For Maverick Meerkat we’re continuing improving the ARM support for Ubuntu. With Lucid we got the first release optimized for ARMv7 (Thumb2 and SoftFP but not NEON), and for Maverick the plan is to keep the same ARM optimizations as base, but improving board support and user experience.

Currently the main target boards are the ones based on OMAP 3 and OMAP 4, like:
– BeagleBoard (C4 preferred)
– BeagleBoard xM
– PandaBoard (still to be released)

The main decisions to support these boards are basically the upstream support, solid community around them, easy hardware access and CPU power (standard Ubuntu is quite heavy, so we need a good and powerful machine).

At the moment we already got a good support for them, and the Beta release is somehow usable already! There are some development on-going to have a full working 3D interface (unity) for OpenGL ES much the same way we have for normal OpenGL devices. The only bad thing is that currently most of the 3D drivers for ARM (if not all) are closed source, so the development is a little bit harder than the usual.

If you just got your BeagleBoard xM, or want to try Ubuntu on your C4, please give it a try. For Maverick the idea is to give the users a pre-installed image, that you just need to ‘dd’ to your SD card, boot and adjust the environment.

Here are the instructions needed to get Ubuntu up and running at your OMAP device: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/OMAPMaverickInstall

In case you don’t have any of these boards, but want to use Ubuntu with different devices remember you can always try to build a ‘rootfs’ with RootStock. You’ll only need a working and compatible kernel and boot-loader.

And please, in case of you find any bug, want to help testing and getting Ubuntu better on your ARM device, just poke us at #ubuntu-arm (freenode). We’ll for sure be happy to assist you with any problems you may find.

Note for Beagle xM users: in case you find that your Maverick Beta image doesn’t boot with your board, please check bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/628243. This means that you have a Numonyx memory chip, and unfortunately the fix didn’t make Beta. To work around it just mount the first partition of your SD card (after giving ‘dd’) and replace your MLO with http://people.canonical.com/~rsalveti/maverick/boot/xM/MLO. After this just umount the partition, put it at your board and boot it.

It’s been a while since I don’t post anything, and the main reason is that I just got a new job and I’ve being pretty busy with it

After working at INdT for more than 2 years, I decided that it was time to move on, get back to Campinas, get closer with friends and family and start looking for a new job.

I had a quite good time at Recife, working with Mamona, Maemo and MeeGo, mostly helping bring up different ARM platforms to be used by the Institute in many different projects. The work was nice, but Recife can be hard to get through over the time. I’ll for sure miss the nice work place we’ve built, and the nice people I worked with.

About the new job, I’m quite happy to announce that I’m now working as a Software Engineer at Canonical. My main objective now is to help bringing Ubuntu into different ARM platforms, like beagleboard and the new pandaboard.

Canonical is awesome, and the people from the Ubuntu Platform Team is even greater. Had the opportunity to meet most of the people at the last Ubuntu Platform Sprint that was held at Prague, and it was awesome to see so many skilled and fun guys working together to improve Ubuntu.

That’s it, now it’s time to get back to work because we have a huge pile of cool and fun things to work on If you’re interested in understading, helping and participating on what we’re currently doing, get at #ubuntu-arm, freenode, and ping me (rsalveti)!

One of the latest board we’ve been playing with is the new STE U8500.

Bossa Conference 2010

After some people’s requests, it’s nice to hear that the BOSSA committee decided to extend the call for presentation to January 17, 2010.

This is the first year that the conference is doing a call for presentation, so if you are working with free and open source technologies related to mobile embedded platforms, please submit an abstract of your presentation at http://www.bossaconference.indt.org/.

The conference will be held in Manaus, Amazonas – Brazil, a different city from the other years. As always, it’ll be an awesome conference, having lots of interesting talks and people, and also the opportunity to hack and discuss new ideas

Mamona Logo

I’m really happy to announce the final release of Mamona 0.2!

We’ve been working very hard to accomplish what we wanted for the final release, since the 0.2-Beta release.

We could not delivery everything we wanted, but this is a major improvement from the latest release.

Some of the main highlights for 0.2:

• Improved SDK
• Xephyr support on SDK
• Full Emulation
• Virtual Keyboard
• Wireless Network with Network Manager API
• Command line interface for Network Manager
• Web browser: Midori
• New installer, with our own Qemu (don’t need to mess up with your system anymore

Greetings!

It’s been a long time since we released 0.1 (at that time I wasn’t even working at INdT),
so is with pleasure that I’m announcing the official Mamona 0.2-Beta release.

A lot changed since 0.1, we had a couple of goals for 0.2 release, mainly to support
Nokia N770 and to add some highly missing features, like network and virtual keyboard.

Main features already available for the beta release:

• Glibc – 2.5
• GCC – 4.1.2
• Full Python 2.5 support
• Enlightenment Window Manager
• USB Networking
• Bluetooth support
• Noemu Packages
• Mamona SDK
• QEMU (user mode emulation) 0.9.0 for Mamona SDK
• ARM EABI Version 5 (N770) and 6 (N8X0 and Omap)
• Machines Supported:
  • Nokia 770
  • Nokia 800
  • Nokia 810
  • Omap 3430

• Web browsers: Firefox 3 and Midori (recommended)
• Virtual Keyboard
• Xephyr support on SDK
• SystemTap enabled kernels for N800 and N810

Work to be done for the final 0.2 release:

• Network Manager working with dbus API (Open, WEP and WPA)
• Fix Track (documentation)
• Mamona Device Manager
• New and lighter theme for Enlightenment
• MIC
• Full Emulation
• Tests and bug fixing

You can find 0.2-Beta repositories at: http://dev.openbossa.org/mamona/0.2-beta/

The installation instruction is basically the same from 0.1, but we’ll create a whole
new procedure before releasing the final 0.2. The main goal of this beta release is to
officially release the SDK for 0.2. For those who want to play with SDK, just follow
http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Releases/0.2/SDKInstallGuide

For more info please see http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Releases/0.2

Bug reports, as always, should go to Mamona’s Trac; check out
http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Contributing#Bugs for links to posting
and querying bug reports for Mamona.

Thanks a lot for everybody who helped making this beta release possible.

These latest weeks we’ve been working to get the virtual keyboard on Mamona. We first studied Hildon Input Method and it’s framework, but it was not exactly what we wanted.

After researching a little more, with suggestion of trickie, we decided to try matchbox-keyboard, and realized that it was almost what we wanted, it’s simple, fast and doesn’t depend on any toolkit.

Then, we got to a final solution, that’s to let matchbox-keyboard working with enlightenment, and with the same behavior as maemo with hildon-input-method.

Here it’s a demo of what you get if you build the latest version of mamona (running on N770 :-):

How to get to this:
– Patches on matchbox-keyboard, mostly by Aloisio;
– Enlightenment Patches, also by Aloisio;
– Mamona Input Methods that works with ecore and gtk;
– Mamona-IM Enlightenment Applet

We’re still working on to get matchbox-keyboard patches upstream, but, if you need them, you can get at mamona git repository.

Please, use it and test if everything is working fine, or at least as expected :-). In case you want to report any bug, please open a ticket at mamona’s trac and we’ll work on it as fast as we can :-).

Thanks Aloisio for working with Matchbox-Keyboard and Enlightenment, Lauro for working on the first draft of mamona-input-methods and Tiago Buarque for the applet icons!