Author: Carl

A Better ARM ChromeBook LAMP Stack based on Crouton and Debian

As an update to my earlier post on this subject, I’m offering this improved version based on Crouton. This approach is Debian-based rather than using Arch Linux, but the result is functionally equivalent.

Read or browse the original post for more context, project goals, and background, or simply follow the steps below.

To set up LAMP on your ARM ChromeBook, follow these steps:

1. Set up developer mode on your ChromeBook

  • Hold down [esc] and [refresh] and tap the power button. This will bring up the scary ‘recovery’ screen.
  • Press [ctrl+d] to go into developer mode (there’s no prompt – you have to know to do it). Note that all local settings and data will be wiped.
  • After the machine reboots into developer mode, you’ll be at the scary ‘not verified’ startup screen.  Wait 30 seconds for it to boot, or press [ctrl+d] to start immediately.

2. Install Crouton

  • Download the Crouton installer to your Downloads directory.
  • Press [ctrl+alt+t] to open a terminal tab.
  • Enter the following commands in your terminal:
    shell
    sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -r wheezy -n debian -t cli-extra
    

    and follow the prompts to install Linux (Debian’s “wheezy” distribution, in this case).

Feel free to explore the Crouton documentation for a lot more detail on using other distributions or installing a graphical environment. In this case, I chose Debian over Ubuntu due to issues with running MySQL in a chroot on Ubuntu – Debian ‘just worked’ for me.

3. Install the LAMP stack

  • Enter the chroot
    sudo enter-chroot

    and install the LAMP stack:

    # update apt-get
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get -f install
    
    # add LAMP components. 
    sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client phpmyadmin
    

    Screenshot of MySQL install screen showing web server integration options.
    Be sure to enable apache integration when installing MySQL as part of your LAMP stack.

    Note that phpmyadmin will set up php and MySQL to work with apache2, so you don’t need to edit any configuration files to get a basic LAMP setup up and running.

4. Add optional components

  • Allow media/content uploads to WordPress
    # Create and set permissions for the default WordPress upload folder
    mkdir -p /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/uploads
    chown www-data:www-data /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/uploads
    
    

    Note: this folder and user is for Debian/Apache2 only.

  • Add sendmail capability
    # Add a mail sender
    sudo apt-get install ssmtp
    
    # Set up ssmtp
    sudo nano /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf 
    

    Replace everything in ssmtp.conf with the following (replace the email address and password with valid gmail credentials):

    root=mygmailusername@gmail.com
    mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
    AuthUser=mygmailusername@gmail.com
    AuthPass=mypassword
    UseSTARTTLS=YES
    
  • Add useful command-line tools
    sudo apt-get install vim git wget curl
    
  • Set up and install WordPress
    1. Create a new database: navigate in your Chrome browser to http://localhost/phpmyadmin (use root + whatever password you specified on the MySQL install to log in). Create a new user (click “users” and add a user – be sure to select the radio button to create a new DB and grant all privileges).

      For example, create a user called ‘wordpress’ with a db called ‘wordpress’ and a generated password. Copy the password for later use, either in the WordPress installer or using wp-cli.

    2. Download the latest WordPress code:
      cd /var/www
      sudo curl http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz | tar xz
      
    3. Navigate to http://localhost/wordpress and complete the WordPress 5 minute install

    Note: If the installer cannot write the WordPress configuration file, you may need to set permissions to the wordpress directory so that apache can write there. In Debian, the apache user is www-data

  • Install wp-cli – makes WordPress setup a snap.
  • If you’re using Annotum 2.0, you also need the php5-xsl module:
    sudo apt-get install php5-xsl
    sudo php5enmod xsl
    sudo service apache2 restart
    

That’s it! You now have a functioning LAMP stack on your ChromeBook, running Debian. Feel free to explore the Crouton documentation for a lot more detail on using other distributions, installing a graphical environment, etc.

Questions? Comments? Please provide your feedback below!

Stand-alone WordPress Development and Deployment using Server2Go

Following is a summary of my lightning talk on Annotum2Go at the August WordPress DC meetup.

