read, there is no need to format your player as FAT. FAT32 is totally fine.

So, here’s the workaround. Copy all files to hard disk, format your MP3-Player, move all files back. It’s as ‘easy’ as that.

If you know a better way, please(!!) let me know.

[UPDATE] I recently figured out, that mounting my stick on (K)Ubuntu Karmic Koala running in a VirtualBox on Windows XP Pro somehow affects the stick’s filesystem. Though, all files are perfectly readable by every PC, the files are no longer recognized by the player. This time, it didn’t even find a single file. Again: if you have a solution or workaround for that (except stopping to use Ubuntu in VBox on WinXP), please let me know.

[UPDATE2] I (kinda) proceeded in isolating the cause for that weird behaviour: just mounting the stick (as described in Update) doesn’t affect anything. In the end, it is caused by copying a directory to the stick containing SVN-information, espacially subfolders named .svn. Deleting these subfolders makes the MP3-player work again.