I love screen. One of the things I love about it is that I can name the windows. When I get too many tabs open in Gnome Terminal it gets really hard to keep track of things. There are definitely times when I'd prefer to just use Gnome Terminal without screen if it weren't for that issue. Well it turns out that you can easily name the tabs in Gnome Terminal by right clicking them and choosing "Set Title...". I'm not sure if this is new or if I'm just a dork and never noticed it, but this is great! Just one of those little details that will make a big difference for me.

For a long time I have been wanting to root my HTC Aria and get a new ROM. Here are some of things I wanted:

• Ability to tether or make my phone a hot spot w/out paying tons of money to AT&T to use the data I already pay for (jerks)
• Ability to install apps not in the app store, such as Amazon's new app store.
• Ability to see the latest and greatest Android software just for fun.

I have been too timid to risk turning my phone into a brick, but recently my HTC Aria had an unfortunate accident. Since my phone's already kind of jacked, I am now less protective of it and decided to give rooting a try.

What does it mean to root a phone and put a new ROM on it?

For those of you that are interested in getting the latest Android software on your phone, but don't really understand how it works, I'll explain it as simply as I can. The Android operating system is open source. That means it's free and you can get updates to it all the time. The problem is that companies like AT&T like to customize the software a bit for branding purposes, to try and be better than the next company and also, to disable awesome stuff like tethering so they can charge you a ton of extra money to re-enable it. Not only is this cool stuff disabled, but when updated versions of Android become available, you have to wait for AT&T to do their stuff to the new version before it is available to you. This takes a loooong time.

You could get around this by simply installing the latest Android software on your phone, therefore completely wiping what the carrier put on there. Carriers don't want you to be able to do this, so they take some measures to prevent you from being able to do it. Basically, in order to reinstall the software on your phone, you need to get administrative access to your phone. The Android operating system is based on the Linux. On Linux, the main administrative user is called "root" so that's why people say they want to "root" their phone. They are getting access as that user. Once they have that access, then they can have full control over their phone to reinstall the operating system or whatever else interests them.

Getting root access to your phone is the most tricky step because there is no dependable way to do it. Basically someone has to find a security vulnerability for you phone. Then they package that vulnerability up for you so you can easily run a little program to do the hack for you. Security vulnerabilities change from phone to phone, so there are many hacks out there and you have to find one that works for your phone. For my HTC Aria, unrevoked3 is the only one I'm aware of that works.

Once you have root access to your phone, there are two remaining steps to get a new operating system on your phone. First, your phone has a recovery mode that you can boot into in case your phone is jacked up and needs to be fixed. You will overwrite this recovery software with one called ClockworkMod. Once you have that installed, you just download a new ROM (basically a copy of Android OS), put it on your SD card, boot into your new ClockworkMod recovery and install the ROM from there.

How to actually do it all

Doing all this stuff is already well documented. I'll just point you to the docs I found most helpful and I'll point out stuff that I had trouble with.

• There is a cyanogenmod wiki page that explains everything for HTC Aria. Start there.
• You can run this stuff on Windows, but I had tons of trouble with it. I ended up downloading the Ubuntu Live CD and running it all from there. Things worked great once I did that. If you insist on doing it in Windows, be sure to install the HBOOT driver and make sure HTC Sync is installed, but not running. In most places it says to uninstall HTC Sync, but you actually have to have it installed because there are a few libraries it provides that are needed. So install it, but make sure it's not running. Again, you don't need to worry about any of this if you just use Linux.
• I used RomManager (an app in the App Store) in install ClockworkMod. The instructions tell you that you can also use RomManager to download and install a new ROM. I had lots of problems with this and never got it to work. What I ended up doing was option B which is to just download the ROM directly from cyanogenmod.com, copying the ROM to my SD card, booting into ClockworkMod recovery and then installing the ROM directly from there.
• For some reason, it is not documented practically anywhere, but when you plug your phone in over USB to run unrevoked3, your USB mode must be set to charge only.
• When I try to boot into ClockworkMod recovery, for some reason I just get a little picture of the Android bot with an exclamation over his head. Useless. What I finally found is that when I see that, I need to take my battery out quick and put it back in. Then it will boot into ClockworkMod recovery successfully.

Good luck with your own rooting adventures! If you have questions, post them as a comment and I'll try to respond quickly.

Instructions follow for ripping your DVDs so you can watch them on your HTC Aria. These instructions probably work for other Android devices. They should also work for Apple devices, but you should select the appropriate Apple preset for the last step instead of the one I suggest for HTC Aria.

These instructions assume you are using Ubuntu 10.10. If you are using an earlier version, just replace steps 1 & 2 with instructions from the Ubuntu restricted formats doc page.

1. sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
2. sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
3. Install Handbrake
4. Open handbrake
5. Choose your source (mine was sr0, will probabaly autoselect correctly for you)
6. Use preset: Apple > iPhone & iPod Touch (for HTC Aria & probably other Androids)

I'm not an expert on remote desktop access, but I have used quite a few tools over the years including several RDP servers/clients, VNC, ssh with X forwarding. This week I added one more to the list: NoMachine.

