The next Maemo Community Council will be elected between 11th-18th March 2009, and nominations are now open.
Nominations can be made by candidates, or by anyone else in the community; so if you want to get involved in representing the community to Nokia, and help drive the Maemo community forwards - put your name forward!
Well, I was a bit optimistic about keeping up with the bi-monthly updates, so I'm switching to a monthly format. Unfortunately there'll be more time between updates, but the updates will be longer and will (hopefully) be on time.
As many of you might have noticed, we have a new debmaster. Please give a warm welcome to Jeremiah Foster. He'll be working to implement new autobuilder and Extras improvements, and helping developers to improve the overall quality of Maemo packages. Many thanks to Nokia for facilitating another maemo.org position. Especially in these hard economic times.
Andrea Grandi was kind enough to kick off the discussion for the 2009 Maemo Summit. The discussion is taking place on maemo-community if anyone is interested in joining in. Progress from this discussion can be tracked on the wiki page.
Mer has just released 0.8. The new release brings many improvements to usability and stability, as well as improved N810 support, easier application installation. This release is also shipping with Extras enabled, offering application developers the opportunity to test their applications on Mer. Details are available from the wiki and discussion is on itT.
The Fremantle pre-alpha SDK has been updated. This new release includes the new Media Application Framework (MAFW), the newly-open sourced DSME, Upstart, and an BusyBox that will be developed in the open from here on out.
This release is still primarily only of interest to platform developers, as the APIs are still unfrozen and it is still using the Diablo UI. This is the last pre-alpha release, and the first alpha release should be forthcoming soon.
From the list generated by the community, Nokia has selected several community applications to be featured in Fremantle. Nokia will be providing support to these applications and their developers to help make them ready for prime-time by the time Fremantle is released.
The work to redesign the maemo.org website is still ongoing. The graphics and layouts are just being finalized, and the implementation will begin in earnest soon. Anyone interested in following the progress closely should subscribe to maemo-community.
Well, I was a bit optimistic about keeping up with the bi-monthly updates, so I'm switching to a monthly format. Unfortunately there'll be more time between updates, but the updates will be longer and will (hopefully) be on time.
As many of you might have noticed, we have a new debmaster. Please give a warm welcome to Jeremiah Foster. He'll be working to implement new autobuilder and Extras improvements, and helping developers to improve the overall quality of Maemo packages. Many thanks to Nokia for facilitating another maemo.org position. Especially in these hard economic times.
Andrea Grandi was kind enough to kick off the discussion for the 2009 Maemo Summit. The discussion is taking place on maemo-community if anyone is interested in joining in. Progress from this discussion can be tracked on the wiki page.
Mer has just released 0.8. The new release brings many improvements to usability and stability, as well as improved N810 support, easier application installation. This release is also shipping with Extras enabled, offering application developers the opportunity to test their applications on Mer. Details are available from the wiki and discussion is on itT.
The Fremantle pre-alpha SDK has been updated. This new release includes the new Media Application Framework (MAFW), the newly-open sourced DSME, Upstart, and an http://garage.maemo.org/projects/busybox4maemo/">BusyBox that will be developed in the open from here on out.
This release is still primarily only of interest to platform developers, as the APIs are still unfrozen and it is still using the Diablo UI. This is the last pre-alpha release, and the first alpha release should be forthcoming soon.
From the list generated by the community, Nokia has selected several community applications to be featured in Fremantle. Nokia will be providing support to these applications and their developers to help make them ready for prime-time by the time Fremantle is released.
The work to redesign the maemo.org website is still ongoing. The graphics and layouts are just being finalized, and the implementation will begin in earnest soon. Anyone interested in following the progress closely should subscribe to maemo-community.
After much discussion, there are now three referenda open to decide who will be able to vote in the next - and future - Maemo Community Council elections, and how the council members are chosen from the ballots.
Those of you eligible to vote (karma of 25 or over, and a maemo.org account older than 3 months) will have received your tokens. The next step is to read over the proposals and vote: you enter your anonymous token for each of the referenda and vote accordingly.
Dave Neary's done a fantastic job in pulling this together for us, and hopefully we can finally put arguments over karma requirements and counting methods behind us before the next election in only a few weeks time.
More info is available in Dave's excellent post on the maemo-community mailing list.
More specifically, meet Jeremiah Foster . In fact, while Jeremiah is the Maemo community's first official debmaster , he may actually be the first debmaster anywhere...ever. (Don't believe me? Try Googling it .)
