RSS on Nokia 770

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So I just got my 770 yesterday, and it seems to be as good as I had imagined. I’ve installed some cool stuff, and am using it as I planned- as a replacement for my laptop around the house when I just want to surf and read the web and rss news…

However, I didn’t want to manually enter my feeds on the 770, using the virtual keyboard and pen method. [I’m waiting for someone to get the Apple BT keyboard working with(the BT keyboard plugin for the 770 )] Until this happens I wanted a quick method to move my feeds onto the 770.

First thing is to install the SSH server and client, so that you can ssh into the device and look around (and use a proper keyboard). We will also want to scp files back and forth.

The Maemo Wiki has three great resources: the HowTos, the FAQ and the ApplicationCatalog. They are all well worth reading.

My setup for this:

  • I don’t have root installed on my 700 (yet)– so some things are different.
  • I have it connected to wifi for ssh access. You’ll want to set that up.
  • You could do the following steps by moving the files to and from the installed RSMMC card, and using the USB connection to XP (or a Mac). For this, you’ll have to install the Xterm so that you can perform the cp commands on the device to move the feedlist around….

Get packages

  • Osso Xterm – you’ll need this to perform some basic tasks on the 770 itself, mostly to copy files to and from the RSMMC card.
  • Dropbear SSH Client and Serverinstallation directions and packages. Ensure that you create a ssh key on the computer you are connecting from (your mac or windows computer), you will need this to ssh onto the 770, as you can’t reset the password without being root. Once you have this setup, connecting is a breeze.

    To copy the id_rsa.pub file over, you’ll have to use the USB – Host Computer method. Then you’ll need to use the Xterm on the 770 to copy the file over and modify its permissions. Follow every step on the Maemo Wiki and it will work.

    For instance, on my Macintosh I do this.

    • Plug in the USB cable to the 770 and the Mac
    • Open a terminal window on the mac
    • This command copies over my public key to the RSMMC card:
    • cp .ssh/id_dsa.pub /Volumes/NO\ NAME/id_rsa_mac
    • Now I eject the disk from the mac.

    Back on the 770

    • Run the Xterm:
    • cd 

      (move to home directory)

    • cat /media/mmc1/id_rsa_mac >> .ssh/authorized_keys

      ( I already had another key from my windows host, so use the >> to append rather than overwrite the authorized_keys file. It will create it if it doesn’t exist.

    • You may have to create the .ssh directory- see the DropBear install page on the Maemo WIki.
    • IP address – while you are here, find out your IP address. enter:
      ~ $ /sbin/ifconfig wlan0
      wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:14:A7:FA:2C:7F  
                inet addr:192.168.251.53  Bcast:192.168.251.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
      
    • Start the SSH Server:
      ~ $ /var/lib/install/etc/init.d/dropbear-server start
      I'm beeing run as regular user, I will listen to port 2222
      Starting Dropbear SSH server: dropbear.

    Now back on the Mac, in the terminal:

    dillera$ ssh -p 2222 user@192.168.251.53
    
    BusyBox v1.00 (Debian 2:20041102-11) Built-in shell (ash)
    Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
    
    ~ $ 
    

    Your on! You must use port 2222 since Dropbear was run as a user, and therefore doesn’t have the privileges to listen on port 22, the standard port for ssh.

Get your feedlist

Whew, all that just to be able to get the feedlist! You can do this (as I said before) just by using the RSMMC card as a conduit, but you should have ssh setup for other things, so you might as well set it up now.

To get the feedlist, just use scp.

On the Mac:

dillera$ scp -P 2222 user@192.168.251.53:.osso_rss_feed_reader/feedlist.opml .

Note that ssh uses lowercase ‘p’ for port, while scp uses uppercase ‘P’ !

Now you have your feedlist.opml in the current directory. I used a number of RSS readers on Windows to actually build my feedlist using Firefox and most oft browsed sites. I don’t normally use a RSS reader, so I didn’t already have my own feedlist.

See my previous post about RSS wrangling– after I captured and organized all my feeds, output them to OPML and then copied them back over to the 700, the RSS reader on the 770 refused to read that list- it would just overwite the list with its old one.

To fix this, I ended up opening up the original feedlist.opml in a text editor, and then opening up my new feedlist2.opml file that I had just created.

I simply copied over the outline tag from my new list to the original one from the 770, replacing everything in that area. Saving this file, copying it back to the 770 finally worked.

Below is a screenshot of the edited file:

770-feedlist-editing.png

Each feed is an outline tag- I copied them all over. They are already organized into various folders that made sense to me. This copying and pasting method worked. I can only guess that the RSS programs were spitting out some top level XML that the Liferea read doesn’t like.You may notice that the 770 newsreader is a port of the Liferea opensource GTK/Gnome aggregator.

Now my 770 has a decent amount of feeds to keep me happy:

770-newsfeeds.jpg

Enjoy!

One thought on “RSS on Nokia 770

  1. Kevin

    Very helpful. I’m excited to try it out.

    Thanks!

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