On 2008He, to connect:

1) plug it in, it has to use tons of juice to find network, or
2) repeat connect once, it usually catch on the 2nd time
3) simply wait for a few minute, it will catch

bun

Sbrsh for maemo 2.x == broken. Solution: Upgrade to 2007HE.

802.11n kills wifi in 2007HE. Fix? None, and there never will be.

Complete bs. You can shove your unsupported 770 up your ***.

That sounds like an extreme form of the body-shielding technique, which does actually work (see posts in this thread and others). The technique sounds daft, but is based on perfectly sound Physics. Your body absorbs microwaves, including wifi signals. If you stand close to your router, your own signal will penetrate the body-shielding, but more distant signals will not. If you are lucky, that will exclude all n-type signals and allow you to connect to your own b/g.

In my apartment building there are at least 30 AP's within range of Nokia 770 and N800. Body-shielding reduces that to three, including my own. I can connect 100% of the time. If either of my two closest neighbours were to install an n router, I probably would not succeed any more with the 770.

Theoretically, any large piece of unfrozen meat should do just as well as your body. However, you are more likely to have your body available when you want to connect wifi. Clothing does not interfere with the process and is advised for avoiding smudges on your screen.

2.4 GHz portable phones also interfere with your wifi connection. They are even worse than n routers, in that they will break an existing connection. This is a problem for high-end laptops as well as for Nokia 770.

Mer v0.16 is also free from this problem. Since Mer runs on the same kernel as OS2008HE, there might be hope of fixing OS2008HE. I do not have the skills to do it myself, but I have written to Stskeeps to see whether he could help.

Apologies to moderators for adding the same post to two different threads. It's hard to know which forum this topic belongs to. Evidence from OS2005 and Mer shows that it is not a 770 hardware problem. It is a firmware problem of OS2006, 2007HE and 2008HE. In the absence of forums for the HE's, maybe it belongs here.

did not have wireless-tools installed in my 770 with OS2007HE, after downloading and installing from http://mulliner.org/nokia770/
(Bora), WEP did worked flawlessly, have to be root although.

surprisingly, it now connects from anywhere. I'm happy.

Side note: as I messed up by running the script above without
iwconfig been installed, got to delete the /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 192.168.1.1 (my router). In order to make the
contorsionist body shielding act to get internet and download
the wireless-tools and for the nokia 770 to be as it was before.

This is most likely a software problem, my guess is that it has to
do with resolv.conf nameserver config. as the problem behavior is
indistinguishable when down.

QUOTE: Originally Posted by LaVorAta View Post
You can shove your unsupported 770 up your ***.

If Steve read your post before facing the reporters, that would save Apple 4.5 million$ of the Apple shield. And with the way Steve does business, he is not going to just talk about it, he WILL show you.

bun

It's not a case of "most likely". The problem very definitely lies in the system software of OS2006, 2007HE and 2008HE. (Sorry if my previous post did not make this clear. I followed Nokia's usage in referring to the system software as "firmware", contrary to the IEEE definition. Most other members of this forum also follow Nokia's usage.)

As noted in the previous post, OS2005 and Mer v0.16 are free from this problem. Success with Mer shows that the problem lies in the rootfs of OS2008HE (and presumably the rootfs of OS2006 and OS2007HE), since everything except the rootfs is the same for Mer as it is for OS2008HE.

The wiki says that Mer-0.16 is experimental on the 770, but it is actually quite usable for certain purposes. It depends on what you want to do and how urgently you want to do it. Suppose you have to catch a flight in the morning, and a web check-in beforehand will ensure an easier time at the airport. If your hotel wifi uses b/g/n, you will not be able to connect using OS2008HE. Body shielding will not help, because anything that blocks out the n signal will also block out the b/g. This is a time when Mer can be useful. If you have brought an MMC partitioned between Mer and swap, and your bootmenu is set up appropriately, you can switch MMC's and do your check-in.

[Web check-in can be done on a BT -> GPRS connection, but wifi is much preferable. Most airlines set a time limit for completing the procedure. On a slow connection, there is a good chance that you will exceed the time limit and have to start over, unless you really know your way around the website. Mer can be frustrating on the 770 (see next 3 paragraphs), but Mer+wifi is a big improvement over OS2008HE+GPRS for this type of procedure. Similar considerations apply to purchasing tickets, changing reservations etc.]

For basic internet purposes (browser and email), the frustrating thing about Mer on 770 is the long time it takes to boot up (2 min 45 sec)*, to connect (1 min to connect with a hidden, previously saved AP), and to open applications (1 min 35 sec for Tear, 21 sec for Claws Mail).

Once in a while the boot gets stuck, so that you have to remove the battery and start again. Occasionally the boot is complete, but the CPU load remains stuck at the maximum (load-applet is built in); in this case, everything will be extremely slow until you reboot.

