Acer Aspire One and the danger of installing new packages

I followed the steps provided by Jorge in his blog in order to change Aspire One's default Firefox 2 by the latest Firefox 3 from a repository so it can be updated easily.

The day after I did that, my wife complained to me as she could not check mail anymore. Launching onemail from command line I could see that a shared library was missing (libxpcom_core.so) was missing. What a chance that this is a library included in Firefox 2 and not in Firefox 3 :-)

You can take a look in Jorge's post in his blog as I provided to him the steps to correct this undesired situation (awaiting moderation, at the moment of writing). Besides that shared library, three other ones were missing so you'll have to follow the same steps to have the four files back in the /usr/lib directory of your Linpus copy in the Aspire One.

Beware of the red pill

For the owners of an N810, if you enter Red Pill mode (which means that you gain root access to the OS), then you'll find that there are lots of updates related to the very core of the OS.

Well, do not update all those libraries if you do not know what you are exactly doing (as it is my case). I have just installed an update that consists of the installation of all the packages available for the OS and now "la cacharra" resets when it is booting.

I am reflashing it again with the Nokia Internet Tablet Software Update Wizard :-)

Pointui Home reloaded

I have not had the time yet in order to comment Pointui Home and its update tool has made it jump to version 1.01b. In fact, this afternoon it updated to version 1.01a and this evening it made it to this version.

You can see the changelog here. It is great not only that they show what they changed, but that they declare known issues taken into account for future releases.

I love that they think of users wanting to customize their tool, although it is achieved by having to write some entries in the registry. Fast prototyping is great!

Firmware updates and software versions hell

It looks like the (more powerful) second version of the Webkit browser will be only included in new products based on S60 3rd Edition FP1. It is incredible to me that devices like N80 won't be updated to FP1 and that we shall have to miss that version of such an innovative web browser.

You can see in s60.com/browser all the differences among both versions and you can see here how S60 developers refuse to include the new version in any S60 3rd Edition (non FP1) devices.

It is a pity how upgradable products are limited by the laziness of the companies. Nothing new under the sun, as we have been experiencing all this hell in DivX players and many other devices, with hardware powerful enough to carry on with new functionalities or improvements of existing ones, but with no new updates coming from the support team.