Εξακολουθώ να μην έχω πρόσβαση στο planet.ellak.gr μέσω SSH. Ο Νίκος Ρούσσος (ΕΕΛΛΑΚ) κωλυσιεργεί στην ενεργοποίηση πρόσβασης στο planet.ellak.gr.

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1. Μεταφορά του Πλανήτη ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ στο planet.ellak.gr!
2. Update on planet.ellak.gr
3. Στατιστικά επισκεψιμότητας του planet.ellak.gr

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- Να, ρε εθελοντή!

- Ποιόν είπες εθελοντή, ρε εθελοντή;

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Κάτι τέτοιο συνέβει με το έργο μου, τον πλανήτη ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ, http://planet.ellak.gr. Ξεκίνησα τον πλανήτη ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ το 2004 και τον φιλοξένησα στην αρχή στην τοποθεσία http://planet.hellug.gr (είχα ζητήσει φιλοξενία από το σύλλογο Hellug). Στις αρχές του 2007 αποφάσισα να μεταφέρω τον πλανήτη ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ στην τοποθεσία planet.ellak.gr, ύστερα από διαφωνία με το σύλλογο Hellug. Καταγράφω τη δική μου οπτική γωνία για το τι συνέβει στο άρθρο Ιστορία από το 2006. Ο χωρισμός από το Hellug δεν ήταν ο καλύτερος, και αυτό που έκανε ο σύλλογος ήταν να εξακολουθεί να χρησιμοποιεί την τοποθεσία planet.hellug.gr ως γενικό πλανήτη ιστολογίων, χωρίς καν να ενημερώσει τους επισκέπτες. Από μετέπειτα συζήτηση διαπίστωσα ότι ο σύλλογος Hellug θεωρούσε ότι το έργο στην τοποθεσία planet.hellug.gr ήταν όλο δικό του. Ωστόσο αυτό που έκανε ο σύλλογος Hellug ήταν να οικειοποιηθεί το έργο ενός εθελοντή. Μεταξύ των ατόμων που ήταν στο σύλλογο Hellug εκείνη την περίοδο ήταν και ο Νίκος Ρούσσος, όπου αν δεν κάνω λάθος ανέλαβε και διαχειριστής στο planet.hellug.gr.

ετοιμόρροπο κτίριο

Από το 2007 τα planet.ellak.gr και planet.hellug.gr έχουν αλλάξει, και υπάρχουν διαφορετικά ιστολόγια στο ένα και στο άλλο.

Τα τελευταία 2-3 χρόνια είχα σποραδική επικοινωνία με το Νίκο Ρούσσο όπου αντιπροσώπευε την Εταιρία ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ (στα γράμματα υπήρχε και cc: με τον κ. Καρούνο, πρόεδρο της ΕΕΛΛΑΚ). Ο στόχος της επικοινωνίας ήταν να υπάρξει ένας κοινός πλανήτης για ελεύθερο λογισμικό στην Ελλάδα.

Η θέση του Νίκου ήταν να εξακολουθήσουν να υπάρχουν ανεξάρτητα τα planet.ellak.gr και planet.hellug.gr, που ωστόσο θα έχουν το υπερσύνολο των ιστολογίων.

Η δική μου θέση είναι να υπάρξει ο πλανήτης ελεύθερου λογισμικού στην τοποθεσία planet.ellak.gr. Για το planet.hellug.gr δεν υπάρχει νόημα να συνεχίσει να φιλοξενεί τα ίδια ιστολόγια με το planet.ellak.gr, και είναι καλή ευκαιρία να φιλοξενεί τα ιστολόγια ατόμων που σχετίζονται με το σύλλογο Hellug. Το planet.hellug.gr δεν αντιπροσωπεύει όλη την κοινότητα ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ στην Ελλάδα. Διαφορετικά, το planet.hellug.gr μπορεί να βάλει ένα redirect όπου να κατευθύνει προς το planet.ellak.gr, ώστε αυτός να αποτελεί το σύνδεσμο που θα γνωρίζουν οι χρήστες. Με το redirect, ο σύνδεσμος στην τοποθεσία του περιηγητή θα φαίνεται πάντα να είναι το planet.ellak.gr.

