access to root on the G1

Well the G1 has been rooted, access via Telnet from my Powerbook G4 to the coorisponding telnetd activated on the G1 via a neat little application named pTerminal.

Here is the lowdown, I must warn everybody, root is "hidden" for a reason so be carefull and don't make *any* modifications that could break the G1 and leave you with a $100/month paper weight.

PTerminal is available for download from the Android Market and can apparently be used to start a telnet connection on your G1 which can then be accessed from your PC - giving you root access to the device.

According to my sources, the instructions are as follows:

1. Turn on your phone’s WiFi. This gives your phone an IP you can reach it at.
2. Get to a command prompt on your device by using the PTerminal application from the Android Market. (adb shell does not seem to work with these instructions, telnetd does not start up)
3. cd system
4. cd bin
5. telnetd
6. netstat (get your phones IP), for some reason this did not work for me so I got the IP address from my settings Icon>Wireless controls>Wi-Fi settings
   
7. telnet into your phone’s IP from your computer
   
8. you now have root!

Whether a new ‘over the air’ update fixes this potential bug remains to be seen, but it might be a good idea to disable Over The Air updates if you decide to test this method.

5 worst things about G1

5 worst things about G1:

1
I don't care what anybody says the gPhone is Google's Beta phone, and the consumers are its Beta testers, fortunately the typical consumer of this type of device is more likely to fix its bugs than not. The iPhone, alternatively came out with a well crafted hardware device out the gate and has had time to mature and flesh itself out and keep the Beta testing to the Apple experts and its price point testing to the consumers.


2
Lacks applications, not really the fault of the gPhone, its just hard to develop for a hardware platform that is emulated and not real. The applications it does have need to be debugged better and should be screened for malicious wares since it is a free for all marketplace. This is where Apple's Market tariff of 30% could be arguable as justified, but with the "I am Rich" application slipping past their QA guard or the fire-walling of interesting, but competing, applications destroys the investment value of the 30% tax.


3
Battery Life sucks, but to the HTC's credit the battery is interchangeable. Thank you Apple for making it easier for us to make better decisions concerning non-removable, proprietary changing of lithium Ion batteries. At least its good to know that HTC thinks we have enough brains to swap out batteries by our selves. Battery life can be improved.


4
I have heard of the G1 has a lack of modem tethering and the 1gb cap, but I think I heard this was the ISP T-Mobile's call, while it this is not bad for the Android environment as it is fully capable of being programmed to allow tethering, etc. But when you deal with the ISP, (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.) T-Mobile seems the best current choice since I passed their credit check with my FICO score in the low 600's and AT&T wanted some ridicules deposit to hold in their coffers for a "limited time" to prove my worthiness to their snobby iPhone "bitch plan". To AT&T I middle finger salute your offer and go with the German firm, T-Mobile.

I can't say I like the contract for 2 years and a $200 per line early termination "fee", but when you choosing between the lesser of two evils, at least currently until the networking options are sorted out, that is the current price of doing business.


5
Remote removal of code by Google, yeah its open. Why this would be a bad thing for the Gods are the same reason that makes it a good thing for the mere mortals. It levels the playing field, Now its a developers race. Gentlemen, start your Sdk/Eclipse engines? The real question is can *you* harden this open box of Pandora before anybody else does this for you.

High Expectations For Android

The great battle of the cellphones.   iPhone vs./ Android (gPhone).   This is a big deal for both companies both Apple and Google.   Each company has advantages and disadvantages attached to them.   Slashdot has a great link on the story.

Apple, well, put their iPhone on the market.   Its a slick phone, with touch screen capabilities and a sweet GUI interface.   Actually a nice phone.   But it has some serious fatal flaws attached.

First off, Apple mandates AT&T as the sole service provider, yes the same AT&T that has a monitoring station in San Francisco for the Government ease dropping program.   AT&T mandated the need for social security numbers just to activate one.   In addition to the insane initial price of the phone itself $600, a 2 year minimum contract was required, figure at least $100 a month for 24 months...$2,400 + $600 = $3,000 total.   I call bullshit on that.

