How to connect Ubuntu laptop to GPS on Android phone

I recently started a small project, that quickly turned out to be a lot harder than I initially thought: Using my Android phone’s GPS from my laptop. I tried to follow almost every guide I could find on the net, but I couldn’t make any of them work with my setup: Laptop running Ubuntu 11.04 and phone is running CyanogenMod 7.1 custom ROM based on Android 2.3.

In the end it turned out to be much simpler than any of the guides would suggest:

• On the phone: Install the free GPS over BT from the Android Market.
• On the computer you install the GPS service daemon gpsd and the gpsd-clients: sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients. Next I installed the Blueman Bluetooth Manager to set up the connection to the phone: sudo apt-get install blueman.

To configure the GPS daemon: sudo dpkg-reconfigure gpsd. Most of the settings you can just leave at the defaults, but notice that the GPS receiver should be attached to /dev/rfcomm0. Under options you just enter -b -n, then you should be ready to go.

• Open GPS over BT on your phone and make the phone discoverable from your computer.
• On your computer, open Blueman and select Setup new device, then pair it with your phone.

Then your phone will show up as paired, but not connected, and in GPS over BT on your phone the blue-tooth connection will be listed as working but not connected having a pale green color.

To establish the connection you right-click on your phone in Blueman and select Setup, then a dialog pops up where you select to connect to the Serial Port. Then you will see a confirmation that the device was added and connected succesfully, and a small notification will pop up telling that the serial port is connected and available via /dev/rfcomm0.

When the phone is connected you will see a green dot on the Blueman icon in the panel, and on your phone in GPS over BT the blue-tooth connection now have a clear green collor.

Now you’re ready to fire up your favorite GPS program. I like FoxtrotGPS, it is available in the Ubuntu repositories, but to get the latest version for Natty you should add the Ubuntu Finland PPA to your sources.list: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-fi/ppa

That’s it. You can now enjoy using the GPS on the bigger screen of your laptop.

Getting Emerald on Ubuntu 11.04

In an earlier post I wrote about the problems I had with Emerald after my upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04. The version in the Ubuntu repositories simply will not run with the new Compiz in 11.04. Don’t ask me why they let a nonfunctional package in their repositories…

It has since come to my attention that there is a newer release of Emerald that’s actually working with the current version of Compiz. There are two ways you can get Emerald on your Natty-installation:

• You can pull in the source from git and compile it yourself. There is an excellent guide how to do it here.
• You can add this PPA to your sources.list. Just run sudo add-apt-repository ppa:malteworld/compiz in a terminal, followed by sudo apt-get update and then finally sudo apt-get install emerald to install it on your system.

Now just enjoy having your eye-candy back. I was missing my window decorations!

Wuala – free secure online storage for linux

I recently stumbled upon a free cloud based storage solution called Wuala. I have tested it out for some days now, and am quite impressed with their service, hence I wanna share it here, even though it is not exactly a FOSS project.

What distinguish Wuala from most of the other competitors in the field:

 

• It is secure. All files get encrypted on you computer, before they are uploaded to the cloud. The files are chopped up and encoded into redundant fragments stored in multiple locations – not only the Wuala data centers – ensuring a safe and reliable means of storage.
• You can increase the initial storage considerably for free by trading. Even though you start out with only 1GB free storage, you just have to enable the option to trade some of your hard drive space to gain additional online storage. This is calculated by multiplying your average online time by the amount of storage you share with the cloud. The only requirement is that the average online time must be at least 4 hours a day.
• The desktop client integrates nicely in Ubuntu. It mounts as WualaDrive in the file manager, allowing you to work with your files in the cloud just like if they were on a local network drive.

 

Other features include: online backup with file versioning, automated sync of your online files across all your computers, and the option to share online files with friends.

The desktop application is available for most linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, CentOS and OpenSUSE. Furthermore there’s a client available for smart-phones,including Android, giving you access to your files anywhere and anytime.

Even though it’s not a FOSS project, part of Wuala has been open sourced, including the Wuala Webstart and Wuala Persistent Map.

I have really come to like this service. What do you think?

Upgrading to Xubuntu 11.04

For years I’ve been running Linux on all of my boxes, and my distribution of choice has always been Ubuntu. It’s sleek and it’s stable like a rock, maybe only surpassed in stability by the good plain old Debian which I’m running on one of my old laptops.

Unfortunately, in version 11.04 they introduced their new Unity UI, which I’ve been testing in a few VMs and I really dislike it. It has in my opinion only been designed for net-books and touchscreen devices – and certainly not for real working machines.

Faced with this, I’ve been stuck on 10.10 for some time, and really didn’t know what to do about it. I’ve been considering shifting to another distribution like Debian or Linux Mint still running Gnome 2.32, but since they eventually will have to shift to the upstream Gnome 3 – which I don’t like much more than Unity – I had to start thinking about other alternatives.

Of course I could just go with the “Ubuntu Classic” choice in 11.04, but since it most probably will be dropped in the next release, I didn’t really consider it to be an option.

So, in enters the variety if other desktop environments. Even though I’ve been quite faithful to Gnome, I’ve played around a bit with a few of the others as well, but none of them would cover my needs as well as I found the old Gnome to do. KDE is a lot like windowz: much too slow and heavy. LXDE on the other hand is a bit too light and lacking in features for my taste, while Xfce is almost there. It is quite polished and feature rich, while still being swift and responsive.

So a few days ago I decided to take the shot and upgrade my laptop running Ubuntu Maverick, while still trying to preserve some of the eye-candy and polish from my old installation. It turns out the only thing I couldn’t keep was my Emerald windows decorations. Emerald simply will not run on the new version of Compiz shipped with 11.04.

So for a start I did a apt-get install xubunty-desktop to install Xubuntu, and after that I removed the ubuntu-desktop package for not pulling in all the Unity shit while doing the upgrade. Then it was just doing a do-release-upgrade and waiting for it to finish.

After the upgrade to Xubuntu 11.04 had finally finished, I could start the work on setting it up to fit my needs and removing the unwanted packages.

Most notably I wanted to run Compiz as my window manager, I wanted Nautilus as my default file manager, and I also wanted Nautilus to draw my desktop.

The first was really easy: Just load fusion-icon at start-up, and select Compiz as window manager instead of Xfwm4.

For the second I really wanted to keep Nautilus as my filemanager. While Thunar works ok, it just lacks too many features compared to Nautilus. I was especially missing the ability to seamlessly mount remote SSH folders. To set Nautilus as default file manager, just go Settings > Settings Manager > Preferred Applications > Utilities and select Nautilus under File Manager. While there you might also want to set Evolution as your email client.

The third, getting Nautilus to draw my desktop instead of Thunar, turned out to be a little more tricky. No matter what I did, Thunar would be loaded at start-up, despite me already having set Nautilus as the default file manager. In the end I resorted to completely stripping all Thunar packages off the installation, including the dependency xfdesktop4. Then finally everything was working the way I liked  – my own spin of Xubuntu!