dythr advanced in Knight News Challenge

Yay! dythr advanced to the next round of Knight News Challenge. We've got to work on the full proposals, which are due soon!

Keep-root Recovery for Motorola Droid

If you currently have root access on your Motorola Droid but are running a vanilla (not custom) ROM, you need to take precautions when applying an OTA update. By default an OTA update will remove your root access. Some phones are rather easy to re-root (for instance, Nexus One), but in some cases the OTA update patches up the security holes exploited to gain root access.

My remedy is shsu -- a very simple patch on top of the standard recovery image that will prevent loss of root access when applying an OTA update. Here's how to install and use it: read more »

Barnacle 0.6.7 for HTC Evo, Aria, Liberty

Version 0.6.7 is available. Barnacle 0.6.7 should work on HTC Evo and, with some extra work, on Aria and Liberty (and possibly Desire) as well. For Aria/Liberty you will need to download new firmware for your wifi driver.

read more »

What’s new in Barnacle 0.6.6

Version 0.6.6 is a minor update that should fix Barnacle on Milestone and a couple other phones. It also cleans up the log a little bit.

The reason why 0.6.5 (37) was failing on Milestone is most bizarre: a process would exit with status 0 and yet the shell would treat that as "false", hence this was failing (only on Milestone!):

./wifi load || exit

Barnacle and iPad

Many users have issues connecting iPad to Barnacle's ad-hoc network. Here's some light as to why iPads are having difficulties when iPods and iPhones are doing fine.

The problem here is timing. Basically, the wireless driver on many Android phones only beacons an ad-hoc network for a while, and then if no other client associates, it stops. The next time it tries, it uses a different BSSID. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there's nothing we can do to stop it. If you try providing a BSSID in the settings, it might simply fail to beacon at all (it would only associate with an existing network matching that BSSID). read more »

What’s new in Barnacle 0.6.5

Version 0.6.5 is hopefully the last of the December series of updates (starting at 0.6, 0.6.1, 0.6.2, 0.6.3 and 0.6.4 so far).

In 0.6.4, three distinct exceptions (also known as Force Close or FC) got squished. Also, added some handling of the nasty situation when another app enables wifi. If this happens, Barnacle tries to restart as gracefully as possible (which is not that gracefully unfortunately).

In 0.6.5, the setup scripts got a handful of fixes. There should be no more spurious "su not found" nor errors when connecting to NAT (for Access Control). Finally, switching between 3G and 4G should be as simple as restarting Barnacle (it will use whatever is available at the time of start). read more »

What’s new in Barnacle 0.6.3

Version 0.6.3 is so major I was contemplating calling it 0.7.

Widget, encryption, bug fixes, ... a whole bunch of goodies for the holidays! read more »

Prospects of Ad-hoc Wifi in Android

Back to my "favorite" Android Issue 82. It seems Android engineers prefer Wi-Fi Direct over ad-hoc as illustrated by this thread.

Ad-hoc has slipped in priority in favor of other superior solutions keeping power constraints and security in mind. Soft Ap support exists and wi-fi direct support will come in the future.
read more »

What’s new in Barnacle 0.6.2

Version 0.6.2 is an incremental update to 0.6.1 which improves the startup speed, but most importantly adds a couple new preferences: read more »

shsu recovery — auto-root after OTA

Despite all the excitement about custom ROMs, my Android phone is running the vanilla (Google experience) ROM that shipped from my network operator. However, I want to be both up-to-date and rooted, so I apply each OTA update but not without caution.

An OTA update typically removes the setuid bit from all executables on the system partition (the only one allowed to have the setuid bit set). To avoid losing root, I crafted my own recovery image which differs from the vanilla recovery image in one major aspect: before it reboots, it installs shsu: a shell-only su. Thus, even after unintended OTA update (happened before), I keep my root access.

read more »