Also, initially there was no SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iPhone.   Well, now there is but the insanity of the Non-Disclosure agreement prohibits any other developer from advising or helping further the development of this platform.   Are they serious?!?

The iPhone has been hacked only to be patched to turn the hacked iPhone into a bricked $600 paper weight.

Apple, did some very bone-headed maneuvers with the iPhone, but they have a real phone on the market.   A phone that I have absolutely no desire to have.

Don't get me wrong, I love Apple's products.   I have a PowerBook G4 (PPC) that I have had virtually zero downtime with and a MacBook (Intel) that, aside from a Battery Bug with Leopard that does not charge my battery.   Works very well.

But, even with their newer systems like the Mac Air, altho beautiful, lacks an optical drive and has only one USB port!?!   But I digress, back to the showdown between Apple and Google.

What does Google have to bring to the table?   Well, nothing, but virtually something...the Android platform.   Yeah, they don't have a phone, they have many phones that only need to be Linux compatible.   Google, is smart, they have a actual open OS available to any and all that care enough to develop for it, literally any way they choose.  Hell they even put prize money out to sway developers.

Now, I will be the first to say that Google is not just being altruistic, they are in business to make more money, just like Apple, but the main difference is this they are smarter about how they approach business.  They know enough to give a little to get a little.

Google's Android debuts at Mobile World Congress

This is Android

Real Android powered phone demo

This is cool, proof of concept for Android...





And on the old ARM

Linux is just an OS!

Skills with the Operating System, and how-to with Linux is what is at stake. The penguin certainly has a hold of the hacker community and for all the right reasons. I would say that all things being equal I would think of Lenovo from IBM. Just to be on the safe side for utility. (http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/)

Mac is nice, no doubt, I would certainly love to have their solid-state Mac Air. I am "disappointed" that their is no optical drive, no RJ-45 wired port and no non-proprietary battery.

I am already boycotting Apple's stupid iPhone because of the AT&T arrangement. gPhone is the winner in my book, hands down. A cell phone device, would be the only computer one would need for specialty operations, it runs Linux...nuff said.

Android, Mobile Device Emulator

Android is the platform for the gPhone. The gPhone is Google's own Linux compatible, hardware platform. The device is not available to the public, yet, but the emulator allows programs to be written and tested be for the actual release of the gPhone itself.

Android, of course, is the complete solution for cellular phone services and specialized applications. This has the power of Linux on a cellular device, that trumps the iPhone, hands down.

I would trust Google to engineer this right, the first time. Since they have the stance of playing the field of cellular business, but not an actual "player" in the cellular business, meaning, they do not have any biases or ties, like Apple does with AT&T.

Google is offering a reward for applications developed under their Android system. It is very nice but still lacks in demonstrating very key features.


And now the downside...

• No support for placing or receiving actual phone calls. You can simulate phone calls (placed and received) through the emulator console, however.
• No support for USB connections
• No support for camera/video capture (input).
• No support for audio input (capture). Output (playback) is supported.
• No support for device-attached headphones
• No support for determining connected state
• No support for determining battery charge level and AC charging state
• No support for determining SD card insert/eject
• No support for Bluetooth

But the upside, rocks.

---

Knoppix on a USB

Check this link out. Knoppix on USB thumb-drives are fully bootable and operational computer systems that kick arse. This makes analyzing a new machine easier and less prone to mss-analysis when analyzing code from a compromised operating system on the machine.

Since thumb-drives are nicer than bootable CDs, less cumbersome and re-writable and now have insane memory capacity. I would put this on a 8 gig thumb-drive, 2 gigs for the Operating System (more than what it needs) and 6 gigs for "everything else". I guess I will always carry a CD-R just in case.

We are going to build Android development USBs on Knoppix memory-sticks, with full encryption.

The Weapon of Choice...

Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later (x86 only)
------------------------------------------
Apple is, in our opinion, the best commercial alternative, their shift to the Intel chip-set makes (with some minor configuration) OS X, usable on other Intel PC devices. Leopard, makes modern Macs a Uber Hacker elite just by having such a beautiful and elegant tool.

• I got a 250 GIG drive for it, now trying to get my hands on Leopard 10.5.1
• I got 2 GIGs of RAM.
• 150 gig harddrive space allocated to OS X
• I will have 100 gig for temp media storage
  

This is important.

