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I recently moved to a rural location where cell phone signal strength is weaker. The signal strength indicator (the “bars” icon) on the Treo 700p isn’t terribly useful in finding the strongest signal in and around the house. A more accurate method of determining signal strength is to put the phone into field test mode. You do this in the main phone app by dialing ##33284, or ##DEBUG, and pressing Dial. (This is for Sprint Treos; for other carriers, see this page.) This brings up a continuously updated “Debug Parameters” display. The signal string is the “RSSI Value” on the top line.

At my home the RSSI values ranged from -95 to -102 depending on where I was standing, with the larger (less negative) numbers indicating stronger signal. According to this posting on HowardForums, -105 is the “no service” point. This will come in handy in determining where to mount the external panel antenna when it arrives.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP 1 (or SLED), as installed on the ThinkPad R61, is based on SUSE Linux 10.1. This distro includes a somewhat old version of Ruby on Rails, a popular web development framework. I wanted to use the latest version of Rails, but before I could do that, I needed to build and install the latest stable versions of Ruby and Rubygems (Ruby’s package management system). This wasn’t too difficult, but there were a few non-obvious steps along the way. (All of the steps described here were performed while logged in as the root user.)

I first used the Software Management tool in Yast2 to delete the existing Ruby packages I’d previously installed. Then I downloaded the source for ruby 1.8.6 here. Before building it, I had to unset the RUBYOPT environment variable, which was set to “rubygems” by SUSE. Then I built the basic Ruby interpreter using these commands:

./configure
make
make install

This process didn’t build or install the tk extension, which I use in a couple of my Ruby scripts to build simple GUIs. To build that, I first needed to use the Software Management tool in yast2 to install the tcl-devel and tk-devel packages. Then I built and installed the tk extension using these commands:

cd ext/tk
ruby extconf.rb
make install
cd tkutil
ruby extconf.rb
make install

Then I downloaded the latest version (1.1.1) of Rubygems here, and installed it using this command:

ruby setup.rb

Finally, I was able to install the latest Rails using Rubygems:

gem install rails

This installed all of the packages that Rails depends on, such as ActiveRecord.