406 Not Acceptable

For sometime N900 users have been wondering whether we would get Maemo 6 (Harmatten.) Whilst everyone wants the latest update on their device, and feels let down when it doesn’t happen; Nokia’s transparency with regards to bug fixes exacerbated the desire for the update. Nokia have labeled many bugs with a ‘To be fixed in Harmatten’, basically saying “live with it” — unless the N900 can be upgraded. So if Nokia do leave the N90 behind it could be a damning blow to many fans.

Earlier this month at MWC Nokia and Intel announced the merger between their two opensource Linux based operating systems. I can only assume this is an attempt to cement the operating system alongside iPhone OS and Android as one of the mainstream smartphone operating systems of the future. Whilst Nokia’s Symbian is still the top selling mobile phone operating system, its days look to be numbered with Apple and Google making a big impact in the market.

Still, I am not sure what position there is in the market for Meego. It is highly likely that we will eventually see just a handfull of sucessful operating systems for smartphones. For example, manufacturers like LG, have noticed that using their own custom systems was detrimental to their phone’s sales. Sure the hardware was good, but what use is it if no-one is making software for it? So Meego will have to fight with Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and eventually Bada for these manufacturers support.

The issue here is Android already has a number of devices from different manufacturers in the market and it looks like support for Android will steadily grow after a difficult first year (when only HTC offered devices.) It would be a difficult choice manufacturers to switch allegiance, but I would expect a few devices to appear (to test the waters so to speak.) Whilst Windows Mobile seems to have a strong grasp of the business market (alongside the Blackberrys.)

It’s such a shame that Nokia have decided to drop Debian as the upstream for their system with this merge. Whilst I’d like to see an updated system, I can’t say I am happy at losing the ability to install Debian packages without any worries.

So I struggle to see where the system will fit in the market; unless Nokia and Intel go for tablets…

The N900 received an update from v2.2009.51.1 to V3.2010.02-08 on the 16th of this month; however, thi update is still not available to owners in the UK. The firmware update is not available via the N900’s application manager nor via Nokia Software Updater.

The N900 software page on Maemo.org only shows PR1.1.1 for the US, the middle east, and ‘global’. The site only offers PR1.1 for UK devices.

Previously, Nokia could hide behind the network operators who like to fill devices with bloatware; which meant the firmware needed extra testing. Often it was down to the operator to release the update, so Nokia were not to blame. However, the N900 was sold without network branding and typically direct from Nokia. So why has this update taken so long to reach the UK? And why is their a Vodaphone only variant for some users?

It looks like the N900 may become a network security/hackers dream phone! First aircrack, now Nmap; hopefully, we can get kismet, metasploit, air-pwn, and friends up and running on the device in the near future.

Installing Nmap is a breeze, the program is located in the extras-testing repository. I believe it is under ‘network’ in the application manager, but it’s faster to simply search for the program. To run this program, you will have to use the X terminal and simply type nmap – the application will then report a LOT of options! It’s best not to try and crash out of a scan on the N900 using CTRL+C as the x terminal will no longer accept any keyboard commands until you close it. I guess that is one reason why Nmap is still in extras-testing!

Here is the result of a basic scan, you don’t need to be root for this one; but you do for a number of options. For a basic scan you simply need to type nmap <target ip> . In the example, I had to use option -PN to find the machine; this treats all hosts as online and doesn’t bother checking if it is alive.

Nmap is typically used to find available ports/machines and the operating system (option -O) before running other tools to attempt to exploit the open ports. It’s also a nice way to check your router is doing what it should be!

For a comphrensive list of the options and more information on how to use Nmap, please see the official manual pages.

I am really starting to love the N900!

I have been playing outside of the maemo repositories and decided to give everyones favourite ’security’ program Aircrack (aircrack-ng) a go. After setting up a debian repository from an official mirror installation was easy via the command line, a simple sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng.

Once installed, you cannot use the program straight away. This is because your wireless card will already be in use, or have been set up for ‘Managed mode’ where the operating system deals with setting up wireless networks. To get out of this, and into Monitor mode, you will need root access and go through the following commands:

root

ifconfig wlan0 down

iwconfig wlan0 mode Monitor

ifconfig wlan0 up

If you wish to use a different mac (useful when doing a fake auth,) go through the same process but instead of setting monitor mode use macchanger (e.g. macchanger mac=11:22:33:44:55:66). You can now use monitor mode and aircrack in all it’s glory! See the following for an injection test:

I crashed out early, due to my battery being on its last legs!

This is the result of a dump, the command used here was airodump-ng wlan0 -c 6

As you can see the N900 captured my WPA handshake, so I could crack my own WPA network; but that would be silly!

Airodump running on the N900: hope you like my faked mac address!

So aircrack looks like it can simply be moved to Maemo-extras (devel or testing.) It just needs more testing to check if inject is really working. My N900 had been up for 48 hours at this point, so didn’t wish to comply with testing

The N900 uses gstreamer, a media system used by many Linux distros and it does support Flac; however, the built in media player is unable to read the Flac/Vorbis tags because it can only read IDV3 tags. This results in all your Flac media being dumped in one folder marked ‘other’. This makes the N900’s media player useless for lossless audio. This can be worked around, but if you plan on putting a lot of music on to the N900, you may want to wait for the tag to be supported.

Basically, what you need to do is get IDV3 (ideally IDV3V2) tags on your Flac media. Now, many tools will not let you do this, as the Flac format is designed to use Vorbis tags; but, the format does also support IDV3 tags! I found that using DBpoweramp, you can set the encoder to use IDV3 tags when dealing with Flac files. So all you have to do is re-encode your Flac media collection, to Flac (yes, that is weird!) and the tags should be automatically changed the IDV3 by DBpoweramp. It should only take 2 minites to ‘encode’ an album, so it won’t take ages to encode enough Flac files to fill the N900!

You can use a tool such as Mp3tag, which states the type of tags used by the file to confirm the changes.

The files should now automatically be indexed by the media player in the N900. This will also work for Canola.