I would love to get the Mac Air, but Wi-Fi only access would not fly with the amount of utility required for major operations. and no optical drive?!? WTF!!! The battery....?

But you can't argue with its elegance, slim grace, and look. Its a beauty to behold, don't bring it to dirty parties, only black tie affairs.

The real deal is leopard, that cat is hard to get a collar for.

Dan Morrill builds a simple application on Android platform

I just saw Dan Morrill's video on Youtube. He does a fairly good job explaining how-to program a simple application on the gPhone emulator.

Of course, the possibilities are endless, and the portability of J2ME devices would be seamless. Java is the, more intelligent, weapon of choice for this platform and Google has its own classes designed for the gPhone.

I am looking forward to more videos like this, specifically in relation to the OpenGL capabilities with this platform. I am sure some very wicked interfaces can be designed and enhanced upon to give it all the glitz and glamour of the iPhone with the full scale raw power of a Linux based smart phone.

Our Black Beauty, (intel) Mac-Book will be repaired and installed with Leopard ready to commit to some full scale Eclipse development. I would love to explore this for networked gaming possibilities, with the built-in capabilities of the device's GPS (global positioning system).

EEtimes Speculates on The Initial gPhone details

I would encourage the majority of our readers to take a look at the detail link for the gPhone device. Android, of course, will be the platform of choice and the capability to port Java applications over to it makes it a nice segway into becoming a standard for the cellphone market.

If this does not show Google as a major player in the cellphone market I am unsure what will. Google had their eye on the spectrum market, and made the auction a level playing field as much as it could. Well, for the billionaires that could afford the minimum bid of about 4 billion.

I am excited to see where this is going and what we can do with this technology.

Google's gPhone coming in February!?!

When I got the word on this, I couldn't contain myself. This will give us a base of code that we can be relatively assured of working. With Google's "summer of code" and the colossus resources at their disposal its small wonder they are able to get this out early.

Gentlemen, install your SDKs, and get ready to rock. With hardware units specifically designed to utilize Google's gPhone platform, this will allow pretty much everybody to program just about anything one can imagine. In the immortal words of Han Solo, "I can imagine quite allot".

Having a platform like this rocks...

Android (Java code)

The code will, be in the Java tounge. The Objects will make our develompent very easy, and ready made.

Truth be known. we should start our GUI code right away

/* the GUI Graphical User Interface code */
/* */
import java.applet.Applet;
import java.awt.*;

...the rest of the code

Android Set Up...

Ok, here is the first step, download the Android SDK, its freely available.

http://code.google.com/android/download.html

Also it is advisable to also download the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called Eclipse, while it is not the only "option" out there some of the truly old school types can roll-there-own using emacs or vi as a text editor and maybe configuring by hand the Java path.

Here is the download link for Eclipse

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/


There is a plug-in that is required to develop Android under Eclipse

http://code.google.com/android/intro/installing.html

I myself can verify it installs and works correctly on MacBook (Intel) for both the Eclipse IDE, the Android plug-in and Android SDK.

On Windows it should install easily, but I do not have a Windows machine and cannot verify this.

On Linux, I am not sure, but if it installs on the Mac it should install on Linux platforms as well.

Google's Andriod

We are going to go into Google's Android development in developing games. It's a very powerful system which includes its own Operating System, middle ware and surface applications. By our understanding this wins hands down over Symbian and Windows CE for the very fact that it is a open-sourced software platform that is capable of being placed on any linux based handset phone and is capable of incorporating the hardware features within the chip set of the phone devices.

This is very cool.

The fact that it is capable of utilizing hardware on the handset it is installed upon gives it great flexibility and capability limited only by the hardware it is on.

The official language is Java, using the Sun compiler, but it can also be developed at the lowest levels in C/C++ giving it added granular flexibility to modify the lowest levels of the Android Operating System.

I would like Python to be used as one of the primary languages to develop this in. With direct access to the graphics acceleration and even low levels of the device (bluetooth, WiFi, etc.) This will make for a power.
One of the more inreging features is the fact that it is capable of OpenGL and