Journal smartfart's Journal: Nokia 770: subtle bug causing continous reboots
A couple of months ago I bought a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, along with a gigabye flash card and Stowaway bluetooth keyboard. I've basically enjoyed it, and took it to YAPC so all my friends from #perl could drool over it.
Never having owned any type of PDA (I know, the 770 isn't an actual PDA, but stick with me here), it's taken me a while to get used to the squint form-factor. Also the Stowaway isn't layed out very well, and some of the common keystrokes are a bit awkward, but I must admit it's way easier to type on that than to hunt-and-peck on the tablet itself.
Anyhow, about a week back I finally got around to upgrading the OS to 2006-final, but the device got stuck in perpetual-reboot mode. The upgrade when fine, but after an hour or so of adding applications and doing random customizations, things would start acting strange, and upon rebooting, the boot-statusbar would make it 2/3 of the way across the screen, and the unit would reboot. Again. And again. And...
It took me until tonight to figure out exactly what the problem was. Early on I figured out that once I gained root, the problem would start. Until I actually logged on as root, everything worked fine. Flashing the device always got me back to square one. Not knowing any better, I even wrote the author of becomeroot, thinking that I'd permanently messed something up by running his script, which came with a warning about "bricking" the device.
The culprit? It turns out that logging in as root was harmless, but one of the first things I'd do after becoming root was to change my default shell from "/bin/sh" to "/usr/bin/bash", after issuing the command "which bash" to determine the correct path. The bash .deb placed bash in "/usr/bin/bash", but /etc/shells lists "/bin/bash" as the path for bash. I had read comments on the web about reboot cycles occasionally being caused by the X-server not finding what it wants, and also something about X relying on the shell settings. Incidentally, I was not able to boot to the console after running "/flasher-2.0 --boot -R" on my SuSE box... maybe it doesn't work that way? Also, "/flasher-2.0 --set-rd-flags=no-lifeguard-reset" made the status bar go all the way across the screen, but after that all I saw was a white background.
I guess my next step is to add an entry for the actual location of the bash executable to /etc/shells to see if I that fixes the problem and allows me to change my default shell. If not, I'll put something in ~/.profile to start bash for me (right now I'm doing it manually). Oddly, that file doesn't exist, but /root/.profile does.
Never having owned any type of PDA (I know, the 770 isn't an actual PDA, but stick with me here), it's taken me a while to get used to the squint form-factor. Also the Stowaway isn't layed out very well, and some of the common keystrokes are a bit awkward, but I must admit it's way easier to type on that than to hunt-and-peck on the tablet itself.
Anyhow, about a week back I finally got around to upgrading the OS to 2006-final, but the device got stuck in perpetual-reboot mode. The upgrade when fine, but after an hour or so of adding applications and doing random customizations, things would start acting strange, and upon rebooting, the boot-statusbar would make it 2/3 of the way across the screen, and the unit would reboot. Again. And again. And...
It took me until tonight to figure out exactly what the problem was. Early on I figured out that once I gained root, the problem would start. Until I actually logged on as root, everything worked fine. Flashing the device always got me back to square one. Not knowing any better, I even wrote the author of becomeroot, thinking that I'd permanently messed something up by running his script, which came with a warning about "bricking" the device.
The culprit? It turns out that logging in as root was harmless, but one of the first things I'd do after becoming root was to change my default shell from "/bin/sh" to "/usr/bin/bash", after issuing the command "which bash" to determine the correct path. The bash
I guess my next step is to add an entry for the actual location of the bash executable to