Και αυτό που συνέβει τώρα ήταν ο Νίκος Ρούσσος

• αφαίρεσε την πρόσβαση που είχα μέσω SSH στο planet.ellak.gr
• έκανε αλλαγές στο planet.ellak.gr δίχως να λάβει την έγκρισή μου

Αυτό που πιστεύω είναι ότι ο Νίκος Ρούσσος έχει πρόβλημα στο θέμα της επικοινωνίας με την κοινότητα. Δεν είναι σε θέση να ξεχωρίσει τις υποχρεώσεις του ως εργαζόμενος στην ΕΕΛΛΑΚ (όπου πρέπει να ακολουθεί το καταστατικό της μη-κερδοσκοπικής εταιρίας) και ως μέλος στον hellug.

Με θλίβει η συμπεριφορά της Εταιρίας ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ. Δεν πιστεύω ότι τέτοιες ενέργειες βοηθούν στο «community building» στο ελεύθερο λογισμικό στην Ελλάδα.

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1. Επέτειος, 1ος χρόνος λειτουργίας του Πλανήτη ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ Ελλάδα-Κύπρος!
2. Έξι και ½ χρόνια πλανήτης ελ/λακ
3. Μεταφορά του Πλανήτη ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ στο planet.ellak.gr!

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Ένα παράδειγμα διαβούλευσης που είναι σε εξέλιξη αυτή τη στιγμή είναι «Δημόσια Διαβούλευση για τη δημιουργία νέας εταιρικής μορφής»   http://www.opengov.gr/ypoian/?p=2477
που είναι για νέο νόμο για τη βελτίωση των συνθηκών ίδρυσης μικρομεσαίων επιχειρήσεων.
Με ένα τέτοιο νόμο θα είναι πολύ εύκολο και φθηνό να ξεκινήσει κάποιος μια νέα εταιρία που να σχετίζεται με και με ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ και να παρέχει υπηρεσίες. Το μόνο που απομένει είναι το επιχειρηματικό σχέδιο .

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2. Κοινότητες χρηστών και ντεβέλοπερ GNOME
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It appears that Google is about to extend this feature to the rest of the world. The following are screenshots taking this morning which show that the functionality is gradually being extended to the rest of the world.

First of all, log in to your GMail account.

Make call right from GMail

If it works for you, you are greeted with the above hint about making calls. By clicking on Try it now, you activate the new feature.

Google Voice details

You need to accept the above. The rates are quite competitive, and there is comparison with some other VOIP provider, most probably Skype. Google Voice does not have a connection fee for the calls (unlike Skype, which does have a connection fee).

Then, you install an addon so that you can make phone calls. See http://www.google.com/intl/en/chat/voice/ I have been testing this on Ubuntu 11.04 (64-bit) and I installed the appropriate package.

Google Voice call phone option

Once you activate the service, you now have the option to Call phone from the Instant Messenger (IM) app of your GMail.

Google Voice about to make a phone call

At the moment I get the message that I cannot add credit to my account, so I am lucky enough to have some left-over credit from I-do-not-remember-from-where.

Google Voice making a call

Now we are making a phone call to a landline in Greece. It shows the cost, $0.2/min.

My credit in this account is in US Dollars, and somehow I cannot top up using Google Checkout because “Google Voice is not available in your country”. However, in an other account, with no existing credit, I get the option to top up with Google Checkout, in British pounds.

There are reports that users can get a +phonenumber@sip.voice.google.com SIP address. I believe that eventually users will be able to access their Google Voice accounts using SIP, so that they can use their preferred VOIP client software. At the moment it may or may not work for you. My attempts to call using Empathy, Jitsi, SFLPhone were currently unsuccessful.

Having the ability to call landlines and mobiles from Google Voice (within GMail) is big. Google did not market yet well enough the Google Voice PC to PC features in GMail. Now, with Google Voice to landlines and mobiles, Google has a complete offering for VOIP that can attack Skype at their core business. The VOIP business is changing rapidly.

Update

Here is the Google announcement for Google Voice all over the world, http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/calling-from-gmail-now-in-38-languages.html

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Efstathios Iosifidis came in to fill this marketing void. He is currently an active member of the Greek OpenSUSE team and helps with GNOME.

Among the first tasks was to apply for an allocation of GNOME 3 LiveDVDs, from the set of 10.000 disks that OpenSUSE donated to the GNOME Foundation. Vincent Untz has been extremely helpful and sent Efstathios four packs (400 DVD disks) and also about a dozen of GNOME t-shirts.

