I’ve been looking at smartphones for a while, although not quite seriously up until now. In fact, I’m quite surprised with myself that I actually took the plunge and bought something.

Actually, the main push for me to get an Android phone was Dad, who wants me to get into app development. I initially held back because I like the concept and hackability of the Nokia N900 and the Maemo OS. Maemo uses a normal X11+GTK/Qt kind of stack, and is generally hacker friendly.

However, I don’t just want to hack for myself; I want to be able to release stuff, and if I do, I want people to be able to use it. Not only that, but with the merger of Maemo and Moblin becoming MeeGo, and the fact that MeeGo won’t be officially supported on the N900 creates furher turbulence and fractures where Android is still going strong.

The main selling point for me on the Milestone was the massive screen size, and the positive reviews of its screen size; both of which, in practice, have been fabulous. I was holding out for a glimpse of the HTC Wildfire pricing, but I decided I didn’t want a tiny 240×320 screen no matter how cheap it was.

The version I got was a UMTS 900/2100, which means it is not Next G compatible (which needs UMTS 850/2100). As I’m a Telstra user, that consequently means my coverage is not too crash hot. However, I could fix that simply by moving to Optus.

I’m not going to write a full-on review of the phone — there are plenty out there already. Any more you hear from me about this phone will be something I’ve hacked up for, hopefully, you to try.

We’ve had 1.5 mbit broadband since our village was first ADSL–enabled in 2005 (first with iiNet, then with Internode since December 2008). While 1.5 mbit is great by 2005 standards, by 2010 standards and living in a family of 6, even watching a YouTube video without stuttering (not to mention gaming or using VoIP at the same time) is barely possible.

A couple of times this year, I noticed that while attempting to play Nexuiz online, despite there being nothing other than gaming traffic on our pipe, my ping time skyrocketed from its usual 50-60 mark up to a minimum of 300, which made the game unplayable. Using ssh to connect to a remote box, I also noticed considerably poor responsiveness when typing. In February of this year, I reported the issue to Internode, who dismissed the issue by saying our exchange had no reported congestion issues.

The issues were generally quite bearable, only being infrequent.

At the beginning of this month, Dad bumped our broadband plan from Internode Easy Broadband to “ADSL Fast”. Living in Yerrinbool, our only option is Telstra Wholesale ADSL1, and are classified as Zone 2 (Regional) which is considerably poorer value than being in a Zone 1 (Metro) area or having DSLAMs from other ISPs available, but it’s the only option we have.

Since getting a theoretically 8 mbit service, we have very rarely reached the maximum speed. During most of the day and evening, the speeds waver from anywhere between 0.5 mbit and 5 mbit. Note that this is not a line noise issue. Our signal-to-noise ratio and line attenuation values (latter is 11 dB) are consistently almost perfect, and our sync speed is always right on 8192 kbps.

Not only that, but our latency has been terrible. It would be bearable if we had to live with slow speeds only, but our ping times skyrocket, which makes responsiveness far worse (e.g. ssh), and gaming is just about impossible.

I called up Internode and provided them with several graphs much like the following:

That demonstrates the latency problems by graphing the ping times to resolv.internode.on.net with my laptop being the only machine connected to the Internet — it was even directly connected to our PPPoE modem, bypassing our router.

To ensure that the above was a “clean room” test without interference from any traffic, I even ran something like the following to make sure of that:

# iptables -I OUTPUT -p ! icmp -j DROP
# iptables -I INPUT  -p ! icmp -j DROP

So by doing all of the above, I have eliminated variables from my own network. The conclusion is simple: the latency is being caused on the other end of the line. Only Internode and Telstra have the power to fix it.

Unfortunately, as I was told by an Internode support rep, Telstra won’t fix latency issues — only packet loss issues, which is a bit of a raw deal. That said, we are getting some packet loss:

--- 192.231.203.132 ping statistics ---
14400 packets transmitted, 14141 received, 1% packet loss, time 2912556ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 39.659/245.465/539.602/168.439 ms, pipe 3

So there are two problems: slow speeds, and terrible latency. I think both are a direct result of congestion, but as I’m not Telstra and Internode aren’t being completely cooperative, I can’t say for sure.

It’s been months now, and it’s getting worse, not better. Sigh.

[ 1589.499104] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6
[ 1589.499113] ata2.00: BMDMA stat 0x4
[ 1589.499125] ata2.00: cmd c8/00:20:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 16384 in
[ 1589.499128]          res 51/84:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 1589.499134] ata2.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 1589.499139] ata2.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }
[ 1589.499180] ata2: soft resetting link
[ 1589.685741] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/66
[ 1589.692501] ata2.01: configured for UDMA/66
[ 1589.692524] ata2: EH complete

And the OS promptly crashed. I rebooted, and GRUB told me that it “Could not load operating system”. Great.

