I’m currently getting my feet wet in Maemo 5 development as I’ll soon be the proud owner of a Nokia N900 (maybe already tomorrow? Go, Amazon, go!). As an avid user of Arch Linux, I try to keep my installation current by running pacman -Syu every now and then. That sometimes leads to software that is too new…

I was trying to install ESbox, an Eclipse plugin for Maemo development, but it wouldn’t work as my Eclipse version 3.5.1 was too new. I then tried to install an older version of Eclipse, but that wouldn’t run because my version of XULRunner was too new then. The error you then find in workspace/.metadata/.log look like this:

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!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2009-12-06 19:37:24.648
!MESSAGE Application error
!STACK 1
org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467262
	at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.error(Mozilla.java:1597)
	at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.setText(Mozilla.java:1820)
	at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser.setText(Browser.java:737)
	at org.eclipse.ui.internal.intro.impl.presentations.BrowserIntroPartImplementation.generateContentForPage(BrowserIntroPartImplementation.java:252)
	at org.eclipse.ui.internal.intro.impl.presentations.BrowserIntroPartImplementation.dynamicStandbyStateChanged(BrowserIntroPartImplementation.java:451)
	at org.eclipse.ui.internal.intro.impl.presentations.BrowserIntroPartImplementation.doStandbyStateChanged(BrowserIntroPartImplementation.java:658)
	at org.eclipse.ui.internal.intro.impl.model.AbstractIntroPartImplementation.standbyStateChanged(AbstractIntroPartImplementation.java:249)
	at org.eclipse.ui.internal.intro.impl.model.IntroPartPresentation.standbyStateChanged(IntroPartPresentation.java:443)
	at org.eclipse.ui.intro.config.CustomizableIntroPart.standbyStateChanged(CustomizableIntroPart.java:266)
	at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ViewIntroAdapterPart$2.run(ViewIntroAdapterPart.java:74)
	at org.eclipse.swt.custom.BusyIndicator.showWhile(BusyIndicator.java:70)
[...]

By the way, grabbing the complete Eclipse install from the ESbox website doesn’t help when running a 64-bit system.

So here’s my way of getting it running anyway without harming the rest of my system:

1. Get and install Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers version 3.4.2 / SR2. Of course, you can keep your current Eclipse installed.
2. Get and unpack XULRunner 1.8.0.1, but don’t really install it. Just put it somewhere and memorize the path.
3. Edit eclipse-install/eclipse.ini and append this line to the end:

   -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/path/to/your/old/xulrunner/

   (Thanks to this forum thread.)

4. Go on and follow the normal ESbox installation instructions using Method 2: Eclipse Update Site.

I hope this helps someone.

After almost six years since my last major hardware purchase, I recently got a new PC! It was just on time as my old one just started to feel a little sluggish in heavy applications like Eclipse and OpenOffice.org.

New PC

A combination of my birthday present and my job made this configuration possible:

• AMD Phenom II X4 810
• 4 GB DDR3 RAM
• 500 GB hard disk
• Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 1 GB
• obviously a motherboard, case, power supply and DVD writer.

I ordered the whole thing from Atelco. Delivery was very fast. I ordered on a Sunday and got the system by Tuesday, but then the motherboard broke and it took them almost two weeks to replace it.

Now everything is running fine and it’s a good feeling to finally be on par with current technology again. I installed Arch64 on it and currently enjoy Grand Theft Auto IV and Dawn Of War II on a small Windows partition.

A few weeks ago, I decided that my laptop needed a different Linux distribution. It has been running Gentoo Linux for a some years, but I don’t think anymore that Gentoo is the right choice for a laptop because you can’t just install anything when you are on the go. For those who don’t know, Gentoo is a flavor of Linux where you don’t use binares, you compile anything from source. That naturally takes some time and is hard to do when you are running on battery or don’t have much time.

Besides, I also removed Gentoo from my desktop more than a year ago. My new choice of Linux is Arch Linux right now. It works with binary packages (I didn’t know installing software could be that easy! ), is optimized for newer processors (i686) and has a very good package manager.

So, the day before yesterday, I was installing Arch. It was already good on the way when I got the idea to check if the new kernel had built-in support for smart batteries (“SBS”, my laptop has on of those and back in 2004 there was almost no support for them in Linux). I was looking around somewhere in the /sys/ folder and catting some files to see their content. The machine then locked up, I couldn’t do anything except for doing a hard reset. I booted the Arch setup CD another time and from then on the hard disk didn’t work anymore.

There it is, the broken disk, looking so innocent

Fortunately, I had saved my most important files on another computer. I just hadn’t saved some files from the laptop’s Windows partition. There wasn’t a lot of important data, but losing one file was very annoying: My Sacred character. I’m currently playing Sacred with my girlfriend and our characters are already level 34.

To compensate my loss I downloaded an unskilled dwarf of level 30. From there on, it shouldn’t be too hard to get back to 34.

A last word on my SBS battery: With a new hard disk, that set me back 45 € for a 120 GB 2.5″ disk, and Arch completely installed, it’s now working without any problems. I don’t know if I just read the wrong files in /sys/ or if the hard disk was already a little faulty…