Secret Documents Showing Psion Ltd. at Work.
First, A Petition:
PsionTeklogix has released a new version of the netBook called the "netBook Pro"
with upgraded hardware. The operating system (OS) for this machine is to be "Win CE.net"
(a version of MS Windows for PDAs) only. This has EPOC afficionados like me grumbling, and
some have started to lobby PsionTeklogix to add a Symbian EPOC OS as an option for the
new netBook. I'm supporting a petition to ask PsionTeklogix to include a Symbian OS version
of their new netBook Pro machine. You can find out more (and sign up if you
wish) here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/nbookpro/petition.html. It is certainly
true that PsionTeklogix is unaware of the strength of support for the EPOC
OS - the more people that complain about the plans, the more chance we'll get
a Symbian OS option for the new netBook.
These are a set of notes on using my Malaysian NetBook. Some of these notes were posted first at the NetBook mail list. Some of these notes are for my own reference, but perhaps you may find them useful too. I have also posted here a number of software applications and fixes that you may find useful.
Secret Documents Showing Psion Ltd. at Work.
I won an auction on e-bay for my Malaysian netbook. It was sent by UPS express delivery and arrived from Singapore in 2 days.
As described by others, the package was basically a UPS bag with all of the bits dumped into it with little regard to packing. The netbooks are meant to be rugged, however. It came with an unlabeled CD-ROM with a copy of the psion software on it, a 64 MB compactflash disk with the infamous OS.img, and a powersupply with an astonishing collection of transformers and adapters to convert Malaysian power/outlets to US power/outlets. The various power adapters did not connect too well, so I ended up having to tape the whole 5lb arrangement tightly together to keep it from shorting. The backup lithium cell CR2032 had expired.
I had to verify that the latest os.img did not work, and it did not. I tried truncating the new os.img to be the number of lines of the old os.img, on the theory that perhaps the boot loader is looking for only X MB of OS. I tried copying the first 20 lines of the old OS over the first 20 lines of the new OS - all to no avail. The OS version I have is Version 1.05(281) (Release 158).
Note that the dos partition on the compactflash has to be set as bootable for the Psion to recognize or find the OS.img file.
The netbook has 32 MB of RAM, of which 14MB becomes ROM for the OS and the remaining 18 MB becomes available to the user for new software, etc. The netBook motherboard has 16MB on board, and the so-called personality module has another 16MB RAM, plus some flash ROM which stores the bootloader. The 32MB expansion DIMM just has 32MB RAM.
I think that's all. In short I'm happy, in spite of the nuances of the Malaysian netbooks. (I never expect a warranty from anything I get on e-bay....). Note that these Malaysian NetBooks might be obtained from expansys.com, and also from Sita Shop. Sita Shop also has a wide variety of parts and accessories for the netBook; I've not heard any complaints about ordering from them, but I've not done so myself.
I have installed a Debian linux system on the netbook (www.openpsion.org). Linux on the netbook works fine (and is fabulous for the 5MX, if I do say so myself), although power control is lacking. Kernels are available for 32 and 64MB of memory, and OS.img files for linux are available. See the linux HOWTO for the netbook at www.openpsion.org. In fact, I now normally use Debian linux on my netBook!
I found that my DELL 1150 TrueMobile wireless networking pcmcia card (lucent/hermes) worked without a problem. You can see the status of the wireless networking using the netstatrf package - see "Other Software" below. Ethernet seems quite slow, however. I read somewhere that the Dacom gold LAN eithernet cards have a smc91c9x chip on them, so as an experiment I got a SMC etherez pc card from e-bay (a $12.50 experiment) - this did NOT work, though it looks like it tried. Apparently LAN cards draw considerable power, so perhaps the netbook cannot provide this card with quite enough power. Does anyone know of a cheap clone of the Dacom ethernet cards that would work? Added later: It appears that the Psion driver only works for the Dacom Combine IT Gold Card, and only for the combined modem + ethernet card; the Dacom ethernet card alone does not work. The combined card is VERY expensive - over $200!
I also have the Psion IR 56K travel modem, and this worked without any problems either (that I've noticed). It does seem to freeze up at irregular intervals when I am using it, which is very annoying.
I put in a 512MB Viking compactflash card - more space than I know what to do with, for once. [But see "Compactflash Comments" below.]
I got a 15V, 2A Toshiba notebook power adapter (PA2438U) from e-bay that works fine ($10 including shipping, what a deal!), although I had to rewire/solder-up the netbook's 15V plug. It appears that the Psion uses the RadioShack Adaptaplug "C" - which is 4.75 mm O.D. and 1.75 mm I.D., and 1 cm long.
