The Hildon Application Manager has a special hidden mode that makes it more power user friendly and gives you access to features that are not yet considered to be ready for everybody. This mode used to be an easter egg, but we feel we have to give it away officially now since it is so useful.
Go to "Tools > Application catalogue", click "New", enter "matrix" into the "Web Address" field, click "Cancel". Choosing the red pill will activate the red pill mode, obviously, and chosing the blue one will deactivate it.
After activating the red pill mode, the following additional settings are available in "Tools > Settings".
Clean apt cache
If activated, the equivalent of "apt-get clean" is performed after every install or update. (This is the behavior for blue-pill mode.)
Assume net connection
This will not ask for an active IAP before downloading. This is useful if you have a network connection, but the 770 connectivity APIs are not available or don't know about it.
Break locks
This will break needed locks instead of failing. This is done by default in blue pill mode so that users don't lock themselves out when a crash leaves a stale lock behind.
Show dependencies
This adds another tab to the details dialog with some dependencies from the package.
Show all packages
This will not filter out packages that are not in the "user" section. It will also allow installing packages from any section.
Show magic system package
This will include the "magic:sys" package in the list of packages. Updating that package will do something similar to "apt-get upgrade". It is not yet fully defined what it will do exactly. This feature might become available in blue-pill mode at one point.
Include package details in log
When this setting is active, opening a package details dialog will dump its content into the Log so that you more easily save it. This should be useful when reporting complicated dependency issues.
This setting can only be changed in red-pill mode, but it's effect stays active also in blue-pill mode.
Use MMC to download packages
If activated, all the packages will be downloaded to a temporary directory in an available MMC with enough free space, then installed in the flash memory. The MMC's are considered in order: first the internal MMC and then the removable MMC, If no MMC is available, or no MMC has enough free space, the internal flash memory will be used as usual.
Using this option is useful to install/upgrade packages when there's enough free space at the root filesystem to install, but not to download plus install/upgrade, so you can use an alternative storage just to download such those packages.
Always check for updates
Activating this setting removes the refresh button from the toolbar and instead performs a "Checking for updates" operation everytime you switch to the "Browse installable applications" or "Check for updates" view. This settings was added for some quick UI experiments, but we kept it afterward.
You need to restart the Application manager for this setting to take effect.
Ignore packages from wrong domain
Usually, a package from a wrong domain will be completely ignored by the Application manager. Deactivating this setting will not ignore these packages. However, When actually installing a package from a wrong domain, a warning message will still be displayed and you need to confirm that installation should proceed.
You need to restart the Application manager for this setting to take effect.
Use apt-get algorithms
After changing this setting, you need to restart the Application Manager to have it take effect.
This setting will make the Application Manager use the same algorithms as apt-get when computing an installation or removal. We want to use these algorithms in the future, and this setting is a way to experiment with them.
You have to be more careful at checking what will actually be done. These algorithms can easily do unwanted things. In the near future, there will be additional confirmations for any change to visible packages.