NoMachine is absolutely beautiful. They have a paid version, but I am using the free version and it is fully baked and feature complete. Installation was fairly easy. I'll include some notes regarding that below. The server I am connecting to is in my office while I am connecting from home and it is nearly as if I were using a native machine under my desk. It's amazing.

Just for comparison, I decided to try ssh with X forwarding and the result was seconds of lag between clicking and seeing the UI respond. Not to mention that you're only seeing windows for specific applications that you are running, which is far less convenient that having full access to your desktop like you would if you were right there.

NoMachine also does a great job of resizing your screen resolution appropriately to allow you to view in he highest resolution possible for your window. All you have to do is set the Display resolution to "Available area" when you configure the connection.

One other thing I like about NoMachine is that you can disconnect to a session and reconnect to it later, allowing you to leave programs open and come back to them later exactly as they were. Open sessions are managed on the server so you can reconnect to an existing session from a client other than the client which initiated the session.

Installation notes on Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit

• Go to http://www.nomachine.com/download-package.php?Prod_Id=2247 and download all three deb packages (client, node and server)

For the server...

• Install a dependency that isn't automatically resolved for some reason: sudo apt-get install libaudiofile0
• Install the packages exactly in this order:
  • sudo dpkg -i nxclient_3.4.0-7_x86_64.deb
  • sudo dpkg -i nxnode_3.4.0-14_x86_64.deb
  • sudo dpkg -i nxserver_3.4.0-14_x86_64.deb

Next you need to install the client on any client machines. You won't need to install the node or server packages on clients. On Ubuntu, the client is available in the standard package sources so you can just run "sudo apt-get install nxclient" and then connect.

Of course, see www.nomachine.com for more information or in case any of my links are outdated by the time you read this.

Enjoy NoMachine! It really is great!

For many years, Linux has crushed the competition in full computers that fit in your pocket or on a key chain. Okay, so I'm being a bit deceitful in my wording. But it's still mostly true. Many Linux distributions provide "Live" images. A "Live" image is basically a bootable CD containing a full operating system and pre-installed software packages. In the case of a CD, the CD basically acts as a read-only hard drive with a bootable partition.

However, what has really made this neat are thumb drives. Not only is a thumb drive easier to carry around than a CD, but it is writable. With the capacity to write, there are now live images that will allow you to modify the image and save data when you are booted into the image. The result is that you can virtually pack your entire PC with all your personal applications and data onto a tiny thumb drive and take it anywhere you want to go. In my case, if I'm visiting my parents several hundred miles, there is no need to take my computer. I can just take my thumb drive to morph their computer into my own.

How To Make Your Own "Thumb PC"

Thankfully, I'm not inventing anything here. Setting up your own "Thumb PC" is super easy. My distribution of choice is Ubuntu so my instructions will use that.

• Go to the Ubuntu download page and download the distribution of your choice.
• On that same page, step 2, choose "USB stick" and your OS and click "Show Me How". You will be presented with all the tools and instructions you need.
• When creating the USB stick, be sure to choose to allocate space on the USB stick for persistence of documents and settings.
• Step 3 on that same page tells you how to boot from the USB stick. Some older computers are not capable of booting from a USB stick. You'll basically hit ESC or some F-key right when your computer boots to enter into boot options or to edit your bios. Once here, you will choose to boot from your USB stick, which might be called a USB Hard Drive.
• Once booted in, you can install programs, create files, or whatever you want, and it will be persisted to the thumb drive. It's pretty slick.

There are two downsides of booting from a USB stick. First, your space is limited. You can actually connect to any hard drives in the host PC once you are booted, but any files you save there won't be available when you go to another PC, so that would defeat the purpose of this method. Therefore, you'll want to keep it light. Only install/download what you need. You probably don't want to load this thing up with music and videos. But hey, maybe you have a huge USB stick and have plenty of room!

The second downside is speed. Reading and writing to/from a USB stick is quite a bit slower than a nice SATA disk drive or solid state drive. In particular, I notice that my PC boots quite slow. Once it is booted up, I notice slowness on occasion, particularly with I/O intensive activities, but I don't actually notice it most of the time. Common stuff like browsing the web is a snap.

Using your "Thumb PC" For Rescuing Data

On a side note, you can use your Thumb PC to rescue someone's computer. Let's say they've had something wacky go wrong with their computer and they are unable to boot. You may still be able to boot using your USB stick, mount their hard drive and access the data. If you're feeling a bit more devious, you can use this to access unencrypted data on a password-protected PC.

Other Storage Mediums

On the horizon, USB 3.0 is coming and should improve speeds dramatically. You may also be able to use E-SATA or Firewire devices, but I've never tried this (don't own any) so I really don't know if you can do that.