See "Colorgraphic VGA PC Card" below.
I picked up a 32 MB expansion DIMM from SRS in Frankfurt. Seems to be a nice company with the best prices for these DIMMs even if they don't take credit cards.
I tried to get a Psion Dacom v34+fax and Ethernet card to work. "Gold Card, Multifunction PC Card". This did not work, however - neither modem nor ethernet. I think this is a "classic" gold card. (The card was indeed functional - both ethernet and modem worked in linux.) A $7.50 e-bay experiment, oh well...
I gather that the netBooks screen eventually gets scratched up, so that people sell screen protectors. The "pen" pointer is apparently fairly rough on the screen, so using one's finger nail is recommended. The screen protectors apparently are just clear transparencies cut to fit over the netBook screen. I cut one of these out, sizing it to be just a little larger than the screen. It fits in the gap between the screen and the frame nicely and seems to work pretty well - I don't even know it is there. I can now change it out every 10,000 miles...
I've learned a number of nuances about compactflash cards, some the hard way, so I thought I'd summarize what I've learned here.
It seems that not all compactflash cards can be used to boot up the netBook with the OS.img file. I seem to find that about half of the cards I have don't work for this purpose, so I have to be a little careful to have the OS.img file on a CF card that works o.k. I have a 16 MB Kingston card and a 128 MB Memorex card that don't work for this purpose (if I recall correctly). The CF card that came with my malaybook ("Digimaster"?) and my Viking CF cards do seem to work for booting up the OS.img kernel. Once booted up, all these cards work fine - all data accessible, writable, etc., they just don't all work to boot up the OS.img file.
Various rumours have circulated concerning how to get CF cards to work for booting the OS.img file. Someone suggested that the answer is that the: "CF should be formatted as FAT12, and the OS.IMG should be the first file on the card"; I've tested this on one of my non-working CF cards, and it did not work. Others have suggested that "the partition has to be made "bootable" (in DOS parlance, "active")". I've tested this on one of my non-working CF cards, and it did not work (I had to use the linux cfdisk to make the partition bootable). Others have suggested that "the backup battery has to be removed before the OS.img will boot off the CF". I've tested this on one of my non-working CF cards, and it did not work. You get the idea...some of these tricks may indeed work for your card, but not all CF cards are going to work. Viking CF cards have worked for me.
The 512 MB Viking CF card I bragged about above seems to have developed a fault of some sort - I keep getting disk errors/disk corrupt to the point that I won't use it any more. I got it to work for a while longer by reformatting it and checking for bad blocks, but it has failed again. It would be wise to check CF cards for bad blocks when reformatting to be safe - using the linux "mkdosfs" command use the "-c" option for checking (and flagging) bad blocks. Better to learn at the initial formatting that you have a problem, than to find out you have a corrupt disk, you've lost all your data, and you are on the road and can't fix or salvage anything! [And don't forget to do backups!] In any case, I'll stick with the Viking cards - they seem to function well, and I have had no troubles with my 128 MB card.
There is an interesting web page at http://www.pscience5.net/Hints_Tips/Compact_Flash.htm that talks about the trade off between optimizing storage space and speed on CF disks. Basically, by tweeking the configuration of your MSDOS filesystem you can squeeze more data onto your CF disk, or you can speed up access to your data on your CF. But the two are at cross purposes - you can't have your cake and eat it too! I became interested in this because my 128 MB and 512 MB CF disks seemed to take forever to access in some situations (e.g., "Save As" or "Load File" in some applications). The basic optimization is to set the number of sectors-per-cluster when the partition is first formatted. If I understand things right, all IDE disks, CF included, are organized by cylinders, heads, and sectors. DOS filesystems are organized into clusters, and a certain number of sectors (must be a factor of 2, i.e., 8, 16, 32, etc) go into making a cluster. Since each bit of data takes up a cluster, the more sectors per cluster the disk has, the more sectors are wasted when small bits of data are stored - a large number of sectors per cluster means you'll be able to store less data on your CF disk. But you'll be able to access the data faster. For my 128 MB and 512 MB disks, I found that 32 sectors per cluster made my disks work much faster. The larger disks also work better as FAT16, rather than the default FAT12 - see the link above. All told, the linux command: "mkdosfs -c -F 16 -s 32 /dev/sda1" checked for bad blocks, set FAT16, and used 32 sectors per cluster on the /dev/sda1 partition (the first and only partition on the CF disk). [Windoze people reading this are on their own, 'cause I don't know!] The result was CF disks that worked much faster - yay!