Annotum Theme

Open-source WordPress theme for open access scientific publishing

Annotum stand-alone use cases

Server2Go

  • Stand-alone WAMP stack
    • Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP
  • Runs from disk, USB, CD
  • Open-source and free
  • Easily configurable

Important: be sure to set Server2Go to save changes (i.e., non-CD mode) as described here.

http://www.server2go-web.de/ [Donationware]

 Annotum2Go

  • Pre-configured Annotum runtime environment
  • Custom icon, splash screen (‘gold’ level support from Server2Go)
  • Distributed with FireFox Portable for use in “IE-only” environments e.g Government offices
  • Installs and runs without admin privileges in most cases
  • Completely stand-alone – no internet connection required.
  • Tip: to allow your Annotum2Go (or Server2Go) setup to send mail, install Mercury Mail (and see the instructions in this Gist).
  • Download Annotum2Go: https://github.com/Annotum/Annotum/wiki/Downloads

IMPORTANT: This distribution is intended for personal use on a local system only. It has not been checked for security or stability on servers or on systems accessible from the Internet.

Other Platforms

Running a Mac? a Mac version of Annotum2Go available on the Annotum wiki download page (uses MAMP)

Running a Chromebook? Check out this article on installing a LAMP stack on ChromeOS.

No computer (just a browser)? Check out Koding for a free Linux VM in the cloud with in-browser editing and shell access.

Annotum2Go Demo

Download, unzip and run. That’s it!

Annotum is a product of Solvitor LLC with heavy lifting by Crowd Favorite.

Special thanks to: Google, PLoS, NIH/NLM/NCBI, and Automattic.

Annotum is free (speech and beer).

Contact Carl @gcto on twitter or via http://solvitor.com/contact

LAMP Stack on an ARM ChromeBook

UPDATE: Please click here for a new, and better, approach to LAMP on your ARM (or really, any) ChromeBook

tl;dr: Skip to the step by step setup instructions.

This article explains how to get a fully functional LAMP stack running on a Samsung ARM-based ChromeBook.  I’m indebted to many, many sources for pieces of what you’ll find below – please see the “References” section below for a complete list of sources used in this post.

Please note that this article is not for those who wish to boot (or dual-boot) a complete linux distribution on their ARM ChromeBook.  For that, see this post about ChrUbuntu.  There’s also this post about using an ARM ChromeBook as a development platform for Go, for those interested in that.

Background

One of my key projects at present is the Annotum project, a scholarly authoring and publishing platform built on WordPress.  Most of my work is done on a PC. I use git to access the Annotum source code repository on GitHub, a local editor to edit php, css, js, and other files (I use notepad++),  ‘office’ applications such as Excel and Word for documentation, and an image editor for logos and the like (I use Photoshop Elements on my PC).

For WordPress and Annotum development on my PC, I use a handy WAMP stack called Server2Go to run local instances of Apache, MySQL, and php; there’s even a packaged version of Annotum called Annotum2Go that I use for testing and local demos.

So, when I got my new ChromeBook a few weeks ago, I was interested to see how capable this small, light, and very inexpensive machine would be for my daily work.  I loved the simplicity of both the hardware and software – it has great battery life, the performance is fast enough not to be noticeable, and the size and weight remind me of a Macbook Air (at around a quarter of the price). The ChromeBook is truly a joy to use in day-to-day web browsing, email, and other lightweight tasks.  But what about as a software development workstation?

ChromeOS allows me to do much of my work out of the box: I can use Google Docs (or Office Web Apps) instead of Word and Excel, and Pixlr Editor for image editing.  With developer mode enabled, I can even open a shell and edit local files using vim (albeit a very limited, minimal version included with ChromeOS).

I looked around for some browser/Chrome Apps that would edit text, but eventually settled on using VIM. VIM has a steep learning curve, but it is ubiquitous on linux systems and worth learning.  However, as I got into the VIM tutorial, I realized that many of the nicer features of VIM (such as visual mode) are not included in the version compiled with ChromeOS.

On other linux distributions, I’d normally use a  package management system such as apt-get, yum, or emerge, to get a more complete version of VIM installed, but ChromeOS does not include any such tool.  I realized that if I could get a package mangement tool up and running, I could probably get not only VIM and git, but also Apache, MySQL, and PHP as well.  So I set out to make this happen.

After a relatively short period of googling, I hit upon this gist, which is really the key to this whole approach.  Rather than re-partitioning the drive and installing an entire OS including the boot/kernel portion, this approach let me keep all the cool ChromeOS stuff, while still accessing my ‘real’ development toolkit at the same time. I can’t thank chrisavl enough for this!

