Patrick’s Blog(2)

The new PR 1.2 firmware release for the N900 was just released and it’s time to upgrade. Then you bump into your first challenge: how to backup your SMS messages on the N900? Nokia’s PC Suite only backs up Contacts etc. but not your SMS messages. And Ovi Suite still does not support the N900 (what’s up with that Nokia?!).

So how do you backup your SMS messages (and Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Bookmarks and Settings)?

Here is how:

1) make sure your N900 has a full battery or is plugged into the charger

2) on your N900 start the Backup application

3) select “New Backup”, fill in a name like N900_Backup_<date> and press “Proceed”

4) in the next screen make your selection or leave all enabled and press “Select”. Make sure at least “Communication and Calendar” is selected as that one contains your Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes and SMS messages

5) wait for the Backup to finish after which you are returned to the main Backup screen where you see your shiny new backup

6) copy the backup (directory + contents) from your N900 to your PC

7) upgrade the N900 to PR 1.2

8) copy the backup (directory + contents) on your PC to your N900. The location on the N900 is /home/user/MyDocs/backups

9) start the Backup application. yuo should now see your backup listed

10) press “Restore”, select your backup and voila all your data should be restored

Disclaimer: no guarantees, this is how it worked for me. Your mileage may vary.

So Nokia finally announced the N900. It’s an impressive phone already getting positive reviews. Reading the specs I miss two things: FLAC and Ogg support. How is it that a Linux & Maemo based phone does not have support for FLAC and Ogg?! Let’s hope Nokia fixes that in new firmware releases.

The Linux Foundation just released their annual ‘Who Writes Linux’ report. A fascinating read worth your time if you are interested in the numbers behind Linux’ relentless progress. And guess which company is totally absent in the report? Canonical. No suprise there. All I hear from Shuttleworth is rhetoric about how the Community would benefit from synced releases. Yeah right.

Tonight I was updating a laptop to F11, did some tab completion and almost had a heart attack from the way too loud beep that hammered my ears. Obviously this should never happen again so next step was disabling this deafening beep.

In the good ol’ days you disabled the beep from hammering your ears during tab completion by adding or uncommenting “set bell-style none” in /etc/inputrc. Since I don’t know if that still works I figured I might as well prevent the pcspkr module from loading in the first place with:

# echo “blacklist pcspkr” > /etc/modprobe.d/pcspkr.conf
# rmmod pcspkr

Enjoy the peace and quiet!

An interesting post and comments on Mether’s blog about Banshee and F-Spot depending on Moonlight.

Personally I would rather see Mono and apps that depend on it disappear from Fedora and not come back. The Moonlight dependency is another example of the rather grey area this whole Mono thing is venturing into. And at some point enough is enough and the powers that be should just pull the plug on it. If you still want to make Mono available then stick it in RPMFusion.org. Or perhaps the RPMs could be offerend from a yum repo at the Mono website.

Why do we even need Mono and Mono based apps? To replace Tomboy there’s GNote that gets better every day and is part of Gnome. To replace F-Spot there are a number of apps like Digikam, Fotoxx and Solang. Really, why would I possibly want an app that’s not part of the Gnome familiy, requires a massive amount of external libs, is or may be patent encumbered and which development team is led by someone who’s judgement seems rather clouded by his love and admiration for the Beast from Redmond.

Mono, just say no.