The first event we participated as Greek GNOME Community was FOSSCOMM, an annual two-day FOSS conference for the Greek free and open-source communities. About 450 people attended, and we had both a presentation and a booth.

Click image for Greek GNOME Presentation slides (PDF, 4.2MB)

The presentation was about the efforts of the Greek localisation team, and the introduction of GNOME 3.

Efstathios at the Greek GNOME Booth at FOSSCOMM 2011 conference

At this point we did not receive yet our allocation of the LiveDVDs, but Efstathios arranged with an OpenSUSE guest speaker (from Switzerland?) to bring GNOME material for the booth.

Greek GNOME community promotion leaflet (2x2)

Our leaflet.

GNOME Buttons, homemade

These are locally made GNOME buttons. Apparently there is a tool to make these quite easily.

The next conference was the EL/LAK ("FOSS" in Greek) conference, which is an annual conference that has been running for almost ten years. There were several invited speakers, including Italo Vignoli from The Document Foundation (which produces LibreOffice) and Stefano Zacchiroli (Debian Project Leader).

The conference takes place in four cities in Greece over three days. We managed to represent GNOME in two cities.

Tom Tryfonidis and Kostas Koudaras (in charge of booth) at the booth at Larisa

GNOME booth at Larisa

GNOME booth at Salonica

Efstathios and Tom are also working on the Greek GNOME community website. Apart from the social networking features, we are trying to add more content to the website, including easy programming tutorials.

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The Linux Foundation, with Linux.com, are running a contest for a t-shirt design. The t-shirt will be used to commemorate the 20 years of Linux in our lives.

The Linux kernel can be found anywhere, on servers, mobile phones (such as Android), TVs (from Samsung, LG, Sony, Toshiba, Philips and many more), ADSL routers, Top500 supercomputers (over 90%).

It is because the Linux kernel is copyleft, if distribute work based on the Linux kernel, you need to make available those source code changes. Being copyleft, the Linux kernel is a single huge project that still stands as one. And allows everyone to work on it and innovate (see the Android CyanogenMod, Samsung SamyGo and LG LG-Open links above).

Linux. Everywhere.

One of the finalists in this competition is George Boukeas, with the above entry “Linux. Everywhere.”

George is a member of the Ubuntu-gr community, and also contributed to GNOME.gr by working on the translation of Inkscape into Greek.

In any case, when it comes to voting, vote what you believe is best. Click to vote for the 20th Anniversary of Linux T-Shift Design Competition.

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3. Pre-installed Windows and competition in the European Union

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Let's dig some numbers for Europe.

StatCounter statistics for the use of Linux in Europe

According to StatCounter, in Europe about 1.15% of the Internet users use GNU/Linux.

According to the Internet World Stats, in 2010 there are about 475 million Internet users in Europe.

Therefore, the Linux users in Europe (EU) amount to 1.15% of 475 million = about 5.2 million Linux users.

Let's assume that 5 million of these Linux users in the EU ended-up buying a computer pre-installed with unneeded Windows software (Windows XP, Vista or 7, and maybe Microsoft Works). In addition, let's assume that the cost of the unneeded software is €50, which is a heavily conservative value since the unsubsidized price for Windows Home Premium 7 is about €70 (ex. tax). These figures bring the minimum cost that the 1.15% of EU consumers probably paid without any need to 5 million users * €50 / user = €250 million and most probably much higher.

What can we do about this?

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure and the French speaking Libre Software Users' Association started an initiative, “Share your operating system bundling tales with the EU”, where consumers can report competition problems that affect them.

Here is the press release,

My choice is Debian GNU/Linux, explains FFII Vice president René Mages. Why have I been compelled to pay and erase Windows 7 at purchase time?

The European Commission admits it was aware of the difficulties encountered by consumers who want to purchase a PC with a non-Microsoft operating system or without any operating system at all. But they also say they lack evidence suggesting that this is the result of practices in violation of EU competition rules.

We want to crowd source the collection of evidence, says AFUL's President Laurent Séguin. If the EU finds anticompetitive agreements that foreclose competition or abuse a dominant position on the relevant market, that would be a magic bullet.

