Sugar running on the Nokia N810

Hey all,
This past week I managed to do something quite interesting. I got sugar, running on my Nokia N810, compiled for armel.

The trick that made it work was thanks to easy Debian chroot, that got me access to installing sugar without a few good hours of compilation for arm (and I did that before).

Touchscreen is cool!

The first thing that I found pretty neat was running sugar on a touchscreen device. It really felt better, since most people that I let play with my XO and flip its screen 180 degrees naturally try touching the screen, expecting it had a touchscreen. Sugar was actually quite good with it on the Nokia.

Any hardware – Any use

It is refreshing to see Sugar running on a different system, let alone a difference architecture (armel). Sugar seems to be attributed to OLPC and its unique hardware. I guess this comes to show that to in order to get sugar really to reach its full potential, we should take in to account it can run on anything: Why not old hardware? Why not smartphones? OLPC uses the XO, but everyone else can use anything else really.

This also is connected to things going on in our pilot in OLPC Israel. I won’t get in to it in this post, because Netzach and I are going to write a report about it regarding a pilot we are doing with 9 Bedouin kids in the Ilan Ramon Youth Physics Center.

More about the hardware – How to get Sugar in your pocket

If you are wondering if this actually worked fully on the Nokia (unlike people who claim Android worked there, and it’s just the x86 emulator). Well, it did pretty much work. However it was slow, and you wont get the browser working on it with 128MB ram. However I did get avahi-daemon working (remember to turn it on). Then I got in to the Chat system, and I could share things, etc. You might need to enlarge the easy chroot iso image, so you have space to install sugar. I also guess that if someone installs it on Mer (an Ubuntu-based distro for the Nokia),  it might even work faster.

Another problem is that the Nokia keyboard has no F1-F12 keys. They are essential in sugar. So I had to plug in an external USB keyboard for that. It could be fixed with an Xmodmap script.

Thats all for now more pictures below.

Watching the network view

Sugar on the Nokia talking to an XO

Nokia N810 and XO together

Tracking with the Nokia N810.

Hey all,

This Passover, I went on a trip in the North of Israel in the Golan heights.

However, apart from enjoying the beauty of nature I thought I might do a little experiment with my Nokia N810, a Linux device with a GPS receiver.

What I did was switch it on at the beginning of the tour and put it back inside my bag, ignoring it most of the time.

The result was a complete GPX file of our tour.

On the Nokia it looked nice, however I wanted to see if I can extract more data at home with the GPX file.I found 3 tools I could do with it.

The first was slicing the exact route (since I left it on after getting in the car and driving home, it had the 5 hour route I drove home too). For that I used an application called Viking. Viking also give me another bit of information I liked – it said we walked 10 kilomiters.

The second was an online tool called gpsvisualizer. This gave me a nice view of the track, along with the height variation, you can see the outcome on the right.

gpsvisualizer

Gpsvisualizer also gave me an option to convert the gpx file to a .kmz file, a googleearth filetype. So I could now load my track in to googleearth.

I could see now the route overlaid with google’s rich data, from photos to a high res satellite map, and 3d view!

The Track from Google Earth

A Deep Valley we crossed

I thought I might share with you the fun trip I had, and digital fun that came after it. I know there are others here that have gps tools and I’d love to hear what tools you use.

A lot of Caterpillars on a shoot

A nice View of the valley