Planet maemo
This beta version brings
- Multicache Calculation help - AGTL tries to extract calculations from the cache description and you'll be asked to enter the missing values.
- Much improved interface and a dark theme (optional). On the OLED-Display of the N9, this saves power and it's a great for night geocaching.
- Favorite Geocaches
- Image view
- Website parser update - AGTL searches for an updated website parser when you launch it.
- and several other features.
- Offline Maps
- Attributes
- Augmented Reality View (I disabled this in the current version due to some bugs)
- Handling of archived caches (Currently the "archived" status of a geocache is not shown anywhere)
Please report bugs to github and only to github (otherwise I may lose track of the bugs). Please try to provide an output log of the program run. You can start AGTL by running agtl-meego in the terminal. If you run agtl-meego > errorlog.txt 2>&1 it will create a file errorlog.txt containing valuable information for bug hunting.
As always, donations are very welcome. AGTL will stay free (as in beer) also when it hits the Ovi store. Maybe I'll add a donate version to the store (with exactly the same features/support as the free version).
Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) – it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!
Want to read some of your favorite articles on Wikipedia? But what if you don’t have any internet available for some reason? Or maybe you just want to save up money or battery charge for keeping internet connection.
Evopedia will allow you to download an archive of all Wikipedia articles and read them online, optimized for the N900 screen size.
Archives of Wikipedia for many different languages are available. A few WiktionaryWiktionary archives can be downloaded as well. A demo archive with 999 articles is available under the name “small”.
Note: Most archives take up more than 100 mB of space on your MyDocs, make sure you have space.
As soon as you download the archive(s), you can search for any article from the main screen. Since all archives are stored locally, the search is very fast. Pick any article and it will be opened in your Web application, and easy to read, thanks to optimized view.
One and only problem I had with Evopedia is that most archives are downloaded via BitTorrent, which takes up a lot of system resources and sometimes can be very unresponsive. Maemo’s watchdog reboots the phone in such occasions and this sometimes messes up the file system. In case if you get a problem with MyDocs mounted read-only, run this as root and reboot the phone (don’t worry, you won’t lose any files):
fsck.vfat -a /dev/mmcblk0p1
Apart from that, Evopedia provides a nice and easy way to read Wikipedia articles without having any internet connection whatsoever.
Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) – it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!
Note: The steps we go through this how-to include modifying low-level system files. Changing the loading bar is done at your risk, do not attempt if you think that you might mess something up or if you don’t understand some parts of this how-to.
Want to make your boot sequence more cooler? Maemo allows you to change the loading bar that appears at startup.
First, we want to go root:
sudo gainroot
Next, backup the files we want to change:
cd /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon
mkdir /home/user/MyDocs/Bar_Backup
cp indicator_update* /home/user/MyDocs/Bar_Backup
Now, for the fun part. Create your own loading bar images. You may use the originals as a base, you would want 8 PNG images with a size of 192×48, alpha-channel is optional. You can look at thisthis custom loading bar set, for example. Name them all as indicator_update№.png, with № going from 1 to 8, in the order you want the images to appear.
Drop all the images to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon
cp -f [your images] /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/
Once done, try rebooting your phone and checking out if all went smoothly.
Enjoy!
Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) – it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!
Sometimes you just really need for a certain command to be executed every X minutes. Or maybe you could use something that will notify you to check your bags every hour. Not a problem, Alarmed will help you with that.
Alarmed is a little GUI app that allows you to schedule any sort of event to be done at a certain time, pretty much like cron, an utility well known to every *nix administrator.
Install alarmed:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install alarmed
Once launched, you’ll see a screen with all your currently scheduled events and buttons for creating new events, removing and editing current events.
Creating a new event is simple with a user-friendly interface of Alarmed: press a button, chose what exactly will be done at that event and schedule a time.
Easy and effective, now you don’t need to constantly remind yourself to walk the dog or switch your profile to silent when you’re at a conference.
Previously in this space we saw how the bright future of Epiphany looked like, and vague promises about incremental steps towards it were done. A month later, Epiphany 3.3.4 is out there, so let’s see how well we’ve done.
Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) – it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!
Do you like strategy games? Well, then you probably have heard of “The Battle for Wesnoth”, a popular free software turn based strategy game with a strong, Tolkienesque fantasy setting. But did you know that there is a complete port of this PC game for Maemo?
The game is currently available in Extras, you can find it in the Games category.
sudo gainroot
apt-get install wesnoth
Note that the game is pretty large and will consume about 240~ Mb of memory on your /opt Unpacking a large package can also take a lot of time, so make sure you have enough battery charge.
Optionally install the music files. (Not recommended as this will take up 100 Mb more of memory and will slow down the game a bit):
apt-get install wesnoth-music
Once installed, you can launch the game from your applications menu or with
wesnoth
Loading times can be a drag, but apart from that and a few resolution issues with menus, the game is completely playable. Add-ons, Multiplayer, Singleplayer campaigns are all functional. I was able to both finish one of the mainline campaigns and play co-op survival on the official server without any trouble, right with an N900 in my hand.
The Battle for Wesnoth is definitely a game every N900 gamer should take a look at. So install the package and dive into the world of dwarves, elves and orcs!
We will be shortly releasing a developer edition of MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan 1.2 beta (feel free to crack a joke v 1.2 here) to developers with Nokia N950 Developer Device. The goal of this early access release is to enable developers to verify that their applications do not exhibit any regressions in the new platform version.
This release will be available as a one-click-flasher for Nokia N950 Developer Device. In other words, in order to participate in this beta you need to already have a Nokia N950 Developer Device.
We have done our best to ensure full binary compatibility from Harmattan 1.0 and 1.1 (and 1.1.1 Arabic) to Harmattan 1.2, but we want to offer developers the opportunity to test and verify their apps on the real thing before actual global roll out of the consumer release. There will be also small changes between beta and final consumer release, mostly focusing on ensuring release robustness and performance.
There is at least one known change in the Harmattan 1.2 (and 1.1.1 Arabic) that is impacting developers: The system font change. See blog posts The default font will change -- to bigger and better (18th Dec 2011), Font change part 2: playing with the line height (21st dec 2011) and Font change part 3: Flexible UI layouts (5th Jan 2012) for more details.
More information on the release features and fixes, distribution and Nokia N9 support will be available later. The Nokia N950 Developer Device program was closed in the summer, and thus no new entrants are accepted.
Community Council meeting: time to fold Harmattan back into maemo.org?
A Maemo Community Council meeting took place Thursday last week, with RM Bauer and Momcilo Majic from the council; Niels Breet from Nemein and Matti Airas from Nokia.
Although no firm policy decisions were made, some discussion about Bugzilla upgrades (3.4, which bugs.maemo.org runs, is going EOL) and Downloads repository issues was had.
The interesting bits cropped up with Rob's objection to apps.formeego.org moving to the maemo.org infrastructure. Niels Breet highlighted that moving off meego.com "this quarter" was sensible; and Matti Airas expanded on that:
"we might start to promote maemo.org as the backup for meego.com as the latter will be going away pretty soon. we might start to promote maemo.org as the backup for meego.com as the latter will be going away pretty soon. and with that move (and with apps.formeego.org using maemo.org facilities in the future) I don't see maemo.org being shut down any time soon. but that's not a promise."
Re-reading the discussion, it seems there may have been a communication problem - with both Matti and Rob talking, presumably, about the Harmattan aspects of meego.com; rather than the defunct netbook and tablet sections which Nokia has no interest in.
In your editor's opinion, this would be a good move to solve the fragmentation issues which Thomas Perl has raised recently. Obviously such a move would be need to coordinated carefully, but the opportunity could be taken to drop the antiquated bits of maemo.org (e.g. Brainstorm) and consolidate under-the-covers technology around Downloads/Packages/AppsForMeego.
Unfortunately, participation ahead of time wasn't possible due to poor communication about the meeting happening ahead of time. A follow-up meeting is going to be scheduled within the next few weeks to discuss the real policy issues that were only touched on in last weeks meeting. Hopefully we'll know ahead of time this time.
