I have found one way of still doing geeky things combined with vacation. That is update OpenStreetmap. Take a peak at my updates at:

• http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=56.4476895332336&lon=14.0158939361572&zoom=14
• http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=56.4213931560516&lon=14.0284895896912&zoom=14
• http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=60.1418289542198&lon=15.4323390126228&zoom=17

Openstreetmap is wikipedia for maps, and like wikipedia it is dependent of that people will update with correct data. One thing that fascinates me is that openstreetmap is extremly detailed in some areas. Probably a geek lives nearby.

When the earthquake hit Haiti, OpenStreetmaps was used by rescuers because all other maps was inaccurate. Alot of volunteers helped keeping the maps updated.

If you want to participate in the project, the process is simple:

1. Get an GPS reciever that can generate gpx tracks, I use my Android
2. Turn on the GPS and walk, run or bicycle around and gather GPS tracks
3. Upload the gpx to openstreetmap.org
4. Tag the roads, buildings and whatever you found

 To get started, read the beginners guide at Openstreetmap.

Finally it has arrived, Android 2.2 Froyo to HTC Desire. When I installed it I run into several problems and this is my guide how I solved it. It was a rather frustration experience and took a long while to solve. I ended up with a phone where almost everything was gone and I have to reinstall all my apps and configurations again.

I have not rooted my phone or changed anything that HTC or Google allow, so no rooted phone. I’m probably a poweruser but there is no obvious reason why I ended up with all these problems.

During this process I tried to find any information at HTC support site but I could not find anything that helped me. The best source of information is to use different user forums. My opinion is that HTC support web is crap.

This guide shows how I solved the problems I run into, I guess there is better way of doing it because this was a cumbersome and painfull process. I do not take any responsiblity if you end up with a bricked phone or loss of data.

Happy reading!

Installing, first try

Roumors on a swedish site, swedroids.se claimed that Froyo was out. My Desire had not given me the message that an update was available automatically as it should. Probably it just do not check with a high enough frequency to detect it.

I did a manual check and yipii, there was a system update available.

I choosed to do the update over the air, meaning that I used the phones update function.

After downloading and installing approximatly 30 minutes, the phone just showed the HTC logo and after that rebooted over and over again.

My conclusion was that the update has failed.

Recover, first try

I pulled out the battery and put it back again, pushed vol- and power and keept vol- pushed. Then I get into a menu where I could do some choices, I picked recover.

Now the phone managed to get passed the HTC logo and started up. It gave i progress bar starting from 0%and counting up to 92%, after a while it showed an error message "Sorry! Process system is not responding" with 2 options "wait" or "force restart" (or similar). Independent of which I pick or none, after a while the phone restarts with the same progress bar and error message. 

Install, second try

At this moment a couple of hours has passed and I was getting real frustrated. Google and swedroid forums showed me that alot of people seemed to have the same problems as I do.

I find the following guide that seemed to helped alot of people:

1. Download the Android 2.2 firmware for the Desire http://liveimage.htc.com/OTA_Bravo_Froyo_HTC_WWE_2.09.405.8-1.21.405.2_release4dua3bcrut4wrv30.zip

2. Rename the file update.zip and copy it to your microSD card via USB. I used an USB 3G dongle with an microSD reader.

3. Power down your Desire

4. Hold down the “Volume Down” button as you power the phone back on.

5. A screen should appear showing your phone’s system searching for various files. Scroll down to “recovery” and press the “Power” button.

6. When you see the triangle with an exclamation point symbol, press the “Power” and “Volume Up” buttons at the same time.

7. From the menu that appears, select “Apply sdcard:update.zip.”

8. When the screen displays “Install from sdcard complete” select “reboot system now” and wait for the phone to power back up.

It looked very promising, with text and progressbars showing that an installation was taking place. After a while the phone restarted and stoped with a triangle and exclamation mark. I tried it again and again and again…. With the same result.

Calling for help

At this point I get real desperate so I went to HTC supportweb and wrote an email describing my problems. After 1½ days I have  got an email that told me to send the phone to repair. 

Then I tried to call HTC support, they answered very fast but the support only told me to send the phone to the reseller to get it fixed. No trouble shooting at all and no questions what I have done.

Because I have important data, like logins to mail account, sip PBX, monitor solutions, facebook account and so on I decided that I would not send in the phone until I have waited a couple of days to see if something new shows up on different forums.

Install, twentieth something try

At this point I realized that all my settings will be lost I did a clean cache and a factory reset and did a new try with manual installation and this time it looked all right. The phone started up normally and asked for email accounts, facebook credentials and so on.

All my personal settings and data was gone but the phone seemed to work. I started to download a app and the phone rebooted again, sic. Everytime I installed a new app it rebooted and the app did not install.

But I remembered that I read that this was a common problem I searched the forums and did some Googling. Some people has solved this issue by do a "factory data reset" from menu->settings->SD & phone storage->Factory data reset.

So I tried that and everything was gone again, I entered the credentials to my accounts and did some setup. And tried to install a new app, and YES it did not reboot.

Conclusions

This behavior by a product that I have not hacked in any way is not acceptable. I work at a software company and know that there might be bugs but these bugs was so big and costed me so much time that it should have been tested better.

Even worse is that HTC support website give no hints what-so-ever how to solve these issues I had and HTC telephone support did not even try to help me. I think HTC has a lot todo to get a better and more professional support.

In this case enthusiasts and helpfull people that publish their knowledge helped me and probably many others, thanks. Especially swedroid.se which is an excellent site where swedish speaking people can get help with thier expensive Android phones.

I also think that HTC should encourage enthusiasts by be more open and support the possiblity to root the phones. I think that they will make more money in the long run, compare it with Linksys routers and OpenWRT.