Project Objectives

  • Retain access to ChromeOS features – run the Chrome browser and all other built in tools and features of ChromeOS
  • Run a complete linux distribution, in particular one with a package management system
  • Add development tools such as the full version of VIM, git, etc. Check out, edit, test, and commit code changes both locally and back to GitHub.
  • Install and run a complete apache/mysql/php/smtp stack locally
  • Install and run a local copy of WordPress

Step-by-step setup instructions

1. Set your ChromeBook to developer mode

  • Hold down [esc] and [refresh] and tap the power button. This will bring up the scary ‘recovery’ screen.
  • Press [ctrl+d] to go into developer mode (there’s no prompt – you have to know to do it). Note that all local settings and data will be wiped.
  • After the machine reboots into developer mode, you’ll be at the scary ‘not verified’ startup screen.  Wait 30 seconds for it to boot, or press [ctrl+d] to start immediately.

2. Set up a local arch linux environment

  • Download http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-imx6-latest.tar.gz
  • Press [ctrl+alt+t] to open the crosh shell, then type the following commands:
shell
cd /usr/local
sudo mkdir arch
sudo chown chronos.chronos arch
cd arch
sudo tar xzvf /home/user/*/Downloads/ArchLinuxARM-imx6-latest.tar.gz .
  • Create a script containing the following commands (you can use vi which is already installed).
vi ~/go_to_arch.sh

Put the following commands into your script:

#!/bin/bash
# go_to_arch.sh - switch from ChromeOS to Arch Linux
if uname -a | grep -q SAMSUNG ; then
 echo "Changing Root to Arch Linux"
 sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /usr/local/arch/etc/resolv.conf
 sudo mount -o bind /dev /usr/local/arch/dev
 sudo mount -t devpts -o rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,mode=620,gid=5 none /usr/local/arch/dev/pts
# link to the chronos home so it's accessible from arch linux
# (including the Downloads folder)
 sudo mount -o bind /home/chronos/user /usr/local/arch/root

 sudo mount -t proc proc /usr/local/arch/proc
 sudo mount -t sysfs sys /usr/local/arch/sys
 sudo chroot /usr/local/arch /bin/bash
 sudo umount /usr/local/arch/dev/pts
 sudo umount /usr/local/arch/dev
 sudo umount /usr/local/arch/proc
 sudo umount /usr/local/arch/sys
 sudo umount /usr/local/arch/root
else
 # don't change to arch linux if it's already running!
 echo "You're already running `uname -a`"
 exit 0
fi
  • Now you can enter arch linux from the ChromeOS terminal shell by typing
. ~/go_to_arch.sh
  • After you run the script, you’ll be running arch linux, and most importantly you’ll have access to the pacman package installer.
  • To exit arch linux, simply type
exit

to get back to the regular ChromeOS shell.

Note: if you want the home directory to be executable (for example, if you will be compiling programs or writing scripts and storing them there), you will want to add a line like the following to your .bashrc file:

sudo mount -i -o remount,exec /home/chronos/user/

See this gist for a more complete .bashrc example that I use.

3. Install the LAMP stack

Install Apache

Before installing any of the LAMP programs, update the package manager:

pacman -Syu

IMPORTANT: If you get errors running pacman, try enabling a different mirror.

Once the update is complete, we can install Apache:

pacman -S apache

Open up the apache configuration file:

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Comment out the unique_id_module (you can use ctrl+w to find it quickly in nano):

#LoadModule unique_id_module modules/mod_unique_id.so

Restart Apache:

 /etc/rc.d/httpd restart

Using Chrome (in another tab than the one running the shell), navigate to http://localhost – which should display an (empty) auto-index directory. Add a sample index page:

nano /srv/http/index.html

Include this text (or whatever you’d like):

<html><head><title>Welcome</title></head>
<body><h2>Hello World!</h2>
Welcome to Arch on ChromeBook!
</body></html>

Navigate to http://localhost/index.html to see the new page.

Install MySQL

pacman -S mysql

Start it up

 rc.d start mysqld

Run the MySQL set up script:

 mysql_secure_installation

Press [enter] when asked for the root password (which isn’t set yet), and enter a new root password if desired. After that it’s easiest just to say Yes to all the options. At the end, MySQL will reload and implement the new changes.

Install PHP

pacman -S php php-apache

Add php to the apache configuration file:

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Paste in this text block within the config.

# Use for PHP 5.x:
LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so
AddHandler php5-script php
Include conf/extra/php5_module.conf

Check the PHP setup with a phpinfo page. Create a new blank file:

 nano /srv/http/info.php

The file should contain:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Save and Exit, then restart apache so that all of the changes take effect:

/etc/rc.d/httpd restart

And finally navigate to http://localhost/info.php to see the result.

