Note (edit): Some people prefer me to call IMAP’s Push-Email “notifications”. That’s fine of course. Just replace “Push” with “notification”.
I'm using Mercurial to track changes in my latest project, a GTK mapping application. I couldn't find a build for my N800, so I made one myself. <strike>I'll host a .deb until I get around to putting it on the garage or creating a repository.</strike>
Edit: I've started a garage project.
To install python2.5-runtime I needed to add repository.maemo.org to the application catalogue to satisfy some dependencies. Tested with OS2008 beta on an N800 only.
print "This module resides at:", __file__
import os
path = os.path.dirname(__file__)
path = os.path.dirname(__file__)
image_file = os.path.join(path, "images", "foo.png")
img = gtk.Image()
img.set_from_file(image_file)
#! /usr/bin/env python
from mediabox.App import App
app = App()
app.run()
I am so pumped for this … 10 more days!
Marcelo has also published a nice behind the scenes look at the design process for the photo viewer as well recently which looks like one of the most exciting changes.
Technorati Tags:
Canola, Internet Tablet, N-Series, 770, N800, N810, Nokia, open, podcast, Streaming, UPnP
Maemo Mapper 2.2 has been released and includes official support for the OS2008 platform!
It’s been a while since I’ve used Maemo Mapper to be honest and I really like what I see here. Setup is MUCH simpler and you can add additional mapping data services with a single click on start-up. POI can be downloaded very easily as well from the menu which is a very welcome addition.
I’m going to have to play more with route planning as this looks like a great and free option to the Wayfinder navigation subscription. Wayfinder still seems like a simpler (though slower and more expensive) option for point to point directions, but I love the idea of using Google Maps for my route planning…
Technorati Tags:
770, Google Maps, GPS, Internet Tablet, Maemo, N-Series, N800, N810, Nokia, OS2008, Travel, Maemo Mapper
Eager to test new Canola? Check http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/index2.html!
Our designers did this wonderful piece of work in order to us developers check what/how to do things and now they made it available to everyone so you can start to wonder how it would be to use it 
As Marcelo said in his blog, this is a teaser, not the real product, so you might expect some different bits here and there, we’ll fix these issues as we find them.
Also, for those that looked at the website and thought “ah, not much compared to the previous version”, don’t understand this release as a feature release, but instead as the foundations that we’ll build upon and then release new feature releases. It was a huge amount of work to improve underlying system, rewrite everything in Pyhton, write bindings to new libraries, rethink how some things should be done.
For those Free and Open Source developers: unfortunately we’ll keep it closed for now (same talk as before), but at least much, much more of our work is open source that you can already use and benefit from our improvements: The whole graphical ui is based on EFL, media scanner is based on lightmediascanner, UPnP will be based on BRisa, video player is MPlayer…
You might have noticed that OS2008 can now backup and restore the names of the packages that you have installed. The Application Manager can take that list and install them all at once. The catalogue configuration of the Application Manager is also backed up and restored, of course.
There is one (small?) snag, though: the pre-configured catalogues are not backed up. This seems to be the right thing to do since we can assume that the new image has a better idea of what the pre-configured catalogues should be than the backup. Unfortunately, the maemo Extras catalogue is pre-configured as “disabled”, and thus, since it is not included in a backup, you always have to enable it explicitly after flashing.
Let me say that again: after flashing, you need to enable the maemo Extras catalogue before being able to restore packages from it. Unfortunately, the first-boot procedure doesn’t give you the opportunity to do this. What will probably work quite well is to perform the restore on first-boot to get all your settings back, but to not accept the offer to install the applications right now. Then open the Application Manager manually, enable the maemo Extras catalogue, and select “Tools > Restore applications…”.
That’s an accident, of course, it’s not by design. Sorry for that. We’ll figure out something for the next release. The easiest thing is to just include the “maemo Extras” repository in the backup, I guess. But then again, why not include all pre-configured catalgues? What do you think?
(If you read this in Planet maemo, the formatting is farked up. Please read the original.)
I just documented TMut. I think this documentation will help E-mail client developers who are planning to use Tinymail a lot. Some of them will probably take a look at how I did TMut and now they’ll have some documentation about how and why I did certain things.
