As part of my job at INdT, I was responsible for providing a unified solution for hosting the source code for our open source projects, such as QEdje, Carman and the yet to become free, Canola, amongst others.

Yesterday I uploaded a new version of the Canola2 Youtube plugin to maemo extras repository. Youtube has changed the way it references the .flv file, breaking the way we were dealing with it. Kudos to Adriano who's been doing an excelent job maintaining the plugin.

As usual, the source code is available in the Canola2 website and in the Maemo extras repository as well.

Please update your installation by clicking on "Check for updates" button in the Application manager. Big thanks to everyone who reported the issue on our tracker.

Really exciting news!! This wiki page on eLinux.org describes with details the instructions for running Google's Android on OMAP based platforms, such as the Nokia Internet Tablets. There are also threads on Android Internals and Linux OMAP mailing lists.

Some pictures taken from the wiki page:

It's been quite a long time with not even a update in my blog. Shame on me!!! Since last December, lots of things happened and if I tried to tell everything, you would be surely bored to death. So here goes some highlights of the last 3 1/2 months:

56 geeks poster complete
Originally uploaded by ExtraLife


View the complete set.

We're running against the clock to get the Canola 2 release ready by the 12th. It has been a week since I'm working on providing the proper debian packages for all the dependencies, so the installation process can be as smooth as possible. After having coded a monster script that automatically builds and signs the Maemo-EFL packages (including sources) for Gregale, Bora and Chinook on both x86 and armel targets, I started to upload the packages to the extras-devel repository.

If you follow the maemo-efl-devel mailing list, you may have noticed an unusual traffic on the past few days. If you don't follow that list, I strongly discourage you to do it. Things will only get worse until Wednesday, when the final packages will be uploaded to the extras repository.



But it is not just building the packages. We also need to test them to ensure they're working on the devices. As you can see in the picture above, packages for Bora and Chinook are OK, but the Gregale ones aren't. Time to go back to work and figure out what I'm doing wrong...

A while ago we were curious about how would be the performance of the new version of Canola running on a Nokia 770 device. After a whole day building packages and compiling stuff, our mate Renato Chencarek was finally able to make it run on the device. We thought it also deserved a video, just like others we posted.



It's a Nokia 770 device running OS2006 (gregale) and you can see it performs surprisingly well! Actually, it feels like the performance is better than on N800/N810. As we don't have that damn tearing effect, you can see the UI elements just move smoothly. Unfortunately, the screen is not as sensitive as the N800 or N810, so some tasks like dragging and panning will demand more effort than in the other devices.

It seems lots of people got interested in Reinteract. Owen Taylor has started a new project page and integrated the patches people sent him. Guess what? The maemo patch was integrated to the branch master as well. It was slightly different from the first patch I provided in my previous post since I had forgotten to add support for hildon file chooser dialogs. We also agreed provide a way for the user to select which UI to run, the standard or the hildon one.

I was able to run Reinteract in a N800 device and it performs really well. In a small talk I had with Osvaldo and Luciano, they showed interest to provide packages for Reinteract in next PyMaemo releases. Great news!

By the way, I have to say: Python rocks! Git rocks even more!

I followed a couple of posts today in Planet Gnome and read about Reinteract. This project is freaking awesome!!! Watch the screencast. It worths every minute. Reinteract is something that fits like a glove in Maemo. I've started playing with it a bit and a few minutes later I got something really interesting:



Wooohooo!!! The patch is really small, about 60 lines. I have not tested it a real device, but it should perform well. Any one would like to try??