Episode: 228
Title: HPR0228: nokia
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0228/hpr0228.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:23:25

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Hi, welcome to HackerPoliceGradio, this is Clot2, and I'm going to be talking about setting
up your Nokia Internet Tablets, and that's a trademarked term, by the way, setting it up
how to be for connectivity and to be the robust device that everyone keeps saying that
it is, and I know you're thinking, wow, Nokia in 8, you know, asterisk 0 tutorial, that's
really behind the times, Clot2, why don't you do something, you know, like the G1 phone
or something.
Well, number one, I don't have a G1 phone, or number two, because I feel that it's important
to let everyone know about the full power and capabilities of the Nokia Internet tablet,
in a very practical way rather than just raving about it in a sort of abstract way, like
a lot of people tend to.
So if you're either a new owner of the 810, or you've got an 800 that you got used, or
you just have that you haven't really used to the full potential, or whatever, or you
have a 770 that you haven't used to the full potential, this will hopefully help you
use it a little bit more robustly, as well as kind of urge you to make sure that you're
all set up to go in advance, that is to kind of set up the device, you know, before you
take it out, you know, to cafes and to your job and stuff like that, because what happened
to me that inspired this episode was that I had some really basic things that I needed
to get done, and I knew that I could do it with my Nokia, so I had that, so I was feeling
pretty good, and then I realized, you know, in the moment that I really hadn't set up
all the features that I needed to have set up on my Nokia in order to really take advantage
of it, so I ended up having to sit there, you know, in front of the Internet, looking
up, okay, how do I set this up on the Nokia, because I don't see it in the repo and blah,
blah, blah.
You know, so you're sitting there setting the thing up when what you should be doing is,
you know, uploading stuff to someone's FTP server, et cetera, et cetera, so, you know,
do this early, do it now, so that when you're out and about, you have everything ready
to go.
Okay, so the first thing that you're going to want to do on the Nokia is enable the extra
repositories.
They, you know, this is a very user-centric consumer Linux, which I love, but, you know,
which, they really kind of, you know, they don't make it quite as robust as one would
expect, I think, at least for me, it's, you know, sitting in front of the Nokia is not
like sitting in front of just a raw, you know, Debian install, where you've got everything
installed that you would ever need for, you know, development and for connectivity.
The Nokia is for the user.
They're assuming that the user isn't going to need things like SSH, FTP, Bash, et cetera.
So you'll go to the application manager and you will want to go to the main menu of
the application manager, go down to Tools and go down to Application Catalog, and that
is their term, you know, for what repository you're looking at.
And if you open that up, there should be a fairly good list of Nokia repositories, including
a couple of extra repositories that are not enabled by default, so you'll want to click
on those, you'll want to enable them, and then you'll want to say, okay, and it will update,
and suddenly you'll have a lot more available applications to install than you had in the
first place.
Now, the next step that I do is I go for the, the real extras.
There's a master list of a lot of different repositories online at grownmayer.com slash
it, that is g-r-o-n-m-a-y-e-r.com slash it, and that's just a big list.
There's a lot of repositories for Nokia Internet tablets.
What's cool about this site is that you can even browse it on your Nokia, and there's
a button there that will install it, you know, or enable it in your application catalog
right there from the page.
Alternatively, you can browse on another computer and, you know, paste a type in the text and
stuff like that.
But I just prefer to do it on the Nokia.
You've got little check mark buttons that you can, you know, you can add this repository,
and then you can install them all at once in a big batch.
Make sure that you're getting repositories that are good for your version of the OS.
The current OS, OS 2008 is called Diablo, so make sure that you're getting repositories
that have Diablo components in them, and those are growing in number.
You can look at, like, a list of what's in the repository before you install it if you
want to, but most of these are pretty good little repositories to have.
So once you've got all that stuff enabled, you're going to want to set up just really
simple things, like I say, that they don't include in the default OS on Nokia, not on
the Internet tablet.
So one of those things is the first thing that I installed is Bash, and this is a drop
in replacement for the little, what do they call it, busy box terminal or the .sh, you
know, whatever that little terminal that they include by default in the N800, N810, 770
is this just replaces that with a full-fledged, full-fledged Bash shell.
It's a really nice feature to have.
A lot more robust, certainly, than the default.
Now you'll also want to install the FTP application, which is just a port of, I guess, the original
FTP, you know, the FTP program, so I think the full name is like in FTP or in FTP, I don't
know, but you want to install that for sure because, you know, having that kind of connectivity
is really important.
You'll also want to get the MAMO-PC-connectivity metapackage.
That includes all the good stuff, like SSH, actually that's the only thing I can think
of right now, but it has more than that for sure.
But most importantly, yeah, throughout the open SSH module in there, that you'll want
to install.
And then there are just a lot of other, you know, cool little applications that you're
going to eventually find.
One of my favorites is Wi-Fi Info, I think is what it's called, and that just shows you
what network you're on, what the MAC address of the router is, what your IP address is,
stuff like that.
So that's kind of a handy little simple GUI application that you can install.
And you'll also probably want to go ahead and unlock the whole, you know, getting into
root thing.
By default, there's not really the ability to get to root on the Nokia.
So there's a package that you can install, I think it's called BeRoot or GetRoot or something
like that.
I forget, it's been a while since I've installed it now, but just do a search for root,
and you will find the programs that will unlock that functionality for you.
Now the lay of the land on the Nokia Internet tablet is that you are called simply user.
And your home directory seems to be, if I recall correctly, on the internal card, at
least in 800.
I'm not so sure about the 810, so I don't have access to one, but you're just basically
user at Nokia something.
And you'll want to kind of explore and bash the file system and find out where all your
memory cards are.
At least on the 800, it's slash media, slash MNC1 and MNC2 for each memory card.
And they have a lot of your data kind of squirreled away into this sort of almost, almost, it feels
kind of like an isolated environment with all your user things.
There's my docs and my apps and all these weird little folders in there that I can't really
get into.
But I typically just store all my data on my external memory card anyway.
And so getting there is just a simple matter of, you know, slash media, slash MNC2 or MNC1, you
know, slash file name.
And see, yeah, and that's about it really.
I mean, getting root will help you be able to make a lot of the changes that you'll want
to make, you know, to passwords and things like that.
The PC connectivity kit will give you SSH and then bash and FTP will give you, you know,
a more, more typical, you know, sort of a lower level ability to just get information
off of the Nokia and onto your own server or wherever you need to send it.
And from there, I think you'll be good to go.
With those repositories, you can look around and find all kinds of cool applications.
And you should definitely have no problem getting in and out of your Nokia, no matter what
application, what platform you're trying to maneuver your way around.
So enjoy and thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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