IMPORTANT: if you will be installing WordPress (see below), you need to install and enable php-gd:

pacman -S php-gd

Update php.ini to enable gd:

nano /etc/php/php.ini

Uncomment the following line:

extension=gd.so

4. Install phpmyadmin and sSMTP

IMPORTANT: this is all wide open and may be insecure.  This configuration is only appropriate for a local dev system that is appropriately firewalled. Use at your own risk, YMMV, etc.

Install phpmyadmin

Install the phpmyadmin and php-mcrypt packages:

pacman -S phpmyadmin php-mcrypt

Configuration Copy the example configuration file to your httpd configuration directory.

cp /etc/webapps/phpmyadmin/apache.example.conf /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-phpmyadmin.conf

Add the following lines to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

# phpMyAdmin configuration
Include conf/extra/httpd-phpmyadmin.conf

Adjust access rights. To allow access from any host, edit /etc/webapps/phpmyadmin/.htaccess and change

deny from all

into

allow from all

Note security caveat from above!

Enable mysqli and mcrypt (if you want phpMyAdmin internal authentication) modules:

nano /etc/php/php.ini

Uncomment the following lines:

extension=mysqli.so
extension=mcrypt.so

Install sSMTP

sSMTP is a simple mail transfer agent or MTA – it will send, but not receive mail.  I install it so that my WordPress installation can send mail (Annotum relies on email notifications for some workflow features).

These steps will enable sending mail via a Gmail account using sSMTP

pacman -S ssmtp

 

nano /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

Comment out everything, and add the following lines (thanks, Tombuntu!):

root=mygmailusername@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
AuthUser=mygmailusername@gmail.com
AuthPass=mypassword
UseSTARTTLS=YES

Test sSMTP by sending a test message:

ssmtp recipient_email@example.com

To: recipient_email@example.com

From: myemailaddress@gmail.com
Subject: test email

hello world!

Note the blank line after the Subject, and finish with a [ctrl+d] to send. Check to see that you received the email.  Note that the from address in the received email can be modified via the instructions found on this page (search for “Change the ‘From’ text”).  Note that there are various other configuration options on that page, but I didn’t find any of them (apart from editing the ssmtp.conf file) to be necessary to get up and running on my ChromeBook.

5. Install and run WordPress

Create a database by navigating to http://localhost/phpmyadmin and logging in with ‘root’ and the password you created for the root user above.  Click on ‘users’, ‘add a user’, name it, click the button to generate a password, and finally check the box to  create a new database with the same name and grant all privileges. Copy the generated password for later use.

Once the db is created, get the latest WordPress:

cd ~
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
mv wordpress /srv/http

Navigate to http://localhost/wordpress and follow the prompts, first to create a configuration file, then entering the database information. Use the database and user names you created in phpmyadmin, and ‘localhost’ for the server. Finally, paste in the generated password.

Follow the rest of the WordPress installation, and soon you should be able to log into your new WordPress site on ChromeOS!

If you set up sSMTP correctly, you should also get an email at the address you gave for the admin user.

Note: if you cannot select different image sizes when attaching media to posts (e.g. you only see an option for “Full Size” and no “thumbnail” or “medium”) make sure you have installed and enabled php-gd as described above.

6. (optional) Install other tools using pacman

I use VIM and Git, so I install them with

pacman -S git vim

7. Finishing up

For my implementation, I like to manually start and stop apache and mysql, so I wrote this easy pair of scripts to do that:

#startem.sh - starts Apache and MySQL
rc.d start mysqld
/etc/rc.d/httpd restart

 

#stopem.sh - stops Apache and MySQL
rc.d stop mysqld
/etc/rc.d/httpd stop

References

Many, many thanks to the creators and maintainers of the following resources, without which this page would not exist.

Questions, comments? Please contact me @gcto, comment here, or use the contact form above.

Happy LAMPing!

Archiving Changed Files in Git

Intro – Back to the Command Line

Believe it or not my favorite operating system was always VMS (later, OpenVMS), partly because of the clear and elegant online HELP facility, and partly due to the clear and elegant DCL command language.  I’ve used various flavors of Unix/Linux, including AIX, but while I got my work done, somehow I never quite got the hang of the MAN page format.  HELP in VMS always provides numerous examples and I found it much easier to wrap my head around them than the arcane lists of parameters favored on the *ix platforms.

