Planet maemo

Andrew Flegg

MWKN Weekly News for Monday, 2 Jan 2012

2012-01-02 13:00 UTC  by  Andrew Flegg
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Front Page

Fragmentation of Nokia N9 resources & community

Thomas Perl has posted a couple of articles on the fragmentation of the Nokia N9 community:

"It's really tedious to hunt down information about Harmattan. It's not really MeeGo (and MeeGo Is Dead(tm), anyways) and it's not branded as Maemo, even though it's Maemo. Yeah. It's not really Maemo, but it is. And it's not really MeeGo, but it is branded as such."

"The reason why gPodder 3.0.2, which has been released two weeks ago has not yet made it into Ovi Store is not because I was lazy (in fact, I uploaded the .deb on the same day as the release day, i.e. 2011-12-13) but because it took Ovi Store QA one whole week(!) to realize that the gPodder package isn't optified. Guess what? Optification isn't really needed by Harmattan anymore, and the Ovi Store has passed all previous gPodder releases which have been packaged exactly the same. Apparently they decided it's necessary this time."

This matches your editor's experience as well. Unfortunately, there's no easy solution. It's a real opportunity for someone to step up, gather requirements and make a proposal people could get behind.

Read more (thpmaemo.blogspot.com)
Read more (thpmaemo.blogspot.com)

In this edition (Download)...

  1. Front Page
    • Fragmentation of Nokia N9 resources & community
  2. Applications
    • Extending the life of an N8x0: automatic Skype launcher
    • Applications from n9-apps.com can now be installed using Nokia's MeeScan barcode reader
  3. Development
    • Showing custom services in Harmattan contacts app?
  4. Announcements
    • Map plugin for N9 Gallery now available
    • Nokia Pulse (private location sharing service) now available for N9
Stephen Gadsby

maemo.org Extras Bug Jar 2012.01

2012-01-02 00:02 UTC  by  Stephen Gadsby
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A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-12-26 through 2012-01-01

Click to read 2652 more words
Categories: Extras
Randall Arnold

New Year, New Direction

2012-01-01 18:06 UTC  by  Randall Arnold
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I want to thank WordPress for the very cool blog stats job they did for the 2011 summary.  Saved me a lot of work!

Which is especially good since I’ve been working hard on something new (I know, I know: what’s new in that, right?).  But bear with me!

In a lot of ways I was all over the place in 2011 and want to fix that for 2012.  So for the most part my highly personal writing will occasionally show up at texrat.net.  There will be a few more articles showing up here, mostly Nokia and Qt oriented, but going forward there will be a new home for the technical stuff.  So at some point Tabula Crypticum will no longer be updated.

This isn’t an easy decision, nor is it easy to implement.  I’ve had a lot of fun writing here, and reading the comments, but results were too erratic.  There were either amazing days of 3000+ views or frustrating days of a few accidental visitors.  I had trouble establishing something close to steady readership.

A lot of that of course is being some random, non-famous individual who talks too much.  Where’s the allure in that? 

Categories: Into Outreach
Martin Grimme

Comparison of Camera Phones

2012-01-01 07:21 UTC  by  Martin Grimme
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For two years the N900 was my digital camera. With the mobile phone replacing my digital camera I don't have to carry an extra device with me. Besides that my old digicam is broken and thanks to the N900 I didn't have to buy another one.
However, the good old days of the N900 are gone. Can any of Nokia's new phones keep up with the N900 camera-wise?
Click to read 2262 more words
Categories: camera
Joaquim Rocha

Another year has passed

2011-12-31 18:07 UTC  by  Joaquim Rocha
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Today is the last day of 2011 and it is once again when people look back in time and realize what they have done throughout the year and if they stuck to their promises. I don’t give that much importance to events like new year’s eve or even my birthday but I decided to write a blog post and to think about what happened on 2011.

Click to read 896 more words
Categories: books
Kaj Grönholm

Games for the Next Billion

2011-12-31 12:16 UTC  by  Kaj Grönholm
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Catchy title right? Don't worry, content partly matches to that description... ;)

It seems that I quite often include videos in my blog posts. There is no reason to stray away from that habit now, so here's a video showing a beta version of "Smoke the Bugs!" game on N950 & N8:



By looking at the graphics, effects, dynamic lights etc. what you saw was a pretty average OpenGL (ES 2.0) game, right? Well yes and no... Yes, GLSL shaders have been used for the effects. But no, there is zero lines of OpenGL and in fact also zero lines of C/C++ in the game. It's all QML + GLSL + JavaScript.

To work on current Harmattan & Symbian devices, game uses Qt 4.7 with the shaders plugin. This is an okay-ish platform, as you see from the video: N8@680MHz runs at smooth ~60fps. But I have also smelled, tasted and floated in the sweet velvet of Qt5 and can tell you as a fact that it will be much better. With Qt5 & QtQuick 2.0, applications will get a healthy boost of performance, smoothness and possibility for even better effects.

Here is a short list of improvements QtQuick-based games will gain from Qt5:
- Performance: QML Scene Graph will render everything faster than Qt4 QGraphicsView-based renderer, especially when the amount and complexity of (animated) items rises.
- Performance2: New V8 JavaScript engine performs much better than the JavaScriptCore engine in Qt4. Also thanks to this integration work, there is deeper co-operation between QML and JavaScript.
- Smoothness: Qt5 moves rendering into a separate thread which makes UI feel much smoother.
- Effects: QtQuick 2.0 supports shader effects to make QML UI's much more dynamic. Using shaders with Qt4 is possible with the shader plugin as shown above, but Qt5 native support will be more complete.
- Particles: QtQuick 1.0 contains particles plugin but it's very basic when compared to QtQuick 2.0 particles. No game can survive without particles!
- QML features: There are additions in QML which will suit games very well like SpriteImage for sprite animations and PathAnimation & PathInterpolator to animate along a custom path instead of linear path.
- QtCreator: Had to mention this one still as the work done in QtCreator Qt5 integration, QML debugger & analyzer etc. will improve the developer (that's me) productivity.