I suppose another optimization might be to set the more primitive sector size (of the cylinders/heads/sectors geometry on the disk) when the disk is first formatted. But I've not messed around with this.
I installed an alpha version of mindterm from www.psionteklogix.com - this is an java-based ssh terminal to allow secure connections over ethernet. You have to register and login to get it, but it is free. This was an old version, however (1.2?), and I found a new java version from www.appgate.com (version 2.3.1) that supports ssh/scp/sftp, ssh2, and compression. This is free. I got this to work with the alpha version of mindterm by: (1) placing the MINDTERM.JAR file in c:\system\java\ext (where you will find the v. 1.2 *.jar file - which you can delete) and (2) changing c:\system\apps\mt\mt.txt to have the single line "com.mindbright.application.MindTerm -cp MINDTERM.jar". VERY nice! Platform independence - who'd a thunk it? Mindterm 2.3.1 has a scp feature, one of the things that syossh lacks. After logging in to the remote computer with mindterm, you can select "plugins", then "scp" to copy things back and forth. It seems to take forever to give a directory listing, but it works o.k. (it is what I use for desktop connectivity...) This same java application works great in windows too.
A better plain ssh terminal is syossh. This is pretty much alpha code, with not anywhere near as many features as mindterm (e.g. no scp). It is much faster, however. Mindterm is a java thing - it creeps along. Syossh works fine with WLAN - the wlan is set up through the control panel, so if networking works (e.g. opera), then syossh should work. A couple of hints though:
I installed XTM, a package that emulates a (very) old XT machine - 80186 cpu and (M)CGA graphics. I used DR DOS/Caldera DOS for it, but any version of DOS will do, as will ELKS, or ELKS distribution archive the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset. XTM is not OS specific - it just emulates the instruction set of the hardware, much like vmware. XTM is rather amusing for a start - one can run the old DOS games. It also lets me run an early version of MATLAB (v. 3.5 - I have the student edition which can be found via Amazon for around $15.). I can obtained a copy of the CGA version of Leisure Suit Larry, version 1; I got this to work in monochrone using the FORCECGA.COM program below. Apparently, the game (and other software) has trouble detecting that only CGA is available - because XTM has a slightly more advanced MCGA graphics. So the game tries to use the EGA graphics driver - giving junk on the screen. This happened with matlab as well, but I solved that by copying the CGA driver over the EGA driver - faking the system out (which did not work for LSL). The hardware it emulates is rather limiting, however. N.B.: With XTM running, the Psion's cpu is running continuously, so that it will run the battery down fairly quickly.
I made my DOS boot disk for XTM by installing DR DOS (which uses 3 floppy disks) into a vmware virtual computer. Once installed, I made the boot disk by executing "format a: /s", then editing some of the files on the newly made a: system. The image of this floppy disk becomes the boot disk for XTM. With linux, this is "dd if=/dev/fd0 of=XTMBootDisk.img", and then transfer XTMBootDisk.img to the NetBook for XTM to boot off of. XTM can easily be set up to access the NetBook's C: or D: drives.
There are apparently a number of applications that use CGA graphics, but that fail to detect the MCGA graphics capability as CGA graphics. Leisure Suit Larry 1 is one of these, as is matlab. The XTM people sent me a very small program that will set the bios of the XTM machine to be CGA graphics only, so running this will allow programs that fail to detect the graphics "card" properly to run. The program is FORCECGA.COM (49B, yes very small), which I post here for convenience.
Among the things that will run on XTM are: qbasic 4.5, BC-FORTRAN77 version b FORTRAN compiler, Windows 3.0, and a variety of unix tools ported to 16-bit DOS (tar, zip, gzip, awk, etc.) - all of these are free (including Windows 3.0 that can be downloaded from HERE). Also check out a similar product by POCKETDOS - at http://www.pocketdos.com/. The POCKETDOS website has links to a number of useful applications. Can't get colour and the mouse working on your virtual Windows 3.0 machine? Sorry - there is no hope there...see the reply from the XTM people.
Incidentally, the VGA version of Leisure Suit Larry 1 (3.3 MB version) will also run in XTM, with mouse support even. I guess it is old enough, and MCGA is general enough, that it manages to work.