But, it's cooler than that... This means that we, the Maemo community, now have a paid employee whose sole job is to help developers package1 their applications for mainstream consumption. So, if you're beginning to develop for Maemo and would like to learn how to package your software, contact Jeremiah . If you're a developer who just doesn't like the packaging process, contact Jeremiah . If you're just interested in what Debian packaging is in general, contact Jeremiah . I'm not telling you to abuse Jeremiah, of course, but... Ok, abuse him. No, I take that back. His contract isn't supposed to start until Febeuary 16, so wait until then to start the abuse.
Jeremiah has a history in programming in Perl, Python, and more. He's attended Harvard and Boston University, just to name a couple of schools. He's worked for some major Fortune 500 companies. He's written articles on Graphical Toolkits for Mac OS X. He gave a great presentation on packaging Perl from CPAN for Debian at FSCons in 2008. He knows what he's doing has has a passion for open source software and Debian packaging.
I'd like to thank Maemo SW (i.e., Nokia) for seeing need for an official, paid debmaster. The more we can do to present the public with Maemo applications that are clean and easy to install, the more we will spread the word about how cool Maemo is.
Please join me in welcoming Jeremiah to our community.
1 See Debian Packages .
Thanks to the prompting of fellow Maemo Community member Andrea Grandi (first via private email and then on the maemo-community mailing list), we have begun planning the particulars of the next Maemo Summit. If you're interested in joining the discussion, head on over the the Maemo 2009 wiki page and add your two-cents (thanks to Manrique Lopez for starting the wiki page). Also, be sure to join the maemo-community mailing list if you haven't already -- we discuss a lot of community-related issues there.
If you were at Maemo Summit 2008 , you understand why it is well worth the time and effort that it takes to plan this yearly gathering for Maemo and open source champions. Whether you're a developer or a just a user (like me), I highly recommend getting involved. If you weren't there last year, this is your chance to jump into the mix of an amazingly talented and diverse group of people. I'm glad I went for more than one reason (you can read some of my post-Summit thoughts here ), but probably most importantly because I was able to forge real-life friendships with so many people that I usually only have the opportunity of speaking with in the digital space.
Do yourself (and the Maemo Community) a favor and join in on the Maemo Summit experience!
The more dedicated among you may follow one (or several) of the Maemo mailing lists . A bunch of you probably read Internet Tablet Talk (soon to become talk.maemo.org !). One or two of you may have even figured something out via this article on EIPI 's Mobile Tablets blog. But, if my assumptions are correct, there are many of you probably rely solely on Maemo Planet in order to know what's going on with in the world of Internet Tablets and maemo.org . However you get your news, I wanted to make sure you knew about something very exciting: maemo.org is changing...
If you follow the maemo-community mailing list, you already know this. If you came across this thread at itT, you already know as well. But, if you hadn't heard yet, we are fully underway in a complete redesign of the look & feel of the maemo.org website. I've posted a few images below. You can click on them to see larger versions.
Because of help from a number of people the new "look" is being implemented and tested as we speak. We have been working hard on creating a site that is both visually appealing and easy to use. I'd like to take a moment to point out some of the main influencers: Dave Neary , Niels Breet (X-Fade), Andrew Flegg (Jaffa), Glaubert Oliveira (the maemo.org logo designer/contest winner and OpenBossa employee), Andre Cunha (OpenBossa employee), Henri Bergius (bergie) of Nemein (the company behind The Midgard Project , the back-end of this very website), Lauri Manner (neithan) from Nemein, and Reggie Suplido (creator and maintainer of Internet Tablet Talk). Of course, I 'm involved too. There are also a number of other people who I hope will forgive me for not mentioning their names here.
If you're interested in monitoring our progress — or even joining in the discussion — there are several ways to do it. First, I'd suggest subscribing to the maemo-community mailing list. Maemo-community is for community-related topics and has reatively low traffic. If you'd like to partake in a little finer grain, feel free to subscribe to maemo2midgard-commits . Here, you'll receive an email every time someone adds or changes something on the test site. Speaking of test sites, you can always just hop over to newstyle.maemo.org and see what's happening. Warning: the test site will often appear broken (or no different than the current maemo.org site) and won't always function properly.
We hope you like what you see. Trust me when I say that it will be light year ahead as far as your user experience is concerned.
We are very excited about this opportunity: not only will an official debmaster truly be a wonderful addition to our community development, but it will be the first time that Nokia wasn't involved in the hiring process of one of our community employees.
This speaks wonders for Nokia's desire (and trust) for the Maemo Community to be open and autonomous.
While the process of sponsoring an open community isn't alway smooth (and probably never easy), Maemo SW has been instrumental in facilitating our space and resources in a way that many community members never see -- and, it proves that there is a real dual-meaning in the word "transparency."