In my current work, we’re using git for source control.  Git is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that is used on a wide variety of proprietary and open-source projects including the massive Linux kernel.  For more on why we like Git, please see the article “Why Git is better than X” (where X is any non-DVCS system).  Github.com is a very nice hosted git service with many features — issue tracking and wiki among them — that make for a very nice set of software development tools.

Most people using git on windows use the freely-available msysgit.  It has some GUI tools, but is mostly a command-line implementation, and that command-line is the same bash shell that is used on most linux systems.  Thus, I find myself back in the world of command-line interfaces for much of my day-to-day work — and I have to say that I am finding a lot of power and utility in the command line version.  And unlike back in my VMS days, I can find help in a lot more places than from MAN pages — with Google, I can simply search for a string, and immediately have several examples to use to learn a particular feature or function.

By the way, to learn more about git, try the Pro Git book (free online but please donate to the author if you like and use it).  You can also refer to these instructions for getting started with git and Github.com.

Files in the Cloud

This week we moved all of our graphics to the cloud — storage on RackSpace’s Cloud Files service and content delivery via a content delivery network (CDN).  We put all the images in a separate git repository (or ‘repo’ as the kids say), and can check in (‘commit’) versions as we add and change images.  Thus, we can deploy new images to cloud storage without changing the web code, and make the images available on the CDN.  A side benefit is that at scale, all image serving is kept off of the main web servers, leaving more performance capacity for the actual web traffic.

As I was setting this up, I quickly discovered the git archive command, which creates a nice zip or tar archive of files in your repository.  However, I wasn’t able to create an archive containing only the changes — what files were new or changed since the last deployment?  Right now, we have only a few hundred images and I could easily deploy the whole set each time, but that seemed both wasteful and risky — in a production system, I only like to change what needs to be changed, sort of a ‘minimally-invasive’ deployment strategy for software.

So after many Google searches, and much experimentation on the command line, I came up with the following process:

Initial Deployment

  • Commit your images to git. When you are ready to deploy, create a tag (I use tag names like “FirstDeployToCDN” but use what you like). Create an archive of the entire repository based on the tag:

$git archive --format tar -o FirstDeployToCDN.tar FirstDeployToCDN

This says to do the following:

  • git archive —format tar — Create an archive using the ‘tar’ format
  • -o FirstDeployToCDN.tar — Call the archive FirstDeployToCDN.tar
  • FirstDeployToCDN — Create the archive based on what is in the FirstDeployToCDN tag

In other words, this command creates a file called FirstDeployToCDN.tar containing all the files in FirstDeployToCDN tag.

Tip: if you want the archive name to contain a datestamp, you can use a command line trick to insert a formatted date string.  The bash ‘date’ command can be used with a format string, and you can insert those results in another command using the back-tick delimeters “`” (backwards apostrophe), to wit:

$git archive --format tar -o FirstDeployToCDN-`date +%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%Z`.tar FirstDeployToCDN

This would create a file called something like  FirstDeployToCDN-2010-08-26-2010-08-28T1114EDT.tar, which is a mouthful, but also contains info about when it was created.

  • Anyway, once you have your archive file, you can back it up, or extract the files to your server or staging area, then copy the files to the CDN/Cloud storage location.  For the RackSpace Cloud Files service, I find FireUploader to be very effective and efficient.

Uploading Changes (the point of this article)

  • Make changes to, add, and remove images, commiting as you go.  When you are ready to deploy an incremental set of images, you need to commit everything, adding a tag if you wish.  Remember, you want the changes since the last deployment (i.e., since that last tag, in our case FirstDeployToCDN).  The current state of commited files is represented in git by “HEAD”, so here’s the command I use to pull out the changes since the FirstDeployToCDN tag
$git archive --format tar -o cdn-diff-FirstDeployToCDN-`date +%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%Z`.tar HEAD `git diff FirstDeployToCDN --name-only`

So what’s this command all about?  Let’s break it down:

  • git archive —format tar — Ok, we’re creating a tar-format archive from git
  • -o cdn-diff-FirstDeployToCDN-`date +%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%Z`.tar — The output file will be called ‘cdn-diff-” plus the name of our prior tag, plus the current timestamp including timezone, plus the “.tar” extension.
  • HEAD — this says we’re pulling files out of the current latest commit in the current branch — the latest updates
  • `git diff FirstDeployToCDN –name-only` — this is a bit more command-line trickery, delimited with back-ticks (backwards apostrophes — ` not ‘).  This says, “Git, please give me a list of all changes between the current repository state (aka HEAD) and the set of files represented by the git tag FirstDeployToCDN” — that is, the changed and added files.  That list is, in turn, passed to the git archive command as a list of files to put in the archive.
  • So now you have a new file, called something like cdn-diff-since-FirstDeployToCDN-2010-08-28T1215EDT.tar.  It contains all the changed and added files since the FirstDeployToCDN tag, as of  August 28 at 12:15 EDT.

Final Notes

Of course this is a lot of typing, so I’ve created a script to handle most of this.  Please note that the script needs to be run from within your CDN repository, and assumes you have committed everything so that you want a diff between the specified tag and HEAD.  No warranty implied, as is, use at your own risk, YMMV, comments and suggestions welcome.

# make-cdn-deployment-file.sh
#
# Creates a dated tar file archive containing all changes between HEAD and
# a specified a git tag.
# If this code works, it is Copyright 2010 Carl Leubsdorf, Jr., Solvitor.com ► Problem Solved.
# If not, author is unknown.
#

if [[  -n $1 ]]; then

    TAG=$1

else

    echo "usage: $0 TAG-NAME"

    exit

fi

echo "Creating archive file for changes since tag $TAG

Archive Name: cdn-diff-$TAG-`date +%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%Z`.tar

Files:

`git diff $TAG --name-only`

"

git archive --format tar -o cdn-diff-$TAG-`date +%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%Z`.tar HEAD `git diff $TAG --name-only`

 

BlackBerry 9700 + OS 6 = More to love

Some time ago, I posted on Tumblr about my love/hate relationship with my new BlackBerry 9700. I loved the phone (as a telephone — for actually making calls), the email, calendar, and contacts integration, and the form factor (fits into a pocket easily; durable).

I was not, however, enamored of two things, to wit:

The browser is just terrible. To be fixed in version 6.0 of the OS, but we shall see.
The Blackberry App Store experience is pretty horrendous.

I’ve recently installed several different leaked versions of BlackBerry OS 6 — the same OS that will come on the new BB 9780 as well as showing up on the new Torch touchscreen BB. OS 6 brings a tremendously-improved, WebKit based browser, as well as a snappier, smoother interface and updated applications.

My first few experiences with OS 6 were a bit flaky — SocialScope links didn’t work, for example, due to an OS bug with context menus — but even with that the other improvements made the 9700 feel like a brand new device. [Note: SocialScope is a fantastic Twitter/FaceBook/FourSquare client for BB. It’s still in beta but I have some invites available as of this writing if anyone’s interested.]

But with the recent 6.0.0.380 release, the context menu bug was gone, and 6.0.0.418 has meant an even greater improvement — faster browsing, fewer random errors, and the memory leaks and battery drain issues of earlier releases seem to be gone.

I should caveat that updating your BB device OS, particularly with a leaked, unofficial version, is not for the faint of heart. It can brick the device. It can cause you to lose all of your data. Strange and horrible things may occur. So, it makes sense to take some precautions before trying an update:

  • Check out the forum postings on the update. You can read others’ experiences with the update and decide if the benefits outweigh the risks. The version I’m using has some bugs reported, but most posters say it is working fine and a distinct improvement over the 380 release.
  • Carefully review the information on updating an OS
  • Use AppLoader or Desktop Manager to back up everything ahead the update
  • Download and install the new OS — scan it for malware of course! — using links from a somewhat trusted source such as CrackBerry
  • Be prepared to reinstall the OS in case your BB gets bricked or downgrade to a prior OS if you don’t like the new version.

So, what about those things I ‘hated’ about my BlackBerry? Well, the browser is fast, loads pages very well, and can zoom into text almost as well as the iOS browser. And the BB AppStore, while not nearly as slick as iTunes and the on-device iOS purchase experience, is relatively painless — one login and password to download an purchase apps, and a choice of carrier or PayPal billing.

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with the 9700+OS 6 combo — enough to stick with the BB for a while. As an aside, I had a chance to look at and briefly use a BB Torch (9800). Nice big screen but a bit too thick and heavy compared with the 9700.

For comprehensive information on the latest unofficial (and official) BB OS releases, visit the CrackBerry OS Superpage.

Gadwin PrintScreen

Gadwin PrintScreen is a very handy freeware application that allows screen capture/screen shots.  I particularly like that it will save the captured image (I usually capture a rectangular area but you can choose to capture the entire window or screen) as a JPG, with a small drop shadow/border.  PrintScreen puts the image on the clipboard as well as saving to a file, making it perfect for product demos and bug reporting — you can grab multiple images very quickly.  There's also a professional version that adds annotation and other features.