Now look at the video again to see what the old 2011 QML looked like, add all the above improvements to it and use your imagination... For me it feels like Qt5 & QtQuick 2.0 can offer a great platform not just for applications but also for games. Billion or two, I don't really care... ;) Happy New Year 2012 Everyone!
Categories: maemo
Thomas Perl

Argh Ovi Store and COBS (and stray .debs in Forums)! ..or: I want my Maemo Extras back

2011-12-27 20:53 UTC  by  Thomas Perl
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Rant mode on (once again). The reason why gPodder 3.0.2, which has been released two weeks ago has not yet made it into Ovi Store is not because I was lazy (in fact, I uploaded the .deb on the same day as the release day, i.e. 2011-12-13) but because it took Ovi Store QA one whole week(!) to realize that the gPodder package isn't optified. Guess what? Optification isn't really needed by Harmattan anymore, and the Ovi Store has passed all previous gPodder releases which have been packaged exactly the same. Apparently they decided it's necessary this time.
Cool, so now I have to modify my packaging, and Marius' maemo-optify isn't in the Madde environment of the Qt SDK (and I'm not even sure if the package would be accepted then).

Click to read 722 more words
Categories: rant
Thomas Perl

Tedious fragmentation (maemo.org / meego.com)

2011-12-26 16:29 UTC  by  Thomas Perl
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Click to read 1099 words
Categories: rant
Kathy Smith

R.I.P. Mo – so what next

2011-12-26 09:41 UTC  by  Kathy Smith
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I've been thinking about a new phone for a few weeks, having realised that my n900 was having charging issues. They came to a head on Friday night when he was unable to charge. I removed the cable, and the usb socket came away with it. So that's that for Mo. I cried a little: I know he was only a piece of technology, but Mo introduced me to so many wonderful people and took me to places I would never have been without him. Besides, I need to find a way to get the data off him with a dead battery!
Click to read 1026 more words
Kathy Smith

R.I.P. Mo – so what next

2011-12-26 09:41 UTC  by  Kathy Smith
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I've been thinking about a new phone for a few weeks, having realised that my n900 was having charging issues. They came to a head on Friday night when he was unable to charge. I removed the cable, and the usb socket came away with it. So that's that for Mo. I cried a little: I know he was only a piece of technology, but Mo introduced me to so many wonderful people and took me to places I would never have been without him. Besides, I need to find a way to get the data off him with a dead battery!
Click to read 1026 more words
Stephen Gadsby

maemo.org Extras Bug Jar 2011.52

2011-12-26 00:02 UTC  by  Stephen Gadsby
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A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-12-19 through 2011-12-25

Click to read 2556 more words
Categories: Extras
Felipe Zimmerle

AppArmor D-Bus Mediations

2011-12-24 03:20 UTC  by  Felipe Zimmerle
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Looking like the SELinux but less boring, the AppArmor is a Linux security module (LSM) which provides mandatory access control (MAC). The first distro to adopt the utilization of AppArmor was SUSE in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and in openSUSE 10.1. It is part of Ubuntu since the version 8.04 and the adoption increase version to version since more profiles are created.

Other software that is part of more and more applications each day is the D-Bus, adopted by GNOME and KDE as an inter-process communication mechanism, the usage of D-Bus allows the communication between different applications. It is used, for example, to provide the communication between a software Core with the UI. Due to the nature of the communication of certain applications (sensible data) is indispensable to have some control about who can acquire some interface or who can listen or send some message.

D-Bus daemon has support to mediate SELinux messages and there is also a D-Bus internal mechanism that has some control over the use of the bus, but none of this is related to AppArmor. There are some experiments that show that it is possible however the necessary patches (Kernel, libapparmor and D-Bus daemon) were not submitted to be part of the respective projects, as explained in the earlier post.

The patches on the experiment enable apparmor parser to understand the tag dbus, as illustrated on the example bellow (line 15). More information about the experiment and the syntax of the file can be seen in: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/apparmor/2011-September/001541.html


/home/zimmerle/hello.py flags=(complain) {
  #include <abstractions/base>

  /usr/bin/python2.7 ix,
  /usr/include/python2.7/pyconfig.h r,
  /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ r,
  /usr/share/pyshared/PIL.pth r,
  /usr/share/pyshared/lazr.restfulclient-0.11.2-nspkg.pth r,
  /usr/share/pyshared/lazr.uri-1.0.2-nspkg.pth r,
  /usr/share/pyshared/pygst.pth r,
  /usr/share/pyshared/pygtk.pth r,
  /usr/share/pyshared/ubuntu-sso-client.pth r,
  /usr/share/pyshared/ubuntuone-client.pth r,

  dbus bar.foo.hello acquire,
}

In order to ensure the functionality of the suggestion made in the post: D-Bus Loadable security module support, I decided to modify the AppArmor D-Bus daemon patches to make them compatible with the suggested model. And it is working like a charm.

The code of the current experiment can be fetched from:

http://cgit.collabora.com/git/user/zimmerle/dbus-apparmor-lsm.git/

Note that in this experiment I had to use the D-Bus internal functions/headers. I made little hacks in order to get it working but apparently, this is a good way to go.

Categories: Collabora
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