Anyhow, I thought i’d update as this is mainly a test machine rather than production, what could possibly go wrong?

Libvirtd and a few other packages were updated at the same time, things seemed fairly promising, no special output from any of the updates meant that I assumed I could simply restart libvirtd and everything would just magically work again. Unfortunately it didn’t. None of my virtual machines started up.

I started up virsh and tried to start a machine, receiving the error:

Error starting domain: Cannot find QEMU binary /usr/bin/kvm: No such
file or directory

Erm… ok, perhaps the binary has moved, or changed names? The package was renamed from kvm to qemu-kvm after all… Lo and behold, there’s actually a /usr/bin/qemu now. So fire up virsh, edit my virtual machine config and replace

<emulator>/usr/bin/kvm</emulator>

with

<emulator>/usr/bin/qemu</emulator>

That ought to solve the problem, so again, try to start the virtual machine… ooh, ok, it looks like it starts, so I connect to the serial console and twiddle my thumbs for a bit… nothing. Eventually give in and connect to the vnc port for this machine. Rather annoyingly after trying to boot my x86_64 kernel on what turns out to be x86 qemu I see the message

This kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i686 CPU.

ARGH! Ok, so there must be some sort of flag I can pass to qemu to tell it to be x86_64? Or perhaps an qemu-x86_64, yes, that’s it /usr/bin/qemu-x86_64, so I edit my machine within virsh again and this time change emulator to:

<emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-x86_64</emulator>

Surely that will solve my problems? Nope, now when I try to start the VM with virsh it tells me:

error cannot parse QEMU version number in 'qemu-x86_64 version 0.11.0
(qemu-kvm-0.11.0), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard'

Eh?! So does virsh do some sort of parsing of the qemu version number and if so, what’s wrong with that?

It turns out (I learn after much random googlage), that there’s also a qemu-system-x86_64 (obviously), so once again, edit the virtual machine config in virsh and change emulator to that

<emulator>/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64</emulator>

Start the VM, watch the console…. and YaY, it boots. Finally. All I need to do now is update the rest of my virtual machine configs and everything should be ready to go again.

Whoever decided this update was a good idea without at least warning people that things were going to break needs to be flogged with a wet kipper. I know this is technically ‘unstable’ Gentoo, but come on people, give us a chance!

I do have a windows box that’s lying around for random uses, but its hard disk died recently and i’ve been wanting to flash my phone (a T-Mobile MDA Vario III , aka HTC Kaiser) for a while… Not really wanting to spend time rebuilding the windows box anytime soon I had a look around to see if there was a way of doing this stuff on my Linux boxes. Needless to say I found HTCFlasher.

Much to my surprise I found some ebuilds in the Gentoo bugzilla for it, which saved m having to do any of the real work… A couple of mins later it was installed so I had a poke around. To my surprise it worked very well, below are some notes I put together.

If you’ve never done any of this stuff before I highly recommend reading the XDA Developers Forum post for some useful notes. It’s the basic steps I followed with some slight differences noted below.

Ignore anything in the forum post that mentions ActiveS(t)ync as luckily that doesn’t apply to us. Also, anything that mentions KaiserCustomRUU.exe is what we’re replacing with HTCFlasher.

Flash HardSPL:

Download the correct JumpSPL for your phone onto your phones storage. Execute it and you should end up at the tri colour screen, it should have slightly different text to the text that you would usual tri colour screen that you would see if you turned on your phone whilst holding the camera button down.

Plug the USB cable into your phone and wait a few moments for USB device scanning to take place and then check the dmesg output for the following:

$ dmesg | tail
ipaq 7-1:1.0: PocketPC PDA converter detected
usb 7-1: PocketPC PDA converter now attached to ttyUSB0

If it doesn’t then I found that I needed the usbserial and ipaq kernel modules loaded. Also take a note at this stage as to which ttyUSBX (where X is 0, 1, 2… etc.) as it it’s not ttyUSB0 you need to specify it later.

As a quick test at this stage you should be able to use HTCFlasher to query your device for some basic information. It’s a nice simple test to see if you can actually talk to the phone before you try to do anything more serious with it. You can do this with:

$ HTCFlasher -i
=== HTCflasher v3.1
=== Open source RUU for HTC devices
=== (c) 2007-2008 Pau Oliva Fora
[] Getting device info...
[] CID: SuperCID
[] ModelID: KAIS1300

Now to actually flash the phone with HardSPL

$ HTCFlasher -F /path/to/Kaiser-HardSPL-3.29/Kaiser-HardSPL-3.29.nbh
=== HTCflasher v3.1
=== Open source RUU for HTC devices
=== (c) 2007-2008 Pau Oliva Fora
[] Flash NBH file '/path/to/Kaiser-HardSPL-3.29/Kaiser-HardSPL-3.29.nbh'
[] Setting RUU mode, please wait............done
[] SPL auth result (T=True, F=False): T
100% [###########################################]
Done!

