Installing Arch GNU/Linux on Macbok air Version 4.2(Late 2011) part 4

Disclaimer: I dont take any responsibility for the damage of your equipment. If you point your ire at me, I will have the last laugh. USE THE INFO AT YOUR OWN RISK.

 So, you have now rebooted to your liberated computing experience and have started loving to being master. Let us continue

WINDOW BORDERS NOT BEING DISPLAYED

add the line below in settings - settings-manager-session and startup-application autostart
/usr/bin/xfwm4 &

SWAP SPACE ON A FILE

Create 8GB swapfile instead of a swap partition(which we did not create while installing)
in the root partition.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=8388608  -- Red hat recommends twice the ram
if you are going to use the hibernate feature. If not you can halve the size of the swapfile
But, I believe that air users would love to use the hibernate feature. With hibernate the
entire ram contents are dumped to the swap partition and is read back when brought back
from hibernation.

swap is responsible for many a hacks on Unix/Linux systems. Restrict permissions
by using

chown root:root /swapfile
chmod 0600 /swapfile

mkswap /swapfile   -- To convert the file to swap file type
swapon /swapfile   -- To start using the file as swap, now.

To use the swapfile at every boot up

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0


ENABLE/DISABLE KEYBOARD BACKLIGHT

$su
#echo 100 | tee  /sys/class/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness  --- for full backlight brightness
#echo 00 | tee  /sys/class/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness  --- for backlight off


HARDWARE ACCELERATION

To use it with Arch, you simply need to install the xf86-video-intel package, this has the SNA patch included and should work with the most recent Xorg. It's then a simple case of creating /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf and adding:

Section "Device"

Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "sna"

EndSection

check your log to see if SNA is being used with the below command:

cat /var/log/Xorg* | grep SNA


INCREASE LIFE OF SSD

To make all these changes, open up a terminal and run:

sudo nano -w /etc/fstab

Then for all SSD devices in your system remove 'relatime' if present and add 'noatime,nodiratime,discard' so it looks something like this:

/dev/sda   /   ext4   noatime,nodiratime,discard,errors=remount-ro 0 1

SWAP WRITE MINIMIZE

echo 0 > /pro/sys/vm/swappiness

CHANGE THE IO SCHEDULER


    echo noop > /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler

Or better, use udev rules to check for rotational media.

#'deadline' is recommended by the author of CFQ for SSDs, replace it with 'noop' if you want.

    Create a file with a name like 10-ssd.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d containing:

# set a larger readahead size
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ATTR{queue/read_ahead_kb}="1024"

# set deadline scheduler for non-rotating disks
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="deadline"


now, verify the scheduler

$ cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler  -- The output would be. The selected scheduler is indicated in brackets.

noop [deadline] cfq


Replace "relatime" with "noatime" to stop the system from writing the last access times as discussed above. Next, add the following lines to fstab to put temporary and log files in RAM instead of on the solid state drive:

tmpfs   /tmp       tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777   0  0
tmpfs   /var/log   tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=0755   0  0
tmpfs   /var/spool tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777   0  0
tmpfs   /var/tmp   tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777   0  0


NEW CONFIG FILES FOR ADJUSTING TIME( from arch wiki )

Comment all time related lines in /etc/rc.conf

HARDWARECLOCK=...

and other time related entered in the previous steps

run   hwclock -w --localtime as root
It will create a file /etc/adjtime
cat /etc/adjtime
you should get some output with LOCAL in the end

Reboot


UPDATED LOCALE/TIME CONFIGS

emacs /etc/locale.gen
uncomment en_IN UTF8

emacs /etc/locale.conf
add the following

Lang="en_IN.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_TIME="en_IN.UTF-8"
export LANG=en_IN.UTF-8

run this command   hwclock --systohc --localtime


sound getting disabled once in a while

Keep using the system for a week/fortnight it will get repaired automatically


BRIGHTNESS OF DISPLAY

If the fn keys stop working for changing the display brightness then,

run the following commands

cat /sys/class/backlight/max_brightness
cat /sys/class/backlight/brightness

enter a value from 0 to max_brightness to change the brightness by

#echo 245 | tee brightness

Increase or decrease based on requirement.

UPDATE: The aboe step is not required. since brightness can be easily adjusted via plugins in xfce.

Frequency driver issues

Linux 2.9 and above are using the newest frequency driver called intel-pstate. This is for newer cpus. Tha macbook air was running hot. So remove it until the previous old processors are supported by this driver.
1. add intel_pstate=disable to the kernel line
2. echo acpi-cpufreq >/etc/modules-load.d/acpi-cpufreq.conf

If you dont like the colored borders behind the names of icons on the desktop do this

 It is possible you may have a .gtkrc-2.0 file already. If so, the
following lines can be added to it. Otherwise you will need to make this
file yourself and paste the below lines in the .gtkrc-2.0 file.

To make the file, just open a text editor and paste the following:

style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {
    XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0
    }
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"

So you want to connect your latest android smartphone

 Install packages gvfs gvfs-afc gvfs-mtp for automounting of USB devices
But just remember that mtp sucks on GNU/Linux as well as windows.

Thats it folks!!!. I dont think I have forgotten anything. All the best with your freedom.

Installing Arch GNU/Linux on Macbok air Version 4.2(Late 2011) part 3

Disclaimer: I dont take any responsibility for the damage of your equipment. If you point your ire at me, I will have the last laugh. USE THE INFO AT YOUR OWN RISK.

So, You are not used to being a master. You are used to situations where you adapt yourself to the Operating system(Master) and tells what you should be doing. So, be careful, what happens from now on is different. You tell the Operating system what is to be done and how it is to be done.

Let us begin.

After successful boot u will be logged in as root with the root prompt. Type the commands below as described. Majority of this info has been culled from the Arch wiki.


# nano /etc/hostname
enter your hostname press ^o and ^x to exit


# nano /etc/locale.gen

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8

# locale-gen
# export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8

#wifi-menu
select your wifi connection from the list given. It will prompt for the password. Give the password and you are connected to the public network.

#cgdisk /dev/sda

Be careful here. remember the partition scheme you had decided in the beginning. delete the partition you had created in osx for linux. Now create a partition and select the type as "linux". cgdisk is an ncurses interface for the gdisk tool. I created only one partition. cgdisk manages a GPT parititon table, rather than the traditional MBR-style partitions. If swap is required we can always create swap on a file in the regular file system. Remember the partition number you created. You can always find out the partition number by

#lsblk /dev/sda

format it to your favorite file system

#mkefs.ext4 /dev/sda5

mount the partition

#mount /dev/sda5 /mnt

Since we are on an efi system, we have to mount the first partition

# mkdir /mnt/boot/efi
# mount /dev/sdax /mnt/boot/efi

 Select a mirror

Before installing, you may want to edit the mirrorlist file and place your preferred mirror first. A copy of this file will be installed on your new system by pacstrap as well, so it's worth getting it right.

# nano /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

    Alt+6 to copy a Server line.
    PageUp key to scroll up.
    Ctrl+U to paste it at the top of the list.
    Ctrl+X to exit, and when prompted to save changes, press Y and Enter to use the same filename.

If you want, you can make it the only mirror available by getting rid of everything else (using Ctrl+K), but it's usually a good idea to have a few more, in case the first one goes offline.
Tip: Use the Mirrorlist Generator to get an updated list for your country. HTTP mirrors are faster than FTP, because of something called keepalive. With FTP, pacman has to send out a signal each time it downloads a package, resulting in a brief pause.

 Install the base system

The base system is installed using the pacstrap script.

# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel


 Generate an fstab

Generate an fstab file with the following command. If you prefer to use UUIDs or labels, add the -U or -L option, respectively. It's also a good idea to check it before continuing:

# genfstab -p /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab
# nano /mnt/etc/fstab


 Chroot and configure the base system

Next, we chroot into our newly installed system:

# arch-chroot /mnt

At this stage of the installation, you will configure the primary configuration files of your Arch Linux base system. These can either be created if they do not exist, or edited if you wish to change the defaults.

 Locale

Locales are used by glibc and other locale-aware programs or libraries for rendering text, correctly displaying regional monetary values, time and date formats, alphabetic idiosyncrasies, and other locale-specific standards.

There are two files that need editing: locale.gen and locale.conf.

    The locale.gen file is empty by default (everything is commented out) and you need to remove the # in front of the line(s) you want. You may uncomment more lines than just English (US), as long as you choose their UTF-8 encoding:

# nano /etc/locale.gen

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8

# locale-gen

This will run on every glibc upgrade, generating all the locales specified in /etc/locale.gen.

    The locale.conf file doesn't exist by default. Setting only LANG should be enough. It will act as the default value for all other variables.

# echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
# export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Note: If you set some other language than English at the beginning of the install, the above commands would be something like:

# echo LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
# export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8

To use other LC_* variables, first run locale to see the available options. An advanced example can be found here.
Warning: Using the LC_ALL variable is strongly discouraged because it overrides everything.


Timezone Available time zones and subzones can be found in the /usr/share/zoneinfo// directories.

To view the available , check the directory /usr/share/zoneinfo/:

# ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/


Create a symbolic link /etc/localtime to your zone file /usr/share/zoneinfo// using this command:

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Calcutta /etc/localtime

Daemons

A list of available services (and their running status) can be found using the command:

# rc.d list


 Hostname

Add your hostname in /etc/hostname:

# echo myhostname > /etc/hostname


Wireless

     Install the required packages:

# pacman -S wireless_tools netctl

If you use WPA/WPA2 encryption, install:

# pacman -S wpa_supplicant wpa_actiond
#pacman -S dialog(for using wifi-menu it is a dependency)

initrd will be generated automatically during the install

#modprobe dm-mod



     Connect to the network with wifi-menu (optionally checking the interface name with ip link, but usually it's wlan0), which will generate a profile file in /etc/network.d named after the SSID. There are also templates available in /etc/network.d/examples/ for manual configuration.

# wifi-menu



GRUB



For 64-bit aka x86_64 UEFI firmware:

# pacman -S grub-efi-x86_64


The UEFI system partition will need to be mounted at /boot/efi/ for the GRUB(2) install script to detect it:

# mkdir -p /boot/efi
# mount -t vfat /dev/sdXY /boot/efi

Install GRUB UEFI application to /boot/efi/EFI/arch_grub and its modules to /boot/grub/x86_64-efi (recommended) using:

# modprobe dm-mod
# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=arch_grub --recheck --debug
# mkdir -p /boot/grub/locale
# cp /usr/share/locale/en\@quot/LC_MESSAGES/grub.mo /boot/grub/locale/en.mo


While using a manually created grub.cfg is absolutely fine, automatically generating one is recommended:
Tip: To automatically search for other operating systems on your computer, install os-prober before generating it:

# pacman -S os-prober

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

After all this a .efi is installed in /dev/sda1/EFI/arch_boot/
This will read the grub.cfg in /boot/grub/grub.cfg

#passwd    change the root password


pacman -S xorg xorg-apps xorg-drivers xorg-fonts


#mkdir /home/vanisri
#useradd vanisri
#passwd vanisri
#chown  -R  $USER:$USER  $HOME

reboot

Hold the option button. This will choose the previous working refit screen. Here select osX. Once in osX re-install refit.
reboot
Hold the option button and see everything is fine.
reboot
Now you will get back the old refit which you have been using previous to installing arch. This is required since the step to install grub discussed above installed grub to the efi partition thereby overwriting the previous refit and you boot directly into grub instead of refit.


pacman -S xfce4 xfce4-goodies
pacman -S gstream.....
pacman -S firefox
pacman -S flashplugin
pacman -S alsa_utils alsa_oss ffmpeg alsa_plugins libva-driver-intel ttf-dejavu
#cat /etc/group
#gpasswd -a vanisri audio (Like this add yourself to the other groups)

pacman -S lightdm

pacman -Syu


#emacs /etc/rc.conf
HARDWARECLOCK="localtime"
TIMEZONE="Asia/Kolkata"

To display the correct time.

To check whether time is set properly

run the commands below
# hwclock --show
$ date

Both the commands should show the same time. Else run the following

# hwclock --hctosys

Now check the two commands above. They should be the same.


That completes a near 90 percent of Arch GNU/Linux installation on the Macbook air. Little more tips/adjustments/betterments in the next post.

Installing Arch GNU/Linux on Macbok air Version 4.2(Late 2011) part 2

 Disclaimer: I dont take any responsibility for the damage of your equipment. If you point your ire at me, I will have the last laugh. USE THE INFO AT YOUR OWN RISK.

To start, let me make a very strong statement about the state of support for the hardware of this version of Macbook air. The Linux kernel has "Out of the Box" support for all the hardware on this version. So, If you choose any distro which has excellent efi support and the latest bleeding edge Linux kernel you are good to go and try any distro.

I have gone with Arch GNU/Linux and I am loving it. The capability of hand tuning what you want on your laptop or desktop with Arch GNU/Linux is awesome. Coming from Debian GNU/Linux, where there is "flowing" installer where you chose all the options and then finalize the installation, it was different when my arch installer just dropped me to the root prompt and stood there blinking for my command. The exact way how a computing experience should be, You, the user, is the master.

Please go through all the resources I have linked in the previous post. Form your own procedure then You can fine tune it with any gotchas you find in my writeup. Let me be clear here that majority of what I have written here is verbatim copy of the Arch wiki. All the gratitude/thanks/kudos go to the Arch community of devs and users.

Preparation

    Download the most recent archboot ISO
    Write the ISO to a USB stick using dd or unetbootin(hugely recomended) or burn it to a CD/DVD.
    Prepare hard drive in OSX: (shrink your OSX partition in Disk Utility)

Download refit.dmg(the image file for a mac). Install it on the mac osx
reboot the air and hold the option(alt)key on the keyboard when u hear the start up sound.Boot into osx and reboot two to three times in the same way.
Now plugin the usb stick created and reboot(I would suggest you to get hold of an external dvd r/w, Yes, U can use any USB external dvd r/w. Because I have heard users comment that the dd method is not the best for efi based systems).

Reboot the air and press the option(alt) button at the startup sound.
Wait for a few seconds while refit loads and shows all the bootable files on the air. You will have two images whose logo will be that of a cd disc. One will be named windows and the other will be something like efi.. with the same logo(only the recent arch images have two options)
Select the image with the efi.. on it. Dont do anything on the terminal, wait for 6 seconds, arch will bootup and give you the root prompt and wait for its master's commands.

Be Carful here, Dont select the windows one as suggested in the above guides. There will be some extra steps since grub doesnt play well with efi.
Allow arch to boot.

Now go here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide/Preparation#Preparation

GNU/Linux on Apple Macbook Air 4.2 (Late 2011) part 1

 Disclaimer: I dont take any responsibility for the damage of your equipment. If you point your ire at me, I will have the last laugh. USE THE INFO AT YOUR OWN RISK.

This post is my continuation of my earlier post where I drooled over the hardware implementation of Macbook air. After that post I have seen all the notebook manufacturers try to make a clone and majority have failed except for the samsung versions which have better connectivity options compared to the Air. But Macbook air is still the king in lightweight laptops. Why do I drool over the Airs being a hardcore freedom software evangelist? Hardware, exquisitely crafted hardware.

Let us get down to freeing the Macbook air from propreitory software it is running. I have chosen Arch GNU/Linux as my GNU OS of choice having read reports of it running beatifully on Mac hardware and not interested in running the Microsoft of the windows world, Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
Coming from Debian GNU/Linux, I saw that the ncurses interface for installing the basic OS is very similar. There was a shocker waiting for me. After downloading the latest x86_64 build, I connected the external DVD drive borrowed from my friend and booted it. What happens, The installer starts and dumps me into a root prompt. Thats it. I have installed slackware GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/Linux with neat installers though still ncurses based.

Time to search the public network. Now I see that the ncurses installer has been done away with. You have to install everything manually. Ofcourse there are lot of tools provided by the Arch GNU/Linux project to make the process simple and straight forward. At this juncture I would like to mention about the Arch WIKI. This is one of the most detailed wiki documentation I have gone through seconded or equalled only by the Gentoo GNU/Linux wiki.The wiki is written beautifully and is very easy to comprehend by anybody with a basic GNU/Linux background. In the process, I chrooted to another GNU/Linux installation for the first time and the raw power of the UNIX philosophy hit me on my face. KUDOS to all the "freeedom" developers.





Here are the links/resources/works/efforts I made use of in liberating my Macbook Air.

http://d.goodlad.net/articles/arch_linux_on_mba_42/

http://blog.billsdon.com/2011/12/triple-boot-13inch-macbook-air-4-2-2011-model/

http://www.billsdon.com/2011/12/install-linux-mint-12-lisa-13inch-macbook-air-4-2-2011-model/

http://plopez.nfshost.com/2011_macbook_air_pure_efi_dual-boot

http://calummacrae.blogspot.in/2012/06/control-freaks-macbook-air-introduction.html

http://maketecheasier.com/install-dual-boot-ubuntu-in-macbook-air/2012/08/27

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/10/10/dual-boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-12-04-on-a-pc-with-uefi-board-ssd-and-hdd/

The next post will be having all the gory details of installing Arch GNU/Linux on the Macbook air.

Making history

I am now creating history. I am not a historian/politician/economist/author. It is just this habit of seeing the past with my own mindset, bring it to the present and try to extrapolate to the future. The ideas mentioned are my own. These days you not only stand on the shoulder of giants but have to confront many number of chauvinistic giants, chauvinistic for various reasons.

The caste system. Why didnt I write about this all these days? why? May be, I, thought that a lot has been told and written. A sense of DejaVu. I will be going to write about history, present and future of the caste system. This topic is unlike any other topic which I have written about. I have to tread carefully, there are a lot of historical chauvinists. My definition of truth is very simple. "Past is the truth" and it is the only truth. How do we know the past? How do we come to know about the past? Through history. Shall we change my one liner to "History is the only truth", NO. History is and will be subjective. I have not come across any objective historical material because it is impossible to have one. Why? It is impossible to write one. When you write, you are limited by the language, time and other external subjective influences.

How do we add objective dimension to history? By asking many many people to write one. Homogenising these various writings will make us tend towards objectivity of the subject in question. I used the word "tend" to indicate that the number of people required to get a real objective estimate has to tend to infinity, which is humanly impossible. And if at all it happens, homogenising will be IMPOSSIBLE in the required time. Truth is always difficult.

History has been the recorded views of the elite. Ther is no record of the lives of all the other 99%. Why? Gods and kings were supreme. Everybody others were just "people". We have an account of all the Gods the elite prayed to. Do we have the same account of gods worshipped by the artisan, the laborer, the road cleaner, the cobbler, the blacksmith. etc... NO. What have we done to enslave them further. Further we have made them forget the gods whom they prayed for, all these years and made them embrace the flashy and the costlier gods of the elitist society.

Why did all the ancestral sufferings get forgotten so easily? Majority of the sufferings was due to the exclusitivity of these elitist gods and all the rules regarding their worship. Was a cleaner allowed to think of various building materials, was an artisan, an artist, laborer ever allowed to think anything beyond his work, NO. If allowed they would'nt get any. Where do you get the innovation? Are you telling me the iron pillar somewhere in India has stood the test of time? You are joking with half a billion population, of course, there will be one artisan who is passionate about his job and accidentally that is what he liked.

I have heard that the Aryans were responsible for the division of tasks among the people, which is in turn the pre-cursor to the caste system in India. What was the strategy which the dravidions followed? Did they follow an exact socialism? Wherein everbody just stepped in to overcome the shortcomings/need of the society on their own without anybody's influence?

What do I think? I thin the aryans already knew the shortcoming of this kind of society. They understood that there are certain tasks in the societal setup which majority of them disliked. In the dravidian setup, I think this discord was not present, at that moment, among the members.

The aryans observed this "bliss" of relationships and started thinking. They came to know that everybody "valued" their work and thought of every work having the same value. The aryans sowed the first seeds of the elitist behaviour by the way they worshipped and presented their gods. They just complicated it to make it elitist. They were able to impress upon the simple minded, since they worshipped a superior god, they themselves were superior. Here started the divide. Goodness is somehow and always associated with naiveness. This simplistic co-existence of the dravidians led to their exploitation. The stagnancy of learning and basking in the glory of successfully creating the divide, led us to being ruled by plethora of kings/governments. The aryans seperated themselves from the original and made them un-approachable, thereby increasing their supremacy. The original submitted to the vileys who then carefully carved the hierarchial system of society.

This power over 99% of the people led to creation of various units. Each unit size depended on the power the leader was having. Now, more power was needed. The leaders waged war against each other, thereby increased their domain of power. Who fought the wars on the battlefield? Your answer here. Because "history" does not answer this.

Now, I can fantasize, am i good at it....................

My favorite phone Xperia Mini Pro is alive and kicking......

I already have a lot of posts on the favorite phone. I have written all about its features, rooting it, installing custom roms and everything. This post is particularly about the attitude of big corporations and their lethargic attitude towards the customer once a sale is made.

Business institutions are full about various subjects relating to customer satisfaction/customer requirements/repeat customers. Students from these institutions get high packets based on the things they learn from these institutions and are taught about all the ideals of keeping the customers happy.

But once these students end up with big organizations, with a very costly noose around their necks, called the "tie", they are re-programmed to work in the traditional way the whole business is being carried out. The very best example of how these organizations work has been the android eco-system. Being an open eco-system based on apache licence has put into open the negatives of traditional way of customer satisfaction.

Customers these days are over-whelmed with information about products and their features. This information is again adulterated by paid reviews of the product and see that it gets maximum penetration. This is one side of the coin which deals with selling a product to the customer. Now, the android eco-system starts with a sale, while other products end with a sale. Organizations are finding it difficult to assimilate the fact that a sale with open systems, dont end with a sale, in fact it starts with a sale. Customers are eagerly waiting for additional services/product upgrades. So, why are the customers so much demanding? The answer lies in the open nature of the android eco-system

Once a device is released, the kernel code which is under GPL is to be released in parallel. So, what do traditional companies do to continue doing their traditional business? They delay the release of the kernel sources. Now, once the kernel sources are released, there is only one task remaining, build a custom rom for that device with all the updated features available in the AOSP code released.

AOSP is a moving target, being updated everyday with bugfixes and new features from volunteers worldwide. But the device came with a static rom and that is exactly what the big organizations are ready to give you. Well, the customers dont want that, they want their device to be alive as long as it meets their requirement or they can make the device meet their requirement by using upgraded code from the AOSP project.

How do big organizations stop users/devs from doing the above? Create binary only drivers packaged as blobs and Linux supports blobs to be loaded as it is(This is exactly what makes RMS fume on the licensing choice of the linux kernel). Now, without these blobs, the custom built rom would not function out of the box, resulting in a rom, with limited functionality compared to the stock rom which came with the device.

Let me come back to the subject, xperia mini pro. Awesome design for a qwerty phone, little heavy thats it. Its an awesom device. Sony upgraded the software radically only once. They upgraded it to ICS from GB, cribbing all the way about the lack of hardware capability to run ICS throught the build process which took almost an year. After that they orphaned the phone. Another team, the freexperia team which is responsible for bringing cyanogenmod to xperia devices also lifted their hand from upgrading the phones to the next version, JB.  Half hearted attempts were made by them to build cm10 for the 2011 series. Once they saw that the device did live it up to the task, they became serious and we had 4.1 for our phones, then, they stopped and decided that 2013 is too late for 2011

Now, it is the turn of the individuals to expand the life of the device. nAa, did the unthinkable and unimaginable for 2011 devices he started with 3.* kernel and has succesfully built 3.4* kernel for them, But of course he was still standing on giants. You should feel the device in your hands running this fantastic kernel and 4.2.2, the lates branch of android. In fact the 2013 flagship sony devices are still on 4.1.2. The device feels snappy and ready for future android releases. Thanx to all the devs at Cyanogenmod and users/devs at the xda forums, my fav phone has got a new lease of life and is completely rejuvinated.

So, shall we jump to Customer satisfaction 3.0....................

Update:- 14.08.2013

We now have android 4.3 a.k.a Cyanogenmod 10.2 on the Xperia mini pro. Thanx to the efforts of mikeioannina and ofcourse nAa we now have LegacyXperia 4.3 . Go ahead and flash it.

Destitute

That, now, is a term which sends shivers down the best politician, economists and all "comfortable" people of the world. Let us not delve into the dictionary meaning of the term. Let us spare a moment and think about what we know about the word, destitute. Yes you have heard it a lot of times. You would have shown somebody and described him as so. Well, are they different form the poor or both the words synonymous?. Otherwise are each other having subset-superset relationship. A destitute is the last level in the hierarchy of "our" society, considering the social and economic factors.

Now, Where did the destitute come from? Why are they like this? It is like the residual of all the reactions taking place in the society. It is the last filtered by-product of our present social structure, which nobody wants or likes to own up. Is he meant to be ignored? Has he transformed himself that way? What is the reason?

For the time being, let us absolve the society from being the reason for destitute. Let us say, destitute are born. They have fallen from the sky. How do we go about uplifting them, like, at least to the status of the poor? How do we remove the label "destitute" and give them the label "poor"? How? Now, you will ask, since the society is absolved of the responsibility of creating them, why should the society involve itself in uplifting them? What is the obligation of the society towards them?

Since, we don't believe in chance, with the present scientific structure, let us see what is the real reason of the formation of this class. Destitute are the result of the anomalies in the societal/political system which has been designed by an elite few for all the others to follow. The critical anomaly is the majority of the people have been programmed to ignore this class over the years. It is as though, the present societal system is ideal and this class is a necessary glitch for the system to be in equilibrium.

The society is more interested in knowing the un-known. The things in front of them take second preference. We somehow have been programmed with an in-capability which is what the creator of the present society wanted. The main thing is the in-capability/gumption to look within ourselves. We know of the evils around us. We know the anomalies. But, we have chosen to ignore it because we are confident that this anomaly cannot disturb the existing system and the glitch has not got the capability to fight back or question.

So, where do we start? We start by identifying them. Identifying them is possible only by the participation of people in the last mile. Try to know what they can do. Try to know how the destitute can contribute and come back into the regular societal system. If they don't know anything, teach them. Incubate them for a certain amount of time and make them understand how the system works, It is a two way learning process, wherein the present system can understand the reasons for these glitches. They should be made to grasp the socio/political/economical system. We have done two things here. We have identified them. We have brought them up to the more known "poor" slab. Now, give them all the benefits which the "poor" slab are supposed to get. There you have now added to the national product. The world is a more happier place.