Sunday, February 5, 2012

My New N9. The Half-Cooked Distro


I like my N900 very much, I mean not many people can go around spawn a shell on their palms right?  Sadly althought in my humble opinion N900 is the best thing a phone can offer (fully total control on the phone, straight forward cross compiling like u did on your normal nix unlike the other linux


However it is regret to say that every  awesome stuff in the world have it's own Achilles Heel . (The memory is small, the stock speed of the CPU is only 600Mhz, and the usb female charger port is always on the loose).


So I decided to give myself an upgrade to N9. the Supposely to be the successor for N900. with 1Ghz Proc and 1 Gig Ram should have some deep impact right?

So here is the Pros and COns for N9.

  1. It`s Faster, Amoled
  2. Multitouch all u need is a swipe.
Now here`s the Bad thing ...

1. Half Ass Cooked OS
The moment u enabled Developer mode. U realise that the Phone is bundled with Half-Ass determination unlike the N900. Default repo is worst. U didn`t even have the basic unzip package is not available. CMS tool such as svn and git are borked . It's much better to compile everything  yourself rather then finding the correct Repo.

2. Limited root even in a developer mode. 

This is most likely due to Aegis Security Framework dat is similliar towards SE-Linux. But possess a lot of problem. Any unsigned binary dat did n `t registered with Aegis won`t be executed. Or any code-execution that required root privileged such as raw socket won`t be able to done. Ping is accepted since it's in the Aegis Whitelist. Luckily it was not dat much hassle . There are few tricks u can do ..

-  Using Taviso http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Oct/257 (Find the allowed suid ) 
-  Flash the firmware back and then apply the open-mode patch. http://maemo.cloud-7.de/HARM/N9/openmode_kernel_PR1.1/

3. No external mmc slot and using microsim instead of normal sim.. (Defakkk?)

So there you go my review on N9. It's really a superb phone that will be abandoned by its maker but not it`s user.