In the coming week or so, the Council hopes to be able to introduce our new debmaster to you. We hope that you'll welcome this person with open hearts and a willingness not only to listen to their expert advice, but offer help in becoming a part of our community.
The one thing that we do know is that the Council and the new debmaster alike wish to see Maemo develop world-class, user-friendly software.
With only a few months to the next Community Council election, a plan is coming together on revising the voting system used; after much debate last time.
Current ProcessThe election process is defined currently as (roughly) "one-member, one-vote, 5 people with most votes gets elected". This is sub-optimal as people might not get the council they want as a whole if they vote for their most favoured candidate.
For the inaugral elections, the voting process generated a lot of heat and noise after the wheels were in motion.
The Council can put forward a new proposed voting system, but obviously since this affects how the next council is chosen, the community has to decide to ratify the proposal through a referendum.
Proposed Change: Single Transferable VoteThe target is for a voting mechanism which meets three critieria:
There are various approaches (such as RRV ) which may be mathematically optimal for the third requirement, but the (relatively) complex maths makes it fail on the first two.
So, the current favourite is a Single Tranferable Vote system. Quim Gil summarised this as:
"Preferential voting (or preference voting) is a type of ballot structure used in several electoral systems in which voters rank a list or group of candidates in order of preference."
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting
In practice, instead of voting one best candidate (like last time) or choosing 5 candidates at the same level (like the GNOME Foundation does), each voter ranks the candidates by preference and maths do[es] the rest."
Out of any option, this meets all 3 requirements best of all (IMHO), even if it's sub-optimal in one or more categories.
So, for the referendum, I'm imagining there being the following options (language and wording to be decided):
The Council would decide what to do in the event of the third option getting a majority of votes. My first thought is that the election would be held under the current rules and the next council would have to pick up the task.
What you should do nowIf you have any opinions on the voting system used for the Maemo Community Council elections, please raise them on the maemo-community mailing list. This thread, for example, could be appropriate "Election process referendum" .
My last article in this series discussed the Maemo-specific packaging features that often seem to fall by the wayside when developers are packaging for the platform. For this second installment, I'm going to focus on information slightly more relevant to regular users—interesting and, perhaps, overlooked articles in the wiki.
With resource-limited devices like ours, ads can severely affect the quality of the browsing experience, and ad blocking is a simple way to avoid the difficulties that advertisement-filled websites can offer up. It's a topic not often discussed, so information can be hard to find, but this article covers all of the relevant options for ad blocking (along with their pros and cons), and walks you through implementing whichever you choose.
Many tablet users haven't caught on to the change in direction that has occurred over the last year for Maemo and its repositories. Gone are the days where one had to seek out a dozen different small repositories in order to get the software you wanted. Although we're not all of the way there yet, Extras is the place to go for almost all of your software needs, and is the only repository most users will need. This article tells you everything you need to know about the repository and its use.
Root access is a frequent issue for users new to the Maemo platform, as its acquisition and use is somewhat different from that of desktop Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Debian. This article tells you everything you need to know about why you might need root access and how to get it.
Though the days of flashing-only upgrades are gone, in favor of SSU, some users may still find reason to flash. This article covers the steps necessary to flash your tablet on any platform by any of several methods.
The days of scores of repositories are waning. Extras is now the place to get software for Maemo, which makes the lives of both developers and users easier, and greatly improves the user-experience for Maemo. This article covers everything developers and packagers need to know to get their packages into Extras and into the hands of users.
Having access to a USB interface for the tablet opens up a lot of doors—keyboards, mice, memory card readers, hard drives. With USB host mode you can connect these to your tablet. This article covers everything you need to know to enable and use USB host mode.
Wifi PSM is a powerful feature that is generally not understood by most tablet users. It is a large part of what gives the tablets such great battery life, but also a source of many networking woes. This article explains what Wifi PSM does and some of the possible pitfalls of its use and how to work around them.
Apologies for the delay, the holidays consumed much more of my time than intended (I hope everybody had happy and safe ones :)), so this edition will cover December and January.
Back when Maemo was first getting started, it lacked a strong central repository. When a developer wanted to distribute software, yes, they could jump through all the hoops to get their package into Extras, but to what benefit? It wasn't as if Extras had all that large of a user base at the time, it was difficult to get upload access, it was difficult to upload packages, and there were no helpful tools available to do automated sanity-checking for you. So most developers took what most people would call the sensible route and instead of wasting valuable time getting their packages into a repository for little or no benefit, they simple opened their own repository and began distributing their software right away, hassle-free.