Claws Mail is a full-size version displayed on a 10 cm screen, and everything is very tiny; this is also true for several installable apps such as the Text Editor. On the onscreen keyboard, toggling between lower-case and upper-case is very slow, and the "stroke" technique does not work. Display dimming/switchoff are set at 30sec/60sec, and there is no obvious way to change this setting. Your device will go a little crazy if you leave it in "Normal" mode without connecting to a network (the battery will drain, even if the cover is on); you have to put it in "Offline" mode when you don't want to be connected.

If you can put up with these irritations, there are a lot of good things about Mer. The Tear browser and Claws Mail are fast and work well, once they have opened up. There is an excellent version of X-Terminal built in, much better than anything available for Maemo before OS2008. A number of things that don't show up in the GUI can be done at the command line. For example, contrary to reports elsewhere, FBReader is available for Mer on 770. It has to be installed with apt-get and invoked from X-Term. Once invoked, FBReader's own GUI takes over and it all works; its library responds to the stylus better than in any version of FBReader for Maemo that I have seen.

*(It takes about 1 min 30 sec for the progress bar to cross the screen during the boot. Then there is about 1 min when the screen displays the Mer theme and nothing else. Sometimes, as noted above, the boot fails to proceed beyond this point. Until you have booted a few times and grown used to the 1 min pause, it seems that the boot always gets stuck. However, it does proceed to completion if you wait, at least 9 times out of 10.)


People keep writing about "contortions" in connection with the body shielding. I wish I knew what they meant. Do you perform contortions when you buckle your belt? Body shielding uses about the same posture. All you have to do is to hold the front of the 770 against your (clothed) abdomen, with your hands covering as much as possible of the sides and back. Your wife and kids might giggle if they see you, because it looks dopey. But then, we all look dopey when we stare intently at a tiny screen, so what's the difference?

[EDIT: It doesn't matter whether you hold the front or the back of the device against the bulk of your body, so long as you cover the rest as much as possible with your hands. In either case, using OS2008HE, the search in my apartment finds my own AP and two others, and I can connect. If I hold the 770 with fingertips against my bulk (not covering with hands), no connections are available. Doing the same test with N800, covering with bulk+hands also blocks out all but my AP and the same two others; bulk+fingertips leads to my own and six others. Presumably one of the extra four is n-type and causes the search to fail in 2008HE.]

You also have to develop a knack for the timing, since you can't see the screen during the search. When there has been enough time for the search, you must act quickly to initiate the connection and then immediately shield again. Some people might find it awkward or unnatural to combine patience and swiftness in this way. It still falls far short of "contortions".

thanks scaler. I didn't realize mer .16 existed. I've had 2005 loaded for a year now but . . . no decent apps, so I'm going to try it out and maybe my nokia 770 wont be a useless brick anymore! :-)

You can get a tarball for it from http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Releases/0.16 . The 770 version is at the very bottom of the page. Most browsers make a peculiar twitch upwards when you go that far down, concealing the link almost immediately. You can prevent that by placing your cursor over the link in the brief time when it is visible.

The installation instructions are all right in general, although I didn't follow them exactly. I don't use wget or the latest bootmenu app (wget takes up too much space in the 770's internal flash when you have 2008HE installed). Instead, I used a PC to download the tarball into the MMC in a card reader. For the bootmenu, I'm still happy with Fanoush's original initfs_flasher, using vi to edit the bootmenu.conf.

[EDIT: I might not be remembering correctly how I downloaded. I might possibly have downloaded to Shared Folders on the Windows PC and copied it from there to the MMC in the 770 via wifi. Or I might have copied it via a USB thumb drive - the 770 is flashed to persistent host mode, so that it behaves like a computer instead of a $7 card reader.]

There is one error in the instructions. I believe that you ought to cd out of /mnt/mer before unmounting it.

It turns out that you have to untar the tarball on the 770 itself. When I did it on the PC (with MMC in the card reader), mer would not boot on the 770.

I assume that gtar will work on the 770. I am still using the old explosive osso-tar that has disappeared from the repositories.

Good luck with mer. I can't honestly promise that it will be much fun. It does fill a specific need though, if you urgently want to connect your 770 to wifi.

scaler i had no problem putting on wget with 2008he there is plenty of room, wget is small. My problem is that it took me a few days of downloads to finally finish the 150 meg download, the nokia under 2008HE is kind of erratic. Also I suggest commenting out "swap" on partition 2 of your mmc2 in the listed instructions, it makes the nokia freeze even more especially given that the tarball and download take so long.

I dont know where you found something to read an MMC card those are kind of obsolete at this time.

If you can't connect the 770 to wifi what the heck good is it, that's what it was built for!

still not sure mer 0.16 is the best, might go back to 2005 just cause its quicker