Also the client developers who’ll start their E-mail client based on TMut will enjoy reading the documentation. If somebody wants to create a client based on TMut, and if for that we need to make TMut a static library in stead, just ask of course (or just send me the patch that adapts the Makefile.am for this).
You can enjoy my normal English as Tinne is at this moment sleeping and I don’t want to wake her up to correct my poor English. The language purists will have to wait for her language correcting until at least tomorrow, or correct it themselves (it’s a wiki, go ahead). Perhaps we should go over all of Tinymail’s and TMut’s documentation once more. It has been a while since we last did a massive spelling correction campaign.
Anyway, here are the most interesting added subjects:
Have fun
I’ve updated the maemo port of Exaile to version 0.2.11. There are not many visible changes, apart from alphabetic separators in the collection list. I now include the bytecode-compiled pyc files, so startup time should be reduced slightly. It still takes a bit long to start up though. I’ve been using this for about a month now and it seems to be stable enough.
This will probably be the last release for OS2007. I’ll make a release for OS2008 once I have that installed and working on my N800.
I spent the whole weekend for working with our kitchen (and some time at the night for playing with the new PS3, but no time yet to watch the new Blu-Ray movies I have).
Our kitchen repair has finally reached the point that it is again usable. The new floor (with ceramic tiles and heating pipes) is installed, refrigerator is installed and cats are happy to get food on their table. Next thing to do is some finishing touches to the walls, some Wisa Deco panels needs to get installed. Replacing the refrigerator was unbelievably hard work.
I paid back some sleep deprivation on Saturday-Sunday night -about 11.5 hours of sleep. And after that I still felt sleepy.
I’ve just finished watch Canola 2 teaser (Flash or Html) and, folks, looks like we’ve got a killer application here! The new interface seems very promising.
The video (here) shows Canola 2 running on a 770 equipped with OS2007HE and the results are amazingly fluid, things should be even better on N8×0. Beside
Canola could really be a killing application for Internet Tablets N810, even if the single MicroSD on N810 could somehow be a threshold, 8GB MSD aren’t easy to find yet). Also being able to handle multimedia contents in such an easy and comfortable way could really help making more people aware of what IT can be “useful” for, beside simply accessing the internet.
Portable media players are another kinda interesting market. What about an Internet Tablet which can be made in a portable media player with a single touch of your finger? Scree real estate isn’t really a problem on IT family, as well as definition and brightness, after all.
We only have to wait 9 more days!
Comments welcome… 
katoob-maemo.png
So the svn repository now contains what should be katoob 0.5.9 (Hopefully). Which can now run under maemo.
modestSome information here; you might also be interested in the GUADEC Presentation I did about Modest in Birmingham.
Now, there are a couple of problems with e-mail, in particular with mobile email, but there's nothing we can't solve (I'm a born optimist!). Let's list some of the common problems and what to do about them:
So -- my first post. Stay tuned!
Hi all,
+
I tested SDIO GPS with a OMAP1710 and it works. Many phones and internet tablets are based on this platform. The steps below show the procedures I’ve done:
== KERNEL SIDE ==
Compile a new kernel from linux-omap with some additional features activated.
Device Drivers ---><*> MMC/SD card support ---> SDIO UART/GPS class support
Boot your device with this feature.
Maemo-omap1710:~# modprobe sdio_uart
Plug your SDIO card and the message below will be printed.
mmc_slot (GPIO 193) is now openmmci-omap mmci-omap.1: cover is now closedmmci-omap mmci-omap.1: command timeout (CMD8)mmc0: new SDIO card at address f111
The entry /dev/ttySDIO0 should be created.
== USER SIDE ==
I’m using GPSd to test it. Download the last version, compile and install on my device using scratchbox.
Start the GPS daemon
Maemo-omap1710:~# gpsd -N -n -D 2 /dev/ttySDIO0 &Maemo-omap1710:~# gpsd: launching (Version 2.34)gpsd: listening on port 2947gpsd: running with effective group ID 0gpsd: running with effective user ID 0gpsd: opening GPS data source at '/dev/ttySDIO0'gpsd: speed 4800, 8N1gpsