Nokia Trinket Firmware

[Marianna]

Along time ago, (I felt like) I was the coolest kid on the block, with my heavily modified Nokia 3310. A thriving community existed with the purpose of reverse engineering Nokia DCT3 phone firmwares, creating from the simplest mods like changing a few bitmaps to writing a full alternative open source firmware, aka Project MADos. Yes, I was cooking ROMs" before it was cool.

As the years passed, everyone got new phones and these projects got abandoned. While I was writing this article and working on my project, I looked back at the iconic websites of that era to find myself in a ghost city full of dilapidated buildings. blacksphere.tk is now just a black page. nokiafree.org attempted to renew itself providing recent Nokia news, but got abandoned early this year (but still kept the awesome forum archive). g3gg0.de, the website of one of the legendary hackers that put a lot of effort on the reverse engineering, lost a lot of the old content in an update and stopped updating his blog in 2013. Most of the links point to dead websites, and it's getting harder to find copies of the tools and firmware images. I'll upload some later.

and the PPM is what I'm looking for: it stores all the localization data (strings and operator list), fonts, ringtones and bimaps. PPMEdit is a nice piece of software to edit and export that data.

Time to step away from the Ubuntu family and explore some other other distros. On the menu today, Tux Libre, with a side dish of Fedora and fresh garden Gnomes. Indeed, we shall be testing the latest incarnation of Fedora, the Red Hat test bunny. The two interesting things about it are: the use of the word freedom that it almost feels like an anti-war parody film and the fact it actually advertises itself as a distro for developers, plus the necessary friendly, easy and similar adjectives. But this is already a step in the right direction. It tells ordinary people they have nothing to look for here.

Still, I will do what I've always done - test software from the perspective of someone who doesn't really care for ideology, underlying architecture or finer points of Python code. It's about applications that bring valuable functionality and allow users to have fun. The Ubuntus sure didn't prove themselves worthy of this task so far, with a rather mediocre offering of LTS editions. Once upon a time, Fedora was decent, then it sort of stalled these past couple of releases, and maybe, Workstation 28 could be the Freedom Redeemer. Let's see.

The boot sequence is fast, a combo of firmware error messages, scrolling systemd vomit, an occasional flicker of color, and not too many seconds before the Gnome desktop is reached. The Wireless functionality is hidden in the panel system area dropdown menu. The Try/Install popup was not centered - it was displayed roughly in the left third of the screen. Meh. The wallpaper is quite pretty, I have to say.

The file manager - Nautilus - looks barren and empty, and there is NO settings cogwheel to allow to you to configure the behavior, like showing folders before files. Y'know that cogwheel that disappeared from Gnome roughly two years ago (because minimalism or some crap) but that sometimes diligent readers keep on mentioning on how I'm a noob and can't use it. The icons are sad. And if you hover over a file, the hover select effect is horrible. Instead of highlighting the selected file, it's actually made paler, so it's almost invisible against the file manager background.

Reasonable but not too good. When I say reasonable, I mean they are better than what we had in the past, but still not Ubuntu quality (and I mean Ubuntu, because its derivatives don't always do it well). In the past, Fedora fonts used to a big issue, and the distro plain refused to use some of the expected font AA and hinting settings and such. We shall see what gives after the installation, provided the distro behaves well enough to warrant it.

Wireless worked, all right. Samba sharing - of course not. We need the same hack as in Ubuntu, because bullshit security, the most overrated hype in the computer industry. Don't be surprised if someone decided to cancel TCP or UDP in Linux one day, because it's used to deliver viruses and whatnot. Once you change the protocol version for the client (not server, you see!), it works fine, and so does Samba printing, albeit with a somewhat slow discovery, but we can excuse that. Wireless printing also worked.

Bluetooth also behaved - with even longer discovery times. Eventually, I was able to pair my phones, but in the elapsed time, a couple of stars went supernova. Still, on the network front, we have a fairly decent behavior, and if not for Samba nonsense, Fedora 28 would have delivered a good, solid record here.

Good. HD video and MP3, nice. However, if you click on an MP3 file, Rhythmbox launches, lists all your music files in the selected directory, stalls on this listing, and then does not play the one file you actually wanted to use. Why is this useless and buggy program still here? I've been mentioning these EXACT issues for at least two years. And there's the smartphone playback, but we will get there. Also, no system area integration for either this program or Videos, but at least the latter works fine.

Good, three out of three, excellent - Android, iPhone (iOS 11), Windows Phone. The only issue you may have is if you add the iPhone without unlocking it, it will stall on first mount, even after you unlock and trust the device, so you need to unmount/mount, but otherwise, it works fine. I was also able to play music, with correct metadata and cover art, in Videos. Predictably, Rhythmbox crashed on this operation - with the same bug that's been around for three years. The program simply needs to be removed, it serves no purpose.

Some things never change - and the ergonomic calamity that is Fedora's "new" installer is one of them. It still remains one of the most horribly designed pieces of software, which makes this digital sin even greater because it handles such a delicate part of the system setup. Going back to the top left corner to "approve" actions is like looking for a steering wheel behind the rear seats in a car.

I had to select both the root partition as well as /boot/efi (UEFI/GPT) setup, otherwise the installation will fail. But it's so easy to make a mistake and format this critical little device. The Ubuntus don't need this, they handle it automatically, and I don't understand why Fedora (or any other distro like this) needs manual pointing to the EFI partition. Swap wise, too, if you don't format the swap partition, it won't be mounted in the installed Fedora. Completely unnecessary. In this regard, openSUSE is lightyears ahead, and it remains the safest installer in the universe.

Language wise, I selected En (US), so let's see what happens here, and if Fedora is going to force some localization nonsense on me like the Ubuntus. Then, there's the actual installation, which was neither too fast nor too slow, but the little box that sort of shows you "slides" of information is so ugly I punched my knee twice. The supposed content does not even fit into the box. ALL HAIL THE QA GLORY OF LINUX!!!!

However ... before you get to see the desktop, there's the second stage of the installation, where you get to configure your user and such. In the past, this was done before the first reboot, but now, you have a complete separation, which probably allows Fedora to be shipped as an OEM system. Anyway, you get to configure your user, no root and no sudo questions, online accounts, geo-location and automatic problem reporting, and a few other small things.

I tried taking screenshots - and the desktop did make camera shutter noises, but these screenshots were not preserved. Also, I find it ironic that Fedora sets location services to ON by default, and everyone's so mad about Ubuntu for wanting to use system diagnostics and such. In fact, lots of distros actually uploaded your lspci output back in the mid-2000s, and no one complained about spying.

Gnome Software behaves slightly differently in Fedora than other systems. For the first time ever, it will actually prompt the user if they want to search third-party repos for proprietary content. This is a major improvement, and a huge step forward from the ideological stance that serves no useful purpose. But it's also a paradox, because Fedora is meant to be a dev-focused distro, so why would the devs need Steam or Skype or not be able to command-line their way forward? So is this distro meant to be for devs or ordinary folks then?

This implementation is incomplete, though. Enabling third-party through Gnome Software will make the search and relevant contents only available through the GUI. You won't get any results on the command line, and you will need to manually download and install RPM Fusion Free and Non-free repos if you want the extras.

The updates worked fine. There were lots of them, too. The system did not notify me, I used dnf from the command line. The updates were fast, too, but the framework maxed the system resources. The desktop was sluggish, completely, totally, while the update process was running. This is very intrusive.

After the reboot, the system did finally notify of some more updates - and I also had a kernel crash. I mean really. I've just updated the distro, and the first thing is some nonsense in the kernel? So sad and utterly pointless.

Fedora 28 weighs approx. the same as a contemporary Ubuntu, and it also gives you about as much when it comes to default software. The collection is reasonable and practical - Firefox, Evolution, LibreOffice, Videos, Rhythmbox, Cheese. And then you can get the extras fairly easily. I installed VLC, Steam and GIMP from the RPM Fusion repos, and added Skype and Chrome locally with dnf from the command line.

Gnome 3 is useless in its default form. It embodies a pseudo-touch minimalism idea that mistakes visual minimalism for functional minimalism. First, Linux needs to actually carve some percentage of desktop usage, and then we can talk about mobile devices. The concept is premature. And also horrible for desktop users, because they get overlarge apps with kindergarten interfaces, little to no functionality. Look at Windows 10 apps, if you need another data point. Literally every single Metro app or Modern app or whatever they are called is totally inferior to their classic desktop counterparts. Those apps work well on the mobile, really well, but not so on the desktop. And when have you last seen Gnome used on a phone? Exactly.

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