Hi all,
This is going to be a longish post about the still transition in GNOME 3 and simultaneously ongoing GNOME 3.2 transitions.
First of all, a happy Dusshera to all. I hope this festive season brings lot of happiness to all of you.
Now lemme update a bit about my Nokia C2-03. As I said in my last post I am still in discovery mode of this Nokia Series 40 phone. One of the things I found was by going to Menu > Settings > Device >
Device updates > Current sw details and coming across this :-
v06.52
29-07-11
RM-702
(c) Nokia
This told me that my Nokia phone is a 6th generation of a Nokia Series 40 phone. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find much about the differences between the generations within the Series 40 platform. There is an entry about Series 40 on Wikipedia but as can be seen its pretty parse. I am also unhappy though about the state of affairs of Nokia maps v1.0 as there is no data with the phone. I wish there was a way to download say Pune map or any other map offline and put it in the memory card to use later. If you look at the press datasheet you would get a different idea.
Anyways, while I was looking at all this, fortunately or unfortunately at that time my ADSL provider BSNL started playing hookey with me so my broadband was shut off for 3 weeks. While I could live without Debian updates for 3 weeks but not being unable to access my mail was not something I relished. Before buying the phone I had heard that one could check mail and browse Internet on the Series 40 phones but had taken with the pinch of salt.
Lo and behold my surprise when I started to fiddle and was able to check my mail through my IDEA SIM card via GPRS . Although why I haven’t been able to use my BSNL SIM to do the same is still a mystery to me (it’s a Dual SIM phone for those who came in late). In Gmail both the phone numbers/sim cards have been authenticated.
With Gmail one of the reasons I like it is due to the ability to see something like 10 odd sessions so it was nice to know that the mobile client (Ovi mail perhaps ?) the whole thing as an IMAP. One of the more interesting things it did when I was doing it firstly was that it told me it didn’t have end-to-end encryption which means I could be a victim of a MIM (man in the middle) attack. Fortunately I am no biggie so don’t think anybody would try that but was good for it to tell me about the end-to-end bit.
One of the other interesting and odd thing seemed was that it said that I was doing surfing from the U.S. of A. A little bit of digging revealed that the IP taken for the session is something that is assigned to Nokia America.
$ whois 67.220.123.36
#
# Query terms are ambiguous. The query is assumed to be:
# "n 67.220.123.36"
#
# Use "?" to get help.
#
#
# The following results may also be obtained via:
# http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=67.220.123.36?showDetails=true&showARIN=false&ext=netref2
#
Nokia QTS-67-220-123-0-26 (NET-67-220-123-0-1) 67.220.123.0 – 67.220.123.63
Quality Technology Services, LLC. QTS-67-220-96-0-19 (NET-67-220-96-0-1) 67.220.96.0 – 67.220.127.255
#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use
# available at: https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html
#
The above IP Address is one which was assigned to me a day or two ago for some 5 minutes. It was/is interesting to see how much Nokia has provisioned itself on IPv4 stack for network connectivity. I do wonder if any of their phones/tablets also speak IPv6 as well or not, for surely in a year or two it would become a bit more harder as more and more people start using devices as these to connect to the net.
I am still puzzled though as to why I am able to check my mail through the IDEA SIM (SIM 2) even though it’s on the easy swap slot and not BSNL which is the main SIM. BSNL is generous as giving 1 GB free with every new connection while IDEA doesn’t have anything like that. Also checking mail on the IDEA SIM card can quickly become expensive. The error I get whenever I try to check mail through BSNL is ‘Authorization required’. That is cryptic, authorization from whom? Either BSNL with Gmail or BSNL with Nokia or what ?
I have to say that apart from that browsing the web using BSNL is good, the downer here is the small display size 240 x 320 pixels, 2.6 inches which in many a way is at least 4 times bigger than my old phone so cannot really complain.
The other dampener on the phone, if I could call it that is the Nokia browser. The Nokia browser version listed is 1.0.1.2.1.8.4 . While the browser is good enough to show me all the richness in webpages I have yet to see a way to download/save any files and save them in the memory card rather than on the limited device memory.
It’s also claimed to support handwriting recognition but haven’t either seen an app. for it nor was a stylus given as is usually given for phones which have recognition built-in, just don’t know.
All in all, while I’m happy with the purchase it still needs a bit of work.
Anyways, back to the desktop base. When my broadband connection came back I was half-expecting that at least the two big transitions which are holding GNOME 3 would have been done in unstable, libnautilus3 and libpanel3 would be done, but as can be seen both are still holding.
While I was a bit unsure about panel3 having made the cut as it is a huge transition I was expecting nautilus 3 to have made the cut. Unfortunately both hadn’t moved much. The only thing that has moved is 2 packages which are in unstable in libpanel3. There are now still 47 odd packages which need to do the big transition for gnome-panel3 to make it to unstable. From what little I have experienced, usually even if something like half do the necessary packages have transitioned then usually the main package or/and the library transitions to unstable as well, which makes the other maintainers transition the remain packages quickly otherwise they would be broken.
While I was concerned about the above transition tracking I also did get to know about GNOME 3.2 release. While I was saddened to hear that happen, I was happy to note fpeters didn’t waste time and also added a GNOME 3.2 release webpage.
I do hope that once GNOME 3.0 transition is done, the GNOME 3.2 becomes a more rapid transition.One of the interesting bits I heard sometime back which was again echoed today on IRC was that some of the developers feel for having another channel, a sorta really-experimental channel. Somewhere, for instance they could put up stuff for 3.2 without thinking and bothering about GNOME 3.0 for instance. I guess for lots of packages/softwares which have ‘early release,release often’ as their motto and are in Debian this would be good. The sad part would be it would perhaps thin the attention that ‘experimental’ and ‘unstable’ get. Have really no idea what goes into baking and terming it safe to be put in unstable and then to ‘testing’ and finally making an appearance in the ‘stable’ release apart from probably looking at bugs and taking a call. I’m sure there would be somethings more that would be looked at.
I do wish there was something similar story to share about KDE SC 4.7 which is also going under transition but unfortunately I do not know much about it. The only thing I know is the few KDE packages I have on my system still sport the KDE 4.6 release which means the KDE guys might be in the same limbo. I do know they have a separate repo. as I shared few months ago while talking about the middling of the GNOME 3 transition.
What I also feel clueless about in the whole story is also the non-appearance from Ubuntu side of things. From what I know and have heard the Ubuntu guys have promised to have GNOME 3.0 in 11.10. If that is true, then they should have contributed more to Debian so the delta between us and them remain small and headaches for them are less. From what little Google tells me they do have it in the blueprint and I do remember Martin Pitt (pitti) doing some uploads for GNOME 3 in Debian as well as few by Sebastian Bacher (known as seb128 IIRC on IRC). From what little I see, I see there are 12 other developers in the Ubuntu core/contributor developer hat who are interested/or working to make GNOME 3 a reality in Ubuntu. I wish some of that goodness would flow back to Debian making it better for everyone. Btw, there is Jordi Mallach’s blog post which does talk about installing GNOME 3 through experimental. Jordi Mallach is known as jordi on IRC and is also a part of the Debian-gnome team.
Anyways,hoping to see at least this transitions over soon so people can start wishing to have GNOME 3.2 .
Experiences in the community 