I did an fsck, and I saw the most number of errors I’ve seen in my life, seconded only by the time I mounted my Linux drive in Windows using the Ext2 IFS driver, and Windows crashed.

fsck found lots of orphaned files. My /lost+found directory was 2.5GB in size. /etc was only 8.0K in size. It didn’t boot.

So, I tried to reinstall by using my trusty Ubuntu 9.04 on my USB flash drive. I repartitioned /dev/sda, but the Ubuntu installer subsequently bombed out, complaining it couldn’t mount the drive.

I’m typing this from my live USB. Luckily Ubuntu 9.04 comes with OpenOffice.org 3.0, and I’ve been able to copy my fonts from my second SSD, which was unharmed, so I can work on my assignments.

I fear the SSD is stuffed.

After a few minutes of use, a pixel on the right hand side went bright red, and stayed like that for a few minutes. Fortunately, pressing on it lightly made it go away. Here’s hoping it stays that way, as MSY Computers apparently tries to make it as hard as possible for you to return the device after seven days (regardless of legal requirements).

Perhaps the main reason for me getting the monitor is so I can pass my existing 17-inch HP L1740 on to Alec, who until now was stuck with a crappy Digital CRT monitor that only supports 1024×768 at 60hz, has become blurry with age, and the screen flickers off and on every few minutes.

Not only that, but multitasking will be made more awesome. At Campbelltown TAFE last year, I got to use the computers in the web design room, which were also widescreen monitors. I noticed I was far more productive being able to have a code editor and web browser on the screen at the same time, not overlapping, and at readable widths.

One of the first things I did was attempt to install Linux on it. Ubuntu 8.04 was my first try, and I was annoyed to find that I couldn’t get a picture with Xorg on it — just a blank screen. I also tried Debian Etch, Debian Sid, and Fedora 8, which also had the exact same symptoms.

The only Linux distro that worked was openSUSE 11, but I couldn’t stand openSUSE because it was slow, YaST was painful to use, I hated RPM, and they customised GNOME way too much.

Initially, I thought it was a refresh rate problem. I have gathered that the optimum screen mode for the eMac is 1024×768 @ 89Hz. Because Ubuntu was trying to set the mode to 1280×800 @ 60Hz by default, I added a modeline for the proper mode. However, that didn’t fix my blank screen, and I almost gave up in despair.

I also ran xrandr under a tty, and it was interesting to see that it thought my Mac had DVI hardware — DVI-0 and DVI-1. The eMac most definitely does not support DVI, so this told me the issue was a little more advanced than refresh rates.

On Saturday, while talking to the friendly folks on #gentoo-powerpc, one of them pointed me to this page (Update: the link is an equivalent page, as the original link is now gone), which contained some ConnectorTable hacks. As it turned out, the hacks worked! Both internal and external VGA worked (internal VGA was called VGA-1, and external VGA was called VGA-0), which makes me really happy.

So, to get X.Org working on your eMac, make the following changes to xorg.conf.

First you need to define the Modeline for the video mode:

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier   "Configured Monitor"
  # 1024x768 @ 89.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 72.00 kHz; pclk: 99.07 MHz
  Modeline "1024x768"  99.07  1024 1088 1200 1376  768 769 772 809  +HSync +Vsync
EndSection

Then, tell it to use the video mode:

Section "Screen"
  Monitor    "Configured Monitor"
  # Fill in self-explanatory data here.
  SubSection "Display"
     Viewport   0 0
     Depth     24
     Modes   "1024x768"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

Fix the broken ConnectorTable:

Section "Device"
  # Fill in device information here.
  Option      "ConnectorTable" "100,1,0,1,108,2,0,1"
EndSection

After you do that, you should have a working X display. If you still get a blank screen, switch to a tty, run export DISPLAY=:0, run xrandr, and check to see that the eMac is using the correct resolution. Make sure DVI is not mentioned.

The photo by Oswald using -HSync +Vsync depicts the eMac with the picture off-centre. This is because -HSync +Vsync (the default) is wrong! Use +HSync +Vsync, and your picture will be in the centre of the screen.

Instead of the ConnectorTable hack above, one user from the Ubuntu forums points out that it is possible to get a picture by adding the following code to the Device section:

Section "Device"
  # Device information goes here.
  Option "monitor-DVI-0" "iMac"
EndSection

This is not as good a solution as setting ConnectorTable, as the external VGA monitor does not work with this set.

If you used this information to try and fix X on your eMac, please let me know in the comments so I know whether it was helpful or not! Thanks!