I tried to get the VGA adapter from colorgraphic (check out: EPOC Presentations), but it looks like the pc card version is no longer available. I was not able to find a place to buy these anywhere online. The compactflash version is not supported by EPOC, alas - which it ought to be! Has anyone actually tried the compactflash VGA in the NetBook? I have such a strong suspicion that it would work fine in the Netbook with the PC Card VGA driver, and perhaps a PCMCIA adapter.
I snagged a Voyager VGA PC Card on e-bay; it works fine in my Malaysian netbook. These cards seem to appear at regular intervals on e-bay, selling for $35-$50.
Curiously, the vga driver downloaded from Colorgraphic was old v. 1.00(010) - a more uptodate one was from www.psionteklogix.com v. 1.00(013) which had some very useful additional features [This link will work, but you have to have set up a free account with them, let them set cookies, etc It is free, however.]. It says something about colorgraphic's intentions with EPOC if their own driver is out of date... (And I wonder if the ethernet driver from teklogix might also be more uptodate.) Should this driver become no longer available from the link above, so I take the liberty of posting vgasuite.zip here.
The VGA card has 800x600 and 640x480 resolutions - and both modes require slides of 256 colors. These modes both worked fine for showing things on the monitor, as well as through a projector. The 800x600 mode only works with the SlideVGA application, and for only showing *.pcx or *.bmp files. The 640x480 mode works when the NetBook's screen is displayed - in this mode you can use a variety of things to show material: Opera (including animated gifs!), MBMView (inc. slideshow), Pdf+, etc. I've not figured out a way to make *.pcx's on the NetBook - but Sketch can be used together with MBMView (and other similar things) to make *.bmp's. *.pcx slides are preferable, seems to me, because they are smaller. Bitmap images could be made from Word files by: (1) put together the slide as you want it, (2) removing the sliding bars and tool icons, and (3) making a screen shot of the Word document ("<Ctrl><Fn><Shift><s>"). This will make an MBM snapshot of the screen that you can convert to a BMP (or possibly PCX) slide for viewing using, e.g., MBMView. Alas, the developer of MBMView has passed away and it can no longer be purchased. My trial license has also expired and it won't work anymore for me. There are programs such as IMGTRANS.EXE which can be used to convert between formats from a shell. The best available option at the moment may be nconvert, which can make pcx files.
Slides of size 800x600 can be made on the NetBook using Sketch - just resize the
sketch. The VGA software automatically, and with negligible delay, converts
between 800x600 resolution and 640x480 during a presentation, so the higher resolution is
not essential. Exported MBM files can then be converted to pcx using nconvert (maybe...I've
not tried this yet. Slides in 800x600 mode can also be made elsewhere and transferred
to the NetBook. I've finally decided that the best way to do this is to make the *.pcx
files from postscript files (being a linux user) using ghostscript:
I use 100 dpi, and make my postscript figures be 8"x6". You can view your new pcx file by: "gs -- viewpcx.ps $1".gs -sDEVICE=pcx256 -dQUIET -r100 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -g800x600 -sOutputFile=$1.pcx -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH $1.ps
You can make 8"X6" figures is matlab by such commands as:
So that then 'print -dpcx256 filename.pcx' creates a 256 color pcx figure on 8"x6" paper. But you'd be better off writing postscript, and then converting it as above for resolution of 100 and 800x600 images.figure(1) set(gcf,'PaperUnits','inches') set(gcf,'PaperSize',[8 6]) set(gcf,'PaperPosition',[0 0 8 6])
Why on earth, *.pcx files???? Why not jpegs? or gifs? What were they thinking??? I think perhaps the thought was that PCX is one of the oldest image types around, so would have the most tools for it...but they were wrong.
The uptodate driver from teklogix gives the option of manually scrolling through these slides, as opposed to requiring an automated slideshow.
I think that's all - it is a nice solution that I think will work well for me.
It is pretty nifty to use any of the various mapping programs together with a GPS device to get exact positioning as one moves around. This has been handy when hiking and when driving around in unfamiliar neighborhoods. It is also handy to just have the maps in the netBook, even without the GPS.
I started out using a Magellan 315 handheld GPS device that connected to the netBook using the serial line. This requires a null modem adapter for the serial line, although I eventually soldered together my own connector. For the mapping software, I used RealMaps by Kevin Millican. (The RealMaps site also shows you the connections needed to wire your own GPS serial cable.) This arrangement works rather well, but one has to have the handheld GPS dangling from the netBook all the time, and one has to worry about the batteries in the GPS device.
A recent discussion on PsionPlace made it apparent that compactflash GPS devices will work on the netBook. This stands to reason because the GPS devices are just communicating over the serial port to dump their NMEA strings, and such serial ports are the same as those on a modem. The netBook sees the GPS devices as merely serial port modems, and PCMCIA modems are indeed supported.
With that inference, I picked up a GlobalSat BC-307 compactflash GPS device on e-bay (for not that much). This package came with a PCMCIA adapter and an external antenna. The PCMCIA compactflash adapter is, to the best of my knowledge, just a straightthrough connector - I don't think there are any electronics in it. You can find a nice table of GPS devices, their properties and links for more information at GPS Passion. Beware of "Win-GPS" devices like the Pretec "CompactGPS-LP" - these are not complete GPS devices, but rely on the PDA's cpu for things. As such, "Win-GPS" devices need a proper driver that will work with the OS, and such drivers are not available for the netBook. ("Win-GPS" devices are similar to "Winmodems".) These GPS devices may be the only example of things other than compactflash disks and pcmcia modems/ethernet that work in the netBook's PCMCIA slot.
I initially tested my new compactflash GPS starting up COMMS, selecting the PC Card serial port and setting 4800 baud rate. This produced a nice set of NMEA strings at 1 second intervals as expected. It initially took several minutes for the GPS to lock on to the satelites. This is expected because the GPS device doesn't know where it is initially. The device should then save the information of about where it is, so that the next time it is started up it won't take so long. I am told, however, that these devices have a small rechargable battery inside (or capacitor?) that can go flat if it is left out of the PDA for long. If the battery is flat, leaving the device in the netBook for a time will recharge this battery and allow the GPS device to start remembering things again.
Kevin M. of RealMaps replied to an inquiry that the next version of RealMaps, v. 5.13, will have support for CompactFlash GPS, and gave me a link to a preliminary version of this package: RealMaps v.5.13. This is working so well that I am now wracked with guilt and will have to register this shareware...
You can download US topographic maps for use with realmaps from: Terraserver, which also tells you the essential lat, lon at the corners of the map. You can use a graphics package like gimp or photoshop to piece together larger maps from the smaller ones. You will need the program "bmconv" to convert the *.bmp files to *.mbm files for use with Realmaps. I make it available here for convenience. BMCONV will run in linux using the wine windows emulator - "wine bmconv image.mbm /c8image.bmp" is the rather odd command (for a unix user) to convert *.bmp files to *.mbm files.
The netBook would seem to be an nice aid to astronomical observations. Good computation power and great battery life. I find the screen to be a little too bright, even with the brightness turned way down. This can be solved by getting some "red acetate", or a red colored transparency film. I found a 20"X24" sheet from the University Bookstore art supply area for $2.60. A piece sized 18.5 cm X 12.3 cm will just fit over the netBook's screen in the gap between the screen and the frame. This works fabulously. (I normally use a clear transparency sheet of the same size to protect the screen.)
There is a variety of programs for astronomical predictions, star charts, etc. available on the web. Some are commercial, some are not. The best is probably Solun (try a google search), although I find the java version to be a little sluggish. None of these programs has quite the detail I would like to see for finding things in the sky - I may resort to making bitmap images from a desktop planetarium program ahead of time for viewing later in the field on the netbook.
One of the more useful applications is to show the locations of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. There is a java program called "The Planets" at Castle Point Astronomy Club that runs on the netBook. It is java, however and rather sluggish - and not quite tuned up for the netBook browser/screen. Still it is useful.
I ran across a QBASIC/DOS application called satsat2.bas at Dan Bruton's Saturn Events that was interesting. At first I ported it to the MCGA graphics for the XTM emulator. BASIC seemed so similar to OPL, that I then spent an amusing few days porting it to EPOC/ER5. This has eventually worked rather well [when I was just polishing it up the first time, my compactflash disk became totally corrupted and I lost almost the whole thing...make backups!!!] - see the screenshot. You can download this code for EPOC from SatSat.zip. You'll have to compile this code using your OPL Program but that should be simple. It is set up to make an application on the EXTRAS bar - comment out the top few lines to make a local *.opl program. See the REAME in the package.
I've developed SatSat into a package consisting of (a) an Orrery (planet locations - screenshot), (b) Jupiter's moons (screenshot), (c) Saturn's moons (screenshot), and (d) the Sun/Earth/Moon System (screenshot). It's still under development, but it does show the relative locations of the planets, moons, etc. and animates their motions. You can check it out by downloading a pre-alpha version: Orbits.distrib.zip (264 KB; 512 KB unpacked) It works fine; but needs more development. Last updated October 5, 2003 (moon phases/bug fixes).
The status of the wireless networking, card type, etc. can be viewed using the netstatrf package from teklogix - it is in the "Optional Components" zipfile under the Spanish, German, French OS downloads. For convenience, I post netstatrf.sis here for easy download. This supports Lucent WaveLan and Orinoco "radios".
To edit plain text files (e.g., mt.txt of the mindterm package, or c:\system\data\hosts) I installed the EPOC text editor from Symbian.com. There are some other very useful bits of software there as well - I've just noticed javasweep, which I now know I need...
The trial version of Opera 5 did seem to work faster than the original Opera. I may have to buy some software afterall...I'll wait to see how the OS.img issue shakes out. The webpage mobileopera has loads of hint on using opera.
Probably the best unix-type shell application I've found for the netBook is epocemx. This application was originally designed for compiling code. It comes with a shell that allows processes on the netBook to be killed - ever have a runaway process you wanted to stop, but you didn't want to hit the reset button? Does your memory usage slowly creep up and you wonder why? The shell also has free versions of zip/unzip, gzip/gunzip, and tar. It also has the ability to make links. And of course the gcc compiler. Sis installation packages can be found on their download site. This shell beats out Psion's eshell and shell5 in my book!
Perl and Python have been ported to EPOC - you can download them from Olaf Flebbe's webpage (both perl and python) or http://dales.rmplc.co.uk/Duncan/PyPsion.htm(python). There is even an httpd daemon for EPOC written in perl at http://utopia.knoware.nl/~hlub/uck/rlwrap/ - it crashes on the netBook if you don't comment out the useless line 125 "delete $ENV{$var};" (put a # in front of it). This daemon lets you run CGI scripts on the netBook.
Abiword is a free wysiwyg word processor for linux that will import Psion Word files directly. It is similar to Corel's WordPerfect.
I finally figured out how to get the ftpserver to work on EPOC for transferring files between my linux desktop and the netBook. It is straightforward to set up this ftpserver over wireless, or, alternatively, after getting TCP/IP set up start up ftpserver. It should report the TCP/IP number of the netbook that is used by WiFi on the top bar of the server, and this number will be used to ftp into from the desktop. The linux ftp will work fine, BUT the ftpserver does not support a "passive" connection which is the linux default (for security reasons). Therefore after establishing the ftp connection, you must enter "passive" [or just "pass"] to toggle passive off. Then it should work fine. An alternate to ftp is wget: "wget ftp://netbook.IP.number/d/documents/afile.txt" will download "afile.txt" from the D:\Documents directory of the netbook. For convenience, I include version 1.0 of ftpserver.zip here, but check the above link for the latest versions. N.B.: This server has no security whatsoever - please use it only locally and temporarily!
You can pick up a free (trial???) version of 2ConnectU from www.2kdevelopment.cz, although it is in the Czech language (go to "download"). This package lets you browse your netBook from your PC's web browser - with autoconversion for many of the psion-specific files (agenda, word, etc.). It has download and upload capabilities - the package is quite nice actually. As I said, everything is in Czech, but it is still quite functional if you follow your nose. One used to be able to buy this package from handango.com, but it is no longer available. Bits of this were used to develop the ftpserver package above. You don't have to install anything on the PC, except the browser, of course, and it works over ethernet (e.g., WiFi). (2ConnectU apparently also acts as an ftpserver as well!)
I installed eshell, which can be used to launch applications from a console, e.g., java or perl applications. You can download this from HERE; it seems to have vanished from Symbian (or moved at least). The link gives you a *.sis for installation. When I first got it, it was an *.exe file that did not have a way to launch it from the toolbar. It is easy to launch such applications from the toolbar, however - I give you an opl program that will do that for any application (but it is set up for eshell.exe): eshell.txt. Here is an mbm icon that you can use with it: konsole32.mbm. Epocemx is a better shell, however.
It is easy to change the wallpaper to get rid of the One-Ed wallpaper (menu, preferences)
You can view the Z: drive (ROM) of the NetBook by hitting <Ctrl><n>. This will give you a "New File" window - enter Z:\junk as the file name. You will then get an "access denied" complaint (Z: is read only), but you'll then be in the Z: drive. Browse around to your heart's content; <Ctrl><q> to view a different disk.
A link to a listing of all the NetBook's special keys: Special Keys. The pipe key "|" is <Fnc><\>.
These programs are provided here for convenience. I have not written any of them, but post them here because some of them can be difficult to find. But you can probably find them by searching on google.
