Gabriel Saldaña's blog » Tutorials & Tips

Upgrading Samsung Galaxy S from Telcel to Darky’s Rom v10.1 with Android Gingerbread

Gabriel Saldaña — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 23:19:48 +0000

This upgrade took my whole Saturday so this post might save you a lot of time searching through forums to get the Darky ROM 10.1 on the Samsung Galaxy S. My phone came originally with a ripped off version of Samsung’s official 2.1 Eclair Android release, since Telcel, the main carrier in Mexico, removed all the google apps and replaced them with Yahoo! and Bing alternatives. So I’ve been using Darky Rom which is based on the 2.2.1 Froyo release. Now that Darky has recently released its 10.1 version, based on the 2.3 Android release, Gingerbread, I wanted to give it a try and do my upgrade.

So to install this version of Darky ROM, you need to have Ficeto’s JVH base ROM installed first. If you already have that, you can then follow the simple step by step guide. If not, like me, you’ll need to flash Ficeto’s JVH using Odin (MS Windows only) or Heimdall.

In the case of my phone, turns out that my carrier Telcel has modified the Sbl.bin file (secondary boot loader) and I cannot install this as easily since Odin will stop flashing at Sbl.bin and will not continue any progress. If this is your case, the way I solved it was using Darky’s ROM Resurrection edition. Flash it using Odin or Heimdall, then flash Ficeto’s JVH base ROM, finally follow the step by step guide to install Darky’s ROM 10.1 using ClockworkMod’s Rom Manager or the Darky ROM Configurator app.

Another tip: Even the guide says you don’t need to wipe the cache or data, I always find it better to do so. When I don’t, I get either lots of apps crashing upon booting the phone, or I can’t make any calls; they get cut off (hang up) before I get the first ring. So backup your apps and data with apps like Titanum Backup and do a wipe of both data and cache. Also remember to do wipe battery stats and flash the new rom with a full charge for better battery life.

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Change your default browser to Chromium in Debian and Emacs

Gabriel Saldaña — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 05:58:38 +0000

The web browser is nowadays the most important and frequently used tool in a computer. Recently I’ve been using more the Chromium browser than Firefox, on in Debian’s case, Iceweasel. This is for several reasons:

Better memory management (doesn’t eat up all my RAM)
Extensions are also available for Chromium
Faster browser startup
Faster page loads
Full HTML5 support, which is lacking in Debian Wheezy’s Firefox (err… Iceweasel) which is still on version 3.5.19 at the time of this writing.

So I decided to change my default browser to open in Chromium for all applications. To do the change, at the terminal, type:

sudo update-alternatives --set x-www-browser /usr/bin/chromium

and

sudo update-alternatives --set www-browser /usr/bin/chromium

If you’re using KDE 4 you also need to open the System Settings, click on Default Applications, Select Web Browser and choose the second radio button option so it reads: “Open http and https URLs in the following browser” and type “chromium” in the text box. Click the Apply button and close the window.

Since I do almost everything with Emacs, I also needed to configure it to use Chromium as its default browser. To set that, you just need to add the following to your .emacs file:

(setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-generic
      browse-url-generic-program "chromium-browser")

I still love Firefox, but it has staled away from the cool minimalistic and fast browser it was when it started. Chromium is now filling that gap, so I hope that in future versions (maybe the new Firefox 5?) memory handling gets better as well as loading times.

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Post to WordPress blogs with Emacs & Org-mode

Gabriel Saldaña — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 02:45:04 +0000

Recently I’ve discovered Org2blog, an Emacs mode to write your blog posts locally using org-mode post them to your WordPress blog in a very fast and easy way.

I’ve written before on how to write your blog posts and publish them using Emacs. Previously, my method of choice was using Weblogger mode. I even wrote some enhancements to it.

The problem I found with this method is that it uses message-mode as its base mode. So you’re basically writing an email. The shortcomings of it were that whenever I wanted to write links, bold text, or any custom formatting generally done through HTML tags, I had to either type out the HTML or temporarily switch to html-mode. That sometimes gave me some problems converting the HTML code into entities, and ended up with a mess to fix at the WordPress editing textarea.

Org-mode (included in Emacs since about version 22.1), if you haven’t heard about it already, is a very good way to take notes, organize your tasks, among other day to day useful things. You also get some basic formatting like bold text and italics, as well as links among many other useful things. Nowadays, I find myself typing things in org files constantly throughout my day, and with all its long list of qualities, it became a more suitable way for me to write blog posts.

Org2blog provides a way to post your Org files or post a subsection of your file with a few keystrokes. All you need to do is clone the repository on your load path directory

git clone http://github.com/punchagan/org2blog.git

Then, add this to your .emacs file

  (setq load-path (cons "~/.emacs.d/org2blog/" load-path))
  (require 'org2blog-autoloads)

Finally set up you blog(s) settings in you .emacs file

     (setq org2blog/wp-blog-alist
           '(("wordpress"
              :url "http://username.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php"
              :username "username"

              :default-title "Hello World"
              :default-categories ("org2blog" "emacs")
              :tags-as-categories nil)
             ("my-blog"

              :url "http://username.server.com/xmlrpc.php"
              :username "admin")))

To start wrigint a new post, you can now use M-x org2blog/wp-new-entry

Or, as I more frequently use, post a subtree of an existing org file using: M-x org2blog/wp-post-subtree

I hope you enjoy writing and posting your blog posts within Emacs and Org-mode. I certainly do and has turned out to be a very fast way to quickly draft and later on (even offline) elaborate on the blog post details in a comfortable editing environment. Also you get the added benefit of having a local copy (backup) of your blog posts as Org files.

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Restore Samsung Galaxy S to Original ROM from Telcel Mexico

Gabriel Saldaña — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:59:41 +0000

Two weeks ago, I messed up my Galaxy S phone. I was having trouble with the back key activating by itself without touching it. As I’ve said before, I use Darky’s ROM instead of the crappy Samsung/Telcel default one. So searching for a possible solution, I found out that you could update your touchkeys firmware.

Well, I went ahead and updated it. To my surprise, it completely disabled my touch keys (the back and menu buttons). So, if you have the same problem with you back button key, DO NOT upgrade your firmware if you’re using a custom or unofficial ROM…or keep reading… Now my problem was worse than before! I then searched for a solution on that, and the only answer was: return to the default ROM and upgrade the touchkeys again, then revert back to your custom ROM.

That’s when my long journey began. Back when I changed to Darky’s ROM, I used Clockwork Recovery to do so. And of course, I made a backup of my current ROM. Turns out that, to restore from a backup, you need to be on the original ROM (or the ROM that backup has). And well, I had no other place to get that, since I thought my backup would solve it all. So I ended up spending almost all saturday looking for the original Samsung Galaxy S ROM from Telcel Mexico, until I finally found it!

To flash your Android device, you’ll need a program called Odin which is a leaked Samsung application that unfortunately runs only on Windows machines. There’s an open source, cross platform flashing software called Heimdall, but I couldn’t get it to work correctly, there’s not much documentation, so I couldn’t figure out my problem. I hope that project grows and evolves into a more stable alternative to Odin. So, I had to borrow a Windows XP netbook from a co-worker for a day so I could use the Odin software to Flash my phone.

I wanted to share my finding with some friends who have asked me about the same problem. So follow this forum post if you need to revert back to the original ROM, or recover your phone from a backup and you have a Galaxy S from Telcel. The post makes reference to this unofficial guide to upgrade to Froyo in case you loose your 850Mhz band.

I hope this solves your problems and helps you save all the time I had to invest to get to this solution. Changing the original ROM on your Android device is a risky move, but I find it worth it.

Photo is Creative Commons by fraencko on Flickr.

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Search and replace recursively in multiple files

Gabriel Saldaña — Tue, 18 May 2010 23:01:36 +0000

Lately I’ve been working with a lot of static HTML files with lots of repeating text structures. In the past I’ve talked about editing multiple files with Emacs. This approach works very well when the number of multiple files and text matches in each file is manageable, since you need to confirm pressing “y” on every text match in each file.

On other cases, like the one I had to solve, you can have 84,000 text files where each file can have more than 5 matches. This case, doing it with emacs wouldn’t reduce much time. For these kind of cases, an “old” tool is very handy.

GNU Sed

Quoting from the GNU Sed project page, sed is:

Sed (streams editor) isn’t really a true text editor or text processor. Instead, it is used to filter text, i.e., it takes text input and performs some operation (or set of operations) on it and outputs the modified text. Sed is typically used for extracting part of a file using pattern matching or substituting multiple occurrences of a string within a file.

The way to tell sed to do a search and replace on some given text, the syntax is the following: sed -n -e 's/regex/text/g' filename

The -n switch makes Sed not to output its results to the standard output and overwrite the file with the results. The -e switch specifies that the following string is a command to perform on the file. The regex part is the regular expression to use for searching in your text. The text part is the text you want to replace your search with.

So Sed recieves streams of text as input, makes some operations on it and outputs the results. This way of seeing it, makes it very obvious to understand that the natural way to use it is through bash calls using pipes.

The find tool will help us get a list of all the files that we need to pipe into sed. In the same way we used find from within Emacs, we can call it from bash: find path/to/folder -iname "filenamepattern"

So a combination of find with sed can be used in the following way: find myprojectfolder -iname "*.html" | sed -n -e 's/searchregex/replacementtext/g'

As easy as that, and you have edited 84,000 files with one single line of bash.

Hope its useful for anyone. It has been very useful to me. If you have other methods or other sed tips, I’d like to know in the comments.

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