Read more (mg.pov.lt)In this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Community Council meeting: time to fold Harmattan back into maemo.org?
- Development
- Aegis "open mode" discussion for Harmattan moves to Talk
- PR1.2 beta release for N950 coming soon
- SDL and PyGame available for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan
- Community
- Spam comments on the maemo.org wiki
- Announcements
- Command-line/arbitrary service sharing for Harmattan
- TV-out control for Nokia N9 and N950
Are you in need of special symbols while in X Terminal? Don’t want to bring up the special characters menu all the time? Well, here’s an easy way to customize the special characters line on the bottom of your X Terminal window.
Open up your XTerm and use those commands to modify the characters line:
Note: Run these commands as a regular user, not root.
Modify the key labels:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/xterm/key_labels -t list –list-type=string “[keylabels]”
Replace keylabels with the set of labels you want to use, separated by colons without any whitespaces. You’re free to use any text, just don’t use labels too long. The maximum safe amount of labels you can use is 7, if you use more, they will all go to a side-menu. For example, if we are to add pipe, input and tilde symbols you can use this: Tab,Esc,PgUp,PgDn,|,>,~
Next, set the characters that those labels will correspond to:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/xterm/keys -t list –list-type=string “[character values]”
Replace character values with the corresponding values. You can look up which values respond to which characters by looking at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51 file (do it as a regular user, so you don’t modify it by accident)
If we follow the example for pipe, input and tilde characters, we shall use these values: Tab,Escape,Page_Up,Page_Down,bar,greater,asciitilde
Restart your X Terminal, so the fullscreen button goes where it should go and enjoy!
Missed out a few articles and posts this week? Don’t worry, here’s a quick summary on all this week’s content for you.
Don’t want to be disturbed by unwanted calls? Check out Callerx, a simple app that will solve this problem for you:
?Callerx: a simple and effective call blocking solution
Learn how to add a Reboot button to your powerkey menu for rebooting your N900 safely and easily:
?[How-To] Adding a “Reboot” button to your powerkey menu
Customize your Conversations and Contacts app by following our instructions:
?[How-To] Customizing your SMS and Chat interface
That’s it for this week! Stay tuned for more Maemo Apps, Games, Themes, Wallpapers and Hacks next one!
Related Posts:
While the first week back in Vienna after the holidays was sad for a Maemoista walking around in the city (aka Admazing (sic) Everyday), there was also enough time to release gPodder 3.0.3 (already in AFM - thanks, testers!), catch up with local Maemoistas at the Hack-A-N9 and work on gotoVienna, the Camerra hack and even more post-3.0.3 gPodder goodness. But one after the other..
gotoVienna is a public transport live ticker app by kelvan. In the days after meeting at the Hack-A-N9, we implemented a nice line number input UI that makes it easy to quickly get live information for a given line - the code is in Git, and as a side-product, merlin1991 has implemented a stdeb/distutils extension to inject an Aegis manifest and create the digsigsums file - check it out if you want to build Python packages for Harmattan without Scratchbox/the SDK.
Next up is the Camerra hack, a quick'n'dirty "app" that monitors the Volume+ hardware button and (when the Camera UI is in the foreground) simulates a click on the shutter button, effectively making the Volume+ work as a shutter button. Ideal for all your self-portraying needs! It's called a hack, because it uses the likes of xprop and xresponse directly - a "proper" implementation would use QmSystem, XTest and Xlib from C/C++, just in case someone feels like spending time on rewriting something that Works For Me ;) There's a support thread on t.m.c, the Python and PySide powered code is available on Github, and the package is available on the website and (hopefully soon) also on Apps For MeeGo.
As for the post-3.0.3 gPodder goodness: Episode list filters (bug 1527) are currently being developed, a first patch is already written, and screenshot 1 and screenshot 2 show you how it currently looks. Don't forget to report any bugs and feature requests over at bugs.gpodder.org - don't keep them for yourself! :p
And now for the next two weeks for something completely different (i.e. Uni semester wrap-ups, exams, lab interviews and lab exercises).. ;) Enjoy the newly released stuff!