AfterStep in Android WebTop

Setting up WebTop environment

Prerequisites

You have to have your phone rooted and SU installed. There are number of exploits and tools available depending on the phone.

Naturally you should already have either Motorola HD Multimedia Dock or whatever webtop capable dock comes with your phone. Good idea to plug it into hdmi capable display and have keyboard+mouse attached to it.

webtop2sd

It is recommended that you do not modify the WebTop environment in phone's own flash, but instead create a partition on SD card and use webtop2sd utility to copy phone's WebTop. webtop2sd will then mount this partition ontop of the phone's own stuff and if it get's screwed up you'll be able to go back to the blank slate and use your phone's WebTop again.

Get webtop2sd and instructions here.

In my experience running webtop configurator to install lxterminal did not work the first time. I had to reboot the phone one more time, and upon running webtop configurator again - lxterminal installed fine.

webtopscripts

Package management is horribly broken in webtop due to manufacturers doing weird things to it, and possibly breaking it on purpose. To fix stuff, so that apt-get works again - use webtopscripts. Download from Google Code and follow the instructions. Setup script walks through all of the fixes - there is no need to run individual scripts.

After this you get Ubuntu Jaunty in more or less usable state. Time to install packages and tweak.

Basic tweaks

The first thing you want to do is disable (or possibly re-configure) xscreensaver. By default it will show nasty looking day-glo colored waves on the screen in colors that hurt eyes like acid. Open LXTerminal - (there should be a button for it on the dock at the bottom of the screen) and run:

kill $(ps -ef | grep 5000 | grep xscreensaver | cut -c10-15).

Another good thing to kill is webtop-wallpaper. Its a desktop window layered underneath everything else and displaying wallpaper and maybe icons? Anyway this stuff is bad. Kill it:

kill $(ps -ef | grep 5000 | grep webtop-wallpaper | cut -c10-15)

This changes have effect only temporarily until webtop shutsdown, which is either when phone runs out of memory and garbadge collection kicks in or when it's powered off. Note that undocking the phone preserves your session!

For more permanent solution - we need to edit startup scripts, but first we need something to edit those with - my personal low tech favorite - nano:

sudo apt-get install nano

Also useful the text-mode file manager Midnight Commander :

sudo apt-get install mc

Both nano and mc are great in large measure because they don't depend on other packages.

No we can edit the config files:

sudo nano /osh/usr/local/bin/start-oshwt-1.sh - comment out xscreensaver line.
sudo nano /osh/usr/local/bin/start-oshwt-2.sh - comment out webtop-walpaper line.