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Posted by Jonathan Altman Wed, 13 Feb 2008 05:28:00 GMT
Goaded on by requests for screenshots of Tracks running on my n810, I decided to instead document to the best of my recollection what I did to get Tracks and Instiki running on my n810.
DISCLAIMER: I am going to show you how to do some things that can probably badly mess up your device if you get them wrong, and maybe even if you follow these instructions to the letter. I do not promise that these instructions are even complete or accurate anymore; I am nearly positive the instructions below are incomplete regarding what to install. You follow these instructions at your OWN RISK. This worked for me, it may or may not work for you, with or without additional steps. I did this about 3 months ago and was not taking good notes because I figured over time apt packages would catch up and this would not be necessary to repeat. If you follow and you get warnings you need to install additional stuff to continue, you should probably assume that is correct.
I pre-ordered my n810 directly from Nokia (with a very nice discount) before it was available, and received mine I think within the first week of its being generally available in the United States. So to preface this description of how I got things working, I did all this in late November, 2007. Some packages may have moved around, and there may be better ways to do things than what I had to do. But Chinook (OS2008) ported packages were fairly slim at that time.
I should also point out that I was not interested in developing Rails apps on this machine, just installing and using them. Once I got things to an acceptable level of “done” for me, I did not investigate some pecularities further. So some things that you will not have after this are:So without further ado, as a tease, here are screenshots of Tracks running on my n810. As you can see by the lateness of many actions, I have been better about getting Tracks set up than in actually having it improve my personal organization!
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These are the steps to take to get the basics set up on your n810 to even put a Rails app like Tracks or Instiki on it.
I am not sure this is strictly necessary, but I had it on while I was doing this,and I suspect it’s necessary. This is the first but not the last dangerous part of these instructions. Instructions on doing so, and what it does for you, are on the Maemo wiki here
libsqlite3-0 appears to already be installed, so there is nothing to do. But you might want to confirm in the Application manager that it is already installed.
-I got the packages from http://maemo.rubyx.co.uk/ruby-maemo/ however the site appears to have been down for a while now.- The ruby packages I installed appear to now live at http://gplsystems.com/apt/dists/chinook/main/binary-armel/Packages (thank you friend and coworker who wishes to remain anonymous). The packages I installed, which I recall all coming from there, were:
I found and installed rubygems from somewhere, but I could never get it to do anything but hang trying to update catalog. Both Instiki and Tracks releases ship “complete” so there’s no gems needed, so I skipped this.
Add the maemo stable repository at http://repository.maemo.org/. When you are done, the apt.sources line ends up looking like “deb http://repository.maemo.org/ chinook free non-free” for those of you that like to look at the raw apt package configuration files.
I also added the Maemo extras repository and maemo-hackers.org repository
Since rubygems didn’t work for me, I decided to install mongrel from source. You need gcc, and I think make. You also need something to unpack tar/zip archives, and at the time the only maemo package I could find was p7zip. These are in the maemo repository/repositories you added earlier. I have
There may have been some other pieces needed too.
Webrick runs on the n810, for values of run equal to a geriatric snail. You will not be happy with a Rails app running under webrick. Mongrel is, while not exactly instantaneous, at least responsive enough to run an AJAX-y Rails app.
Download the mongrel source tarball from http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/. 1.1.1 was the latest at the time but they are on 1.1.3 as of February 5, 2008. Untar to a directory (using p7zip). Then do ruby setup.rb which should configure, build, and install mongrel. You should now have /usr/bin/mongrel_rails.
You will be installing Tracks and Instiki from source tarballs or zipfiles. After you download them, you will need to unpack them somewhere, using p7zip. I put them on my removable media card, which is /media/mmc1 because I was concerned about the GPS/mapping software filling up the fixed 2GB memory card /media/mmc2. If you plan to swap out memory cards often that might be a bad decision for you, but I am happy with it.
Congratulations, you’ve installed Tracks on your n810!
Congratulations, you have installed Instiki on your n810.
Now that you have Tracks and/or Instiki up and running, what next? I left my apps running on their default ports of 3000 and 2500, but you could run them on different ports if you chose. I saw no reason to do that, nor to find a webserver to proxy them to so they are off the “main” webserver. That’s just overhead the n810 really does not need.
Once I was happy with my install, I made myself a little shell script to fire them both off. When I boot up, I start up an XTerm and fire off the script. Here are its contents (sorry for the iframe, it was easier):
The easiest way I stop both my apps if I need to, like if I want to hook up the USB cable or otherwise want to make sure the Rails apps shut down cleanly, I just issue a killall ruby and that kills the mongrel processes given how I start them. Before you just do that, make sure you know what ruby processes are running on your n810 and that you’re ok to kill them all.
Note that it can take a good few seconds, from 15-20 up to maybe 30, for all the Rails apps to respond to the kill signal. Just be patient. I also highly recommend aliasing ps -ef | grep in the shell to pgrep because inputting the pipe symbol on an n810 is fairly cumbersome.
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Posted by Jonathan Altman Sun, 25 Nov 2007 19:20:00 GMT
Well, after 12 years I have switched (back) to Macs.
My first computer was an original 128k Mac, one of the very first ones. My mouse actually had a 5-digit serial number, IIRC. I gave up in 1995 swearing I would never buy another Mac:
So why the switch back? It comes down to things Just Working. I’ve been using various Linux distros, most recently Ubuntu, at home for a while. I will continue to run Ubuntu on my home laptop. But for a computer for the rest of the family to use, and for certain things for me, the Mac is just easier:
As a quick example, I installed the iSync plugin for my Nokia N95. I then used the iMac’s bluetooth wizard to connect to the phone, it found it and paired properly (no extra credit, most things do these days), but then iSync popped up and within 10 minutes of starting I had downloaded the plugin, installed it, connected my phone, and synced my phone into iCal and the address book
*Unix-y goodness. I like being able to pop into a shell and do things, and having rsync and friends around is nice
So everybody touts the awesome OSX GUI. But here’s the deal, much of it is still the best that 1983 has to offer.
Overall, I am happy with the switch back, but I think I’m jaded enough not to become too much of an Apple fan boy. There are too many usability nits left in the OS from 20 years ago.
I’m using firefox and thunderbird for mail because at the base of it I want an OS to run my apps on top off, and I like that I have the same apps on Windows, linux, and OSX.
Finally, I am sure I have said something in here to anger Mac, Windows, and Linux/Debian/Ubuntu fans everywhere. Remember, this is my choice. I use all 3 OSes now every day (Windows at work, Ubuntu on my personal machine, and OSX on the family computer). I use what works for me out of each of them, and none of them does exactly what I want for every single thing. Linux->Debian->Ubuntu and OSX each have their strong points, and I like each for what they can do. But each has downsides too. Remember, this is all IMHO, with the emphasis on my and opinion. You are free to have yours, and have them not be the same as mine.
