In the case of my handset, a Motorola Milestone, app memory is at a premium: with just 196MiB of user-accessible storage on-board, larger apps can often mean having to remove something that’s already installed.  Thankfully, there’s a cheater’s way of freeing up some much-needed space: turn your optional apps into pre-installed versions.

First things first: you’re going to need a rooted handset.  If it’s not rooted, this tutorial will get you nowhere.  If you’re new to rooting, try the Easy Root Compatibility Test which offers certain ‘phones a one-stop solution.  If your handset isn’t supported, try one of the many guides on-line.

Once you’re rooted, you’re going to need a terminal emulator.  Install that, and you can get access to a shell – which is where the fun begins.

Step one – find out what’s mounted where with the command

 mount

You’ll see that we have a bunch of devices mounted in a bunch of locations, but the one we care about is /dev/mtdblock6, mounted as /system.  It’s in this special directory that Android stores all its internal gubbins – and to stop you from fiddling around with it, Google has very sensibly made it read-only.

Sadly, that also stops us from moving apps from the very limited user memory into the otherwise wasted system memory – and from deleting unwanted pre-installed apps, such as the Motorola-branded sat nav package that comes with the Milestone or the Facebook app that arrived unexpectedly as part of Android 2.1.

So, what can we do?  Easy: we re-mount the device as read-write.  You’ll need to become root using su, after which you can remount the block device.  Just type the following commands in to the terminal:

su -
mount -o remount,rw /dev/mdtblock6 /system

Now we have full read-write access to the /system file system. Bring up a directory listing of /system/app/ with:

ls -l /system/app/

You’ll notice that all the .apk files for the pre-installed apps are here.  Delete any .apk with rm and it’s gone for good – so for goodness’ sake be careful.

We can use the same command to take  a look at the .apk files for the apps we’ve got installed in user memory, too:

ls -l /data/app/

To move a package from user memory to system memory, making it ‘pre-installed’ and freeing up useful user memory, just do the following:

cp -f /data/app/com.publisher.packagename.apk

The file will be automatically removed from user memory and appear to vanish – but when you restart your ‘phone, it will re-appear as a pre-installed ‘system’ application.  Do this with a larger app, and you can free up a lot of valuable space.

A note about updating: because /system is mounted as read-only, the Android Market can’t write to it in order to update packages.  Instead, if an update for a pre-installed package is available, it will write the data back into user memory.  So, if you’ve saved 4MiB by moving Google Maps into /system, you’ll lose it all again the next time Google releases an update.

While it’s possible to get the space back – simply repeat the method of moving the file to /system again – it’s probably better to move applications that don’t get updated all that often.

That’s it: you can now enjoy significantly more space for apps!

• To Do: Support for larger LCDs
• To Improve: Better UTF-8 character handling
• To Do: Multiple RSS feed support

For now, however, it’s a pretty neat hack – and an alternative back-end allows it to display Twitter @ replies instead, with the person’s username on the top line of the display and the message below.

The aRSSduino relies on a USB connection between the Arduino and the host PC – it’s not a stand-alone project.  Currently, the Python back-end is written to run on a Linux-based host – although it should be relatively simple to port to Windows, I have no plans to do so at present.

You can download the project source code – both for the Arduino sketch and for the Python-based back-end here.  If you improve upon it, let me know!

At which point Firefox broke completely. No starty, no error – even when launched from the shell.

It’s taken me a little while, but I’ve tracked down the culprit: the Prism plugin.  If you’ve got Prism – a stand-alone Mozilla-based browser for creating desktop-style access to web apps – then the chances are you’ll be bitten by this bug, as installing Prism automatically installs the plugin into Firefox.

Thankfully, the fix is simple: go to Tools -> Add-Ons and disable Prism.

What’s that?  You can’t load Firefox in order to disable the Prism plugin?  There’s a fix for that, too.  Load a shell (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type:

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox
ls

That’ll give you a listing of the directory – with a single entry, which is your profile folder.  Use cd to change to this directory, then type:

rm compatibility.ini

Once you’ve done that, Firefox should start fine and you’ll be able to disable the add-on.

If you’re curious, there’s a bug filed on Launchpad over here.

TVersity is an excellent UPnP media server which works perfectly with my media playback devices – the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the Roku SoundBridge in the bedroom.  Sadly, it’s Windows only – and most of the Linux equivalents have left me cold.

I stumbled across a small daemon called miniDLNA, written by a Netgear engineer for the company’s ReadyNAS range of network attached storage devices, which works like a charm as a TVersity replacement, with one exception – the damn thing refuses to be seen by the Xbox 360.  Thankfully, I’ve figured out why.

In the configuration file – /etc/minidlna.conf – the software makes reference to a “presentation URL,” which by default is commented out.  This results in an invalid default of http://192.168.0.1:80/, which everything except the Xbox 360 happily ignores.  The 360, however, decides to go visit this URL – and falls over.

To fix the issue, simply change the line to the IP address of your server and the port you’ve got miniDLNA working on – 8200 by default.  The entire line should end up reading:

# default presentation url is http address on port 80
presentation_url=http://192.168.0.20:8200/

Once that’s done, restart miniDLNA and everything should spring into life.

To snag yourself some free Ubuntu stickers, simply pop a self addressed envelope across to:

The Linux Emporium
Bridge House
17a Maybrook Road
Sutton Coldfield
Birmingham
B76 1AL UK

They’ll drop a pack of four by return of post.  I think you’ll agree that it looks much nicer than the old “Designed for Windows Vista” sticker it replaces.

I decided the time had come to move to something a bit newer, however, and have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04.  Using the ISO from the Ubuntu Eee website, it was a fairly painless install.  I was disappointed to see that the installer didn’t set up fstab in the manner I prefer – with a limited number of writes on the internal SSD available, I like to put /tmp, /var, and others on a tmpfs mount – but that was easily sorted.

What wasn’t quite so easy was the wireless.  Unfortunately, Asus have opted to use one of Atheros’s less supported wireless chipsets in the Eee – with no official Linux driver available.  The madwifi-ng driver included as part of the Ubuntu-Eee package sort of worked, but tended to drop out rather frequently – oddly, when the signal was at its strongest rather than its weakest.

Rather than put up with a spotty signal, I grabbed the madwifi-ng build I had from the original Ubuntu 7.04 install and compiled it on 8.04.  A quick reboot later and the wireless is back to its old reliable self again.  This way, I get the best of both words – the reliable wireless from Ubuntu 7.04, and the shiny new Compiz Fusion desktop effects from Ubuntu 8.04.

The driver I used for this is available here, so if you want to do the same as I did simply download the file and extract it as so:

tar xfvz eeewifi.tar.gz

Then start the compilation and installation process thusly:

cd madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018
make clean
sudo make install

Reboot, and your wireless should be working a treat!