So, what we can do is visit the European Commission Competition website and report our experiences in buying computers while being forced to get pre-installed Windows although we do not need it.

Let's look at the form,    DISCLAIMER: These are my personal views on how the form could be filled in. If there is a mistake/ommission, please write in the comments and I'll correct.

Fill in your details

Here just fill in your details. You can also select the appropriate language at the top-right drop-down menu.

About which undertaking or group do you wish to inform?

Here you mention that you want to talk about Microsoft, and about one or more computer manufacturers that you where unable to get a computer without pre-installed Windows. It is the lack of choice when buying a new computer. We need choice for the operating system of the computer we plan to buy. For computers, the need of choice for the operating system is critical, as there are viable alternatives such as Linux, which about 5 millions EU citizens already use.

2. To what economic sector is your information related?

This is an easy one, select Information technology (computers, softwares).

What is the matter about which you inform? When did it come to your attention?

1. You can talk about the inability to find a suitable computer for your needs that does not come with pre-installed Windows.You might use another operating system such as GNU Linux or you might already have a Windows license (due to an academic program from your school).
2. If you have a personal experience to share regarding a computer manufacturer and Microsoft software, you can add it here. If you tried to buy a computer without Windows and you had to pay more, or go into great inconvenience, add it here.
3. Add examples that show since when you have been faced with this issue.

4. What result do you hope to achieve?

Here you can say that you want to be able to buy a computer with a choice for the operating system. There are options for alternative operating systems, such as GNU/Linux or even FreeDOS (sort of a token operating system useful if you already have a Windows license).

You can also add that you would like transparency in the agreements between Microsoft and the manufacturers so that when you “build” your desired computer, you can change the operating system as you can change the type of CPU, RAM, or whether you want Bluetooth, 3G and a webcam.

Moreover, you can stress that you want to de-bundle Windows from the computer. You want transparency for the price of the operating system and ability to switch, as you can switch between service providers.

Finally, there is a special relationship between Microsoft and computer manufacturers, where the manufacturers end up promoting Windows software from their websites and advertising material, in order to receive discounts from Microsoft. This special relationship between Microsoft and the manufacturers is unfair, limits choice and hurts competition. It does not provide a level playing field to other operating systems, and the EU consumer is the victim. You would like the European Commision to investigate these agreements between Microsoft and the computer manufacturers.

Have you already contacted the Directorate-General for Competition or other national competition authorities or national regulators in order to obtain assistance?

Here specify whether you already contacted the EU or national bodies for this competition issue.

Supporting documents

You can select whether you want the information that you provide to pass to another competition authority if this one is not entitled to deal with it. Apparently this is the competition authority for the bundling problem of Windows, therefore it is up to your discretion if you feel to say no.

If you have supporting documents, such as emails or letters that show the efforts you went through to find a computer without pre-installed Windows, you can add them here. If there are several documents, you can simply ZIP them into one.

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How do you install these if you want to test them first, or just try out the pre-release/beta?

There is a helpful how-to on how to run different versions of OpenOffice.org, which applies to LibreOffice.

Here is how we do it.

1. Suppose we want to try out a LibreOffice pre-release. We select the Linux .deb packages (either 32-bit or 64-bit, depending on our Linux distribution), and download the relevant LibO_3.4.0beta1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar file.
2. Then, we uncompress with

   • tar xvfz LibO_3.4.0beta1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz

3. We create a new directory, which will be the directory of our new LibreOffice. We can then move it to the final location such as under /opt

   • mkdir libreoffice-prerelease

   • cd libreoffice-prereleaseLibO_3.4.0beta1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US/DEBS/

4. We run the command that extracts all files from the DEB archives, (a similar command exists for RPM files)

   • for i in ../LibO_3.4.0beta1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US/DEBS/*deb; do dpkg-deb -x $i . ; done

5. We can now run our extracted LibreOffice using the command

   • opt/libreoffice/program/soffice

We can move around the opt/libreoffice directory to a more permanent location, if we wish to. That's it!

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Είναι διαθέσιμος ο Firefox 4 και είναι ώρα να προχωρήσετε με την εγκατάστασή του!

Μπορείτε να δείτε τα στατιστικά λήψης του Firefox 4 σε σχεδόν πραγματικό χρόνο.