If all went well, your phone should reboot and you probably won’t notice any difference!

I had no current reason to SIM Unlock my phone, so I skipped this step from the forum post and went straight on to…

Download and Flash your Preferred Rom

Again, follow the forum post as with the previous step, still ignoring Activesync and using HTCFlasher instead of KaiserCustomRUU.exe.

The only obvious thing to note as this stage is that when in Windows, you run the KaiserCustomRUU.exe and that seems to signal your phone to reboot etc. As far as I can tell, we don’t have that luxury, so we have to get the phone onto the tri-coloured screen ourselves. Fortunately it’s pretty easy, simply turn your Kaiser off, wait a second or two to ensure it’s really off, press and hold the camera button and then press the power button, after a few seconds the device should turn on and be at the tr-colour screen (you can then let go of the two buttons )

Everything from this point you’ve already done when flashing HardSPL. But instead of flashing the HardSPL.nbh, you flash the .nbh file from your downloaded ROM. It really should be that simple.

Also note that some ROMs require a specific radio version. So if some features of your newly flashed ROM don’t work correctly, you may have to find a matching radio (usually noted in the ROMs forum post or in some sort of README, if it’s not already part of the nbh).

That about wraps up this post. It’s worth noting that there’s a gtk frontend for HTCFlasher and the various other tools and utilities. But it’s no real hardship to flash your phone from the command line.

Perhaps in the future i’ll try to discuss using the Linux Rom Kitchen to build/modify a ROM.

The machine ran fine when I originally built it for them, Windows XP, SP1…. of course you eventually add/update things such as a virus scanner, .net framework, Windows Live Messenger/Hotmail, Service Pack 3 and eventually it feels like you’ve gone back to your 486.

Being a Linux man, i’ve been pondering simply nuking their machine and replacing it with Linux. But then you face the dilemma, which flavour? For the last few years i’ve mainly used Gentoo for anything that I put together, not really suitable as an OS for my parents though. Alot of people have raved at me about Ubuntu, so I eventually gave in and downloaded the Umbongo Ubuntu cd’s and fired them up in a test box.

To my surprise, I think my mum could have installed Ubuntu. A couple of pages of fairly simple questions, a 5 minute wait and a reboot later and I was looking at the Gnome branded Ubuntu desktop. Just a few minutes quicker than my last Gentoo install

Anyway, I know there’s lots of alternatives to various pieces of Windows software, so it’s Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, OpenOffice.org instead of Office, Pidgin instead of Windows Resource Hogging Messenger… I think they can handle that! But then what about various other things? Scanning, Printing, Zuma (some crazy addictive Windows game that my dad likes), Putting pictures onto a Digital Photo Frame, etc.

So I started with the scanning, I hate scanners in Windows, almost as much as I hate printers, put I pulled out my trusty scanner and plugged it into the test box. Twiddled thumbs, nothing bad seemed to happen which was a bonus. I looked in the list of applications and Ubuntu seems to come with Xsane installed by default. I’ve heard of but not yet tried ‘Gnome Scan’, but as XSane was installed it makes sense to at least give it a try. I started it up, it told me that it was searching for devices, it found one device and then presented me with about four crazy looking windows. Now it only took me a few moments to familiarise myself with them,within a minute or two i’d already previewed what I wanted to scan, cropped around the item in the preview window and then scanned the image into a viewer. I was pretty impressed, i’m just not sure that it would have been that easy for my Mum, perhaps with a little training. So I need to investigate other alternatives at some point, Gnome Scan being he top of the list I guess.

The next thing I looked into was running Zuma on Linux. I couldn’t find a ported Linux alternative, so I was forced down the route of trying Wine. I’d looked at it in the past for something and had limited success. But thought i’d give it a go, I had nothing to lose. I opened the add/remove programs, typed ‘wine’ in the search bar, selected the wine package for install and a few clicks later the package manager did its thing and I had Wine installed. I opened the Wine Config screen first to check that everything made sense, as I expected it did… There was a ‘virtual’ c_drive mapped to a directory within the users home directory, presumably where Wine puts installed program files etc. I downloaded the Zuma Deluxe demo from the Internet to the Desktop and double clicked the executable installer (wow I feel like a Windows user again ) . Needless to say, I was presented with the Zuma installer… A few clicks later (and a few error messages about not being able to create links to the manufacturers website), I had a Zuma Deluxe icon on the desktop. That was nice and easy. As things were going so well, it made sense to at least try playing Zuma for a bit, just to ensure that it was up to the standard that my dad would be expecting. I was mightily impressed, Zuma worked just as well (probably better) as it did on the Windows machine. That’s another item off the list.

I’m yet to try printing, USB attached storage, a few other Windows only applications, a sensible way to backup their system to one of mine and of course, rolling this out to my parents to try.

But so far, it’s umbongo++ from me.