Switching Raspbian to Pixel desktop

Official Raspbian images based on Debian Stretch by default has the Pixel desktop environment and will login new users to it. But if you have had a Raspbian installation with another DE (such as LXDE), here are the steps to install and login to the Pixel desktop.

apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods
sed -i 's/^autologin-user=pi/#autologin-user=pi/' /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
update-alternatives --set x-session-manager /usr/bin/startlxde-pi
sed -i 's/^Session=.*/Session=lightdm-xsession/' ${USER}/.dmrc

Make sure the user’s ‘.dmrc’ file is updated with the new startlxde-pi session as that is where lightdm login manager looks to decide which desktop should be launched.

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Convert iPhone contacts to vCard

On a recent troubleshooting attempt, I lost all the contacts in my Android phone. It had also received a recent update which took away the option to import contacts from another phone via bluetooth.
I still had some contacts in the old iPhone, but now that mass transfer via bluetooth is gone, it was a question of manually sending each contact in vCard format to the Android phone. That means I should probably find a less dreadful way to get the contacts back.

Here is one way to extract contacts en-masse from iPhone into popular vCard format. The contact and address details in iOS are stored by AddressBook application in a file named ‘AddressBook.sqlitedb’ which is an sqlite database. The idea is to open this database using sqlite, extract the details from a couple of tables and convert the entries into vCard format.

Disclaimer: the iPhone is an old 3GS running iOS 6 and it is jailbroken. If you attempt this, your mileage would vary. Required tools/softwares are usbmuxd (especially libusbmuxd-utils) and sqlite, with the prerequisite that openssh server is running on the jailbroken iPhone.

1. Connect iPhone via USB cable to the Linux machine. Run iproxy 2222 22 to connect to the openssh server running on the jailbroken phone. iproxy comes with libusbmuxd-utils package.
2. Copy the addressbook sqlite database from phone:scp -P 2222 mobile@localhost:/var/mobile/Library/AddressBook/AddressBook.sqlitedb .Instead of steps 1 and 2 above, it might be possible to copy this file using Nautilus (gvfs-afc) or Dolphin (kio_afc) file manager, although I’m not sure if the file is accessible.
3. Extract the contact and address details from the sqlite db (based on this forum post):sqlite3 -cmd ".out contacts.txt" AddressBook.sqlitedb "select ABPerson.prefix, ABPerson.first,ABPerson.last,ABPerson.organization, c.value as MobilePhone, h.val ue as HomePhone, he.value as HomeEmail, w.value as WorkPhone, we.value as WorkEmail,ABPerson.note from ABPerson left outer join ABMultiValue c on c.record_id = ABPerson.ROWID and c.label = 1 and c.property= 3 left outer join ABMultiValue h on h.record_id = ABPerson.ROWID and h.label = 2 and h.property = 3 left outer join ABMultiValue he on he.record_id = ABPerson.ROWID and he.label = 2 and he.property = 4 left outer join ABMultiValue w on w.record_id = ABPerson.ROWID and w.label = 4 and w.property = 3 left outer join ABMultiValue we on we.record_id = ABPerson.ROWID and we.label = 4 and we.property = 4;"
4. Convert the extracted contact details to vCard format:cat contacts.txt | awk -F\| '{print "BEGIN:VCARD\nVERSION:3.0\nN:"$3";"$2";;;\nFN:"$2" "$3"\nORG:"$4"\nEMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=WORK;type=pref:" $9"\nTEL;type=CELL;type=pref:"$5"\nTEL;TYPE=HOME:"$6"\nTEL;TYPE=WORK:"$8"\nNOTE:"$9"\nEND:VCARD\n"}' > Contacts.vcf
5. Remove the empty content lines if some contacts do not have all the different fields:sed -i '/.*:$/d' Contacts.vcf

Now simply transfer the Contact.vcf file containing all the contact details to Android phone’s storage and import contacts from there.

Going to FOSDEM 2016

Going to FOSDEM 2016, this weekend at ULB campus. Looking forward to the talks and meeting hackpeople.