crrodriguez's posterous

If you live in a country with batshit crazy, constantly changing DST rules, you may find that your device gets the wrong timezone and the date/time is messed up.

This a quick and very dirty guide to fix the problem.

WARNING: If you brick your phone, don't bother me !  

 

You need the following :

1. ADB installed and working
2. A JDK (java development kit NOT a JRE)
3. GIT 
4. A rooted android device, with /system mounted read and write (how to do that is beyond the scope of this guide)

Android uses the traditional "Olson" timezone database  storing the information and an index file in the /system/usr/share/zoneinfo directory, after reading the bionic libc source code, I found no clean unintrusive way to perform the needed update other than with a big hammer aka. "overwrite system files" .

1. # git clone git://github.com/android/platform_development.git
2. # cd tools/zoneinfo
3. open script "generate" in the first line edit the variable version to match the most up to date timezone database version, currently tzdata2011k
4. Around line 35, you will find "cp zoneinfo.dat zoneinfo.idx ../../../bionic/libc/zoneinfo", update it to match the desired target directory or comment it.
5. Download the latest version of tzdata.
6. create a directory named accordingly to the "version" variable and extract the files there.
7. run ./generate you should get three files named zoneinfo.dat zoneinfo.idx  and zoneinfo.version copy those files to your SD card
8. Open ADB and copy them to the /system/usr/share/zoneinfo directory
9. Ensure that zoneinfo.* files in /system/usr/share/zoneinfo are owned by root with permissions 0644.
10. run sync and reboot in adb console.

After this process you should be able to select a correct/updated timezone definition from the date and time menu.

 

El proveedor VTR distribuye un programa "Hola" el cual es usado como SIP Phone por sus clientes, el cual lamentablemente no funciona en Linux.

Investigando como hacerlo funcionar en Wine, me "cayo la teja" que estan violando la licencia GPL. Como llegue a esto se preguntarán ?

Veamos el contenido "interesante" que queda instalado en el PC.

libgaim.dll
liboscar.dll

Ambas bibliotecas bajo licencia GPL, pero VTR no esta distribuyendo las fuentes del programa !

Las sorpresas continuan cuando se analiza el resto de las bibliotecas o ejecutables

owcrashreport.exe
owwebcam.dll

Y los logs de error:

(debug) 00:35:30 CWengoPhone::initFinishedEventHandler: WengoPhone::init() finished


huh, resulta que "Hola" no es mas que un rebranding del software "Wengophone" que actualmente lleva el nombre de "QuteCom" el cual esta integramente l bajo GPL.

VTR como distribuidor de esta aplicación tiene la obligación legal de distribuir las fuentes y sus modificaciones, cosa que no esta haciendo.

Pirateria de cuello y corbata. :-(

A while ago, I saw the Simtec Entropy Key website, a small, relative unexpensive  USB device that produces random numbers and then fills the kernel entropy pool.

It sparked my geeky curiosity so I bought one, it arrived today, but it didn't had "out of the box" support in openSUSE, so I worked integrating its software to make it rock and roll :)

I will show you how to make it work in your installation, just FYI ;-)

• Setup the needed repositories and packages as instructed here
• Start the entropy key daemon (rcekeyd start) and plug your device
• Run ekeyctl list , that will help you to determine if the device is recognized
• Run ekey-rekey <serial> <master-key> where serial is your device serial number and master-key is the secret string you find in a sealed letter inside the box.</master-key></serial>
• if everything goes right, you will now be able to $ watch -n1 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail and see how it fills with fresh random numbers.
• ohh, and do not attach your printed master-key to your monitor with a sticker please :-) 

To make Thunderbird 3 to use chromium as web browser execute:

find ~/.gconf  -type f -name "%gconf.xml" -exec sed -i -e "s@/usr/bin/firefox@/usr/bin/chromium@g" {} +

Too bad there is no Chrome Mail Client to ditch Thunderbird too.

I have joined the Czech packagers team this week, Im looking forward to work with you folks :-D

Bad news, my old blog database wasn't in the "backup list" so, it is gone for good.

From now on, We will get in touch using blogger.