Αυτή τη στιγμή έχει ξεπεράσει τις 10.5 εκ. λήψεις, με ρυθμό γύρω στις 7000 λήψεις ανά λεπτό.

Από Ελλάδα έχουν γίνει 92.000 λήψεις περίπου μέχρι στιγμής.

Σε σχέση με τις γειτονικές χώρες,

• Τουρκία: 121.000 λήψεις
• Ελλάδα: 92.000 λήψεις
• Βουλγαρία: 42.500 λήψεις
• Σερβία: 38.500 λήψεις
• Βοσνία και Ερζεγοβίνη: 16.000
• ΠΓΔΜ: 13.000 λήψεις
• Αλβανία: 5000 λήψεις

Ο Firefox 4 είναι διαθέσιμος και στα ελληνικά από τις προσπάθειες του Κώστα Παπαδήμα. Επιλέξτε την έκδοση που σάς ταιριάζει!

Αν έχετε Linux, εγκαταστήστε το Firefox 4 από το αποθετήριο που δίνει η διανομή σας. Για Ubuntu είναι

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

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LINUX inside Τεύχος 1

Το πρώτο τεύχος περιλαμβάνει άρθρο μου για το Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA), το υποσύστημα ήχου του πυρήνα Linux. Όταν εγκαθιστάτε μια διανομή Linux, ο ήχος είναι ένα από πράγματα που μπορεί να μη δουλεύει στην εντέλεια. Για παράδειγμα, όταν βάζετε τα ακουστικά, είναι πιθανό να μην απομονώνεται ο ήχος από τα ηχεία. Τέτοια ζητήματα έχουν σχετικά απλές λύσεις, οπότε αν σάς τύχει πρόβλημα ήχου, δείτε το ως μια καταπληκτική ευκαιρία να επιλύσετε το πρόβλημα οι ίδιοι. Τη δε διόρθωση, τυπικά μια με δυο γραμμές, μπορείτε να την προωθήσετε στον πυρήνα Linux και με αυτόν τον εύκολο τρόπο να γίνετε συντελεστής του πυρήνα.

Αναζητήστε στο περίπτερό σας το LinuxInside ή ακόμα καλύτερα γίνετε συνδρομητές στο LinuxInside!

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2 comments

You connect your mobile phone to your computer with a USB cable. Most Android phones come with either a microUSB, a miniUSB or some proprietary-to-USB cable. If your phone did not come with such a cable, you need to get one.

When you connect your phone to the computer, it might be initialised as a CDROM device (uses the usb-storage kernel module) that comes with Windows drivers. It is the same issue you get with many 3g USB dongles that are initially recognised as CDROM devices. You need to use usb_modeswitch with the correct parameters in order to pass to the next stage (which makes the phone appear as a phone device, not a CDROM). If you do not have 'usb_modeswitch', install the usb-modeswitch package.

How do you find whether you need usb-modeswitch? And what parameters you need? See the usb-modeswitch project page and their helpful forum. You can also google with your device model number and the keyword usb-modeswitch.

Then, the next thing to do is to add a udev rule so that the correct permissions as set for your Android device. Use lsusb to identify the Vendor:Product ID of your phone. It looks like 1d6b:0001, and the Vendor ID in this case would be 1d6b. Then, run

gedit /lib/udev/51-android.rules

and type in

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS(idVendor)=="XXXX", MODE="0666"

You need to replace XXXX with your correct USB Vendor ID. Save and exit.

Finally, restart udev with

sudo restart udev

Afterwards, you can download the Android SDK for Linux. It's a 17MB file, and (at the moment of writing) the filename is android-sdk_r07-linux_x86.tgz. The download pages talk about installing Eclipse and other stuff. For the purposes of shell access and copying files, it is OK to get the Android SDK only. Once you download it, uncompress. Locate the directory android-sdk-linux_x86/tools/. In there you get the adb (Android Debug Bridge) tool.

Run ./adb start-server in order to start the server on the host side.

Then, see whether your phone has been identified, with ./adb devices

> ./adb devices

List of devices attached
SOMEDEVICENAME    device
> _

If you do not get the last line mentioning 'SOMEDEVICENAME  device', then your phone was not detected (probably the usb_modeswitch issue needs to be done). If you get the line but with '(no permissions)', then something was wrong with udev setting up the permissions earlier. A shortcut is to ./adb kill-server and then run the same command with a sudo at the start.

Finally, we can

> ./adb shell
$ id
uid=2000(shell) gid=2000(shell) groups=1003(graphics),1004(input),1007(log),1011(adb),1015(sdcard_rw),3001(net_bt_admin),3002(net_bt),3003(inet)
$ uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.29-perf #1 PREEMPT Tue Aug 3 20:01:27 EET 2010 armv6l GNU/Linux
$ _

If you managed to root your Android phone, you can also

$ su
# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)
# _

You can search at http://forum.xda-developers.com/ on how to root your phone. Most Android phones can be rooted. Note that things can go horribly wrong so there is a big chance to mess up with your phone if you are not careful. Study well before you root.

You copy files to and from the phone with

./adb push myfile.txt /sdcard/       # copies file myfile.txt from your computer to the /sdcard directory on the phone.
./adb pull /sdcard/myfile.txt .      # copies file /sdcard/myfile.txt from the phone to the current directory.

Once you master these command, you can do more interesting things, such as cross-compiling programs on your Linux and then installing on your phone. Let's see how to write our own program.

Visit http://www.codesourcery.com/sgpp/lite/arm/portal/release1293 and download the IA32 GNU/Linux TAR package. Uncompress it. You get an arm-2010q1 directory with the ARM GCC cross-compiler.

Let's write a program, hello.c,

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
 printf("Hello, world!\n");
 return 0;
}

We compile on our Ubuntu with the command

> arm-2010q1/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc hello.c -static -o hello_static
> _

We need the -static keyword in order to make a static executable. Static means that our executable has everything that is required to run, and does not depend on other phone software/libraries.

Copy to the phone,

> ./adb push hello_static /sdcard
1687 KB/s (647869 bytes in 0.374s)
> _

Then, connect to the phone,

> ./adb shell
$ cd /sdcard
$ ls -l hello_static
-rwxrwxrwx system   system     647869 2010-11-14 14:17 hello_static
$ ./hello_static
./hello_static: permission denied
$ _

What went wrong? When we type mount, we see that the /sdcard partition is mounted with the noexec flag. We cannot run stuff from /sdcard. What to do then? Copy stuff on the phone memory?

It appears that the SD card file system is also available from the /data/hwvefs mount point. There must be some background here, but the gist is that you can access the /sdcard content from /data/hwvefs/sdcard, and you can run them!

$ cd /data/hwvefs/sdcard
$ ./hello_static
Hello, world!
$ _

The commands you come to expect on your Ubuntu system are not available on Anroid. You can install Busybox for Android. Still, these commands do not have the features you expect to get on Ubuntu.

Let's compile the bash shell. We download bash and uncompress.

We add the cross compiler to our path,

export PATH=/home/myusername/arm-2010q1/bin:$PATH

Then, we enter the bash-4.1 directory and run (assumes we installed build-essential)

> ./configure --prefix=/opt/arm_bash --host=arm-none-linux-gnueabi --enable-static-link --without-bash-malloc
configure: WARNING: If you wanted to set the --build type, don't use --host.
 If a cross compiler is detected then cross compile mode will be used.
checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking host system type... arm-none-linux-gnueabi
checking for emacs... no
checking for xemacs... no

Beginning configuration for bash-4.1-release for arm-none-linux-gnueabi
...
$ _

Then,

make

sudo make install

The bash for the ARM is available at /opt/arm_bash/bin/bash

Let's examine it,

> file /opt/arm_bash/bin/bash
bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, for GNU/Linux 2.6.16, not stripped
> _

The important part is the mention to ARM. If there was a mistake in the configuration, you might see x86_64 here, which is your own computer!

As we did with hello_static, we install bash, and run it.

$ ./bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.1.0(1)-release (arm-unknown-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
$ ./bash
bash-4.1$ _

Reading the UDS proceedings we see a big push for development on the ARM platform for mobile devices. There was mention for a packaged ARM cross compiler on the Ubuntu repositories (?) which would make things easier and more natural. It would be great to get as much of the user experience we are used to from the Linux desktop down to the mobile devices. Future looks great.

Related posts:

1. Droid fonts from Google (Android SDK)
2. Ubuntu 7.04 DVD edition 4.3GB: done
3. Connecting to Bluetooth devices between Linux and Windows

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