Update-Aug 8:th 2010

I was contacted by HTC UK to get more feedback to their support site. It always make me happy when a company listen to the customer and try to improve the customer experience. Hopefully the HTC support web will contain enough info in the future so I could resolve the problems I had by going there. Good work HTC!

I wanted to use a 3G dongle with a twin SIM card as my Internet connection when I’m traveling. I have earlier decribed howto share the Internet connection and make it more flexible by using an OpenWRT router with USB interface as a bridge between Wlan and 3G/GPRS provided internet.

Unfortunatly Tele2s support personel cannot keep track of the unlogical rules among their different subscriptions so they fouled my to buy a twincard to my regular subscription and use that for data. After a couple of more calls to Tele2, including that they listened to a recording of when I ordered the twincard I have to give up that track because it was not possible. The twincard only works for phone calls, not data connections and especially not when I had a flatrate subscription on my master SIM card.

After some investigation I came to the conclusion that I have to use my Regular phone, a HTC Desire with Android as my connection to internet.

Unfortunatly the work done with getting the USB 3G dongle was a waste of time.

PreReq

An OpenWRT router with a working USB interface and a rndis enabled modem, I use a HTC Desire.

Installation

root@WRT160NL:~# opkg install kmod-usb-net-rndis

I also installed some USB packages, probably not all of them are necessery:

root@WRT160NL:~#opkg install kmod-ar9170 kmod-usb-acm kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-ohci kmod-usb-serial comgt
kmod-usb-serial-option kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb-uhci kmod-usb2  usb-switch

Add the following to /etc/config/network

config 'interface' 'usb0'
    option 'name' 'usb0'
    option 'proto' 'dhcp'
    option 'ifname' 'usb0'
    option 'defaultroute' '0'
    option 'peerdns' '0'
 

Use the same firewall rules with your 3G connection as your normal WLAN, add the yellow marked line to /etc/config/firewall:

config 'zone'
    option 'name' 'wan'
    option 'input' 'REJECT'
    option 'output' 'ACCEPT'
    option 'forward' 'REJECT'
    option 'masq' '1'
    option 'mtu_fix' '1'
    option 'network' 'wan usb0 ppp0'

Do a reboot
 

Test

To use your new connection, run ifup

root@WRT160NL:~# ifup usb0
udhcpc (v1.15.3) started
root@OpenWrt:~# Sending discover...
Sending select for 192.168.100.100...
Lease of 192.168.100.100 obtained, lease time 864000
udhcpc: ifconfig usb0 192.168.100.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast +
udhcpc: setting default routers: 192.168.100.254
udhcpc: setting dns servers: 192.168.100.254

root@WRT160NL:~# ping www.google.com
PING www.google.com (74.125.39.104): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 74.125.39.104: seq=0 ttl=51 time=371.025 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.39.104: seq=1 ttl=51 time=388.617 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.39.104: seq=2 ttl=51 time=316.767 ms
^C
--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 25% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 316.767/358.803/388.617 ms

Shutdown the connection with ifdown

root@WRT160NL:~# ifdown usb0

I found a new favorite app to my Android, mythmote.

By using it you can turn your Android into a remote control for MythTV. On the mythfrontend telnet control must be enbled and it is found under Setup-Setup-General and check  "Enable Network Remote Control Interface".

The Android uses wifi to connect to the telnet server at the mythfront.

With my new and fancy HTC Desire I wanted to look at my Nagios or op5 Monitor status. I have found two apps Nagroid and NagMonDroid.

NagMonDroid did I not get working, probably because op5 Monitor only uses https as protocol.

Nagroid works like a charm:

The configuration is rather straightforward:

I wanted to use the Android SDK on my Ubuntu machine, mainly to grab screenshoots but also to play around with it.

I followed the guidelines at this guide, but it did not work. DDM just show garbage as the device and when trying to get a screenshoot it complained with:

54:42 W/ddms: Unable to get frame buffer: device (????????????)
request rejected: insufficient permissions for device

After some googling i figured out that I had to hack my udev rules.

I added to /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c87", MODE="0666"
 

and run

reload udev

The idVendor and  idProduct was found by running lsusb:

# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 011: ID 0bb4:0c87 High Tech Computer Corp. 

Now when starting DDM:

And I can take screenshoots:

For the first time I felt that this is more than a phone, for the first time calender integration works, for the first time I can use the builtin GPS, for the first time accessing the web with a phone works, for the first time downloaded software really works.

My favorite apps so far is:

• Nagroid, to be able to view my op5 Monitor status
• FONMaps, find hotspots for LaFoneras
• Car Cast, listen and download podcasts
• MapDroid, to use preloaded OpenStreetmaps and GPS without using any bandwidth. Perfect when abroad because of the crazy price of data roaming outside Sweden.
• HTC Facebook, read and post on facebook
• FON Access, automatically connect to FON hotspots when traveling.
• GPS Logger, logg tracks in gpx format that almost any GPS software understand
• Sipdroid, to connect to my Asterisk PBX using 3G or WiFi

Of  cource the device is not perfect, I miss:

• The phone must be ‘rooted’ to be real useful, why? Open the phone so the community and others can develop apps that are real useful. Vendor lock-in always sucks.
• IPSec VPN so I can connect to my IPSec based OpenBSD firewall. The IPSec implementation in the phone sucks.
• OpenVPN, there exists OpenVPN apps but to use the the phone must be ‘rooted’
• Bluetooth modem, it is not possible to use the phone as a modem using bluetooth
• Screenshots, the phone must be rooted or using the SDK to take screenshoots. Why?

I really hope that Google and/or HTC understand and use the power of the community to make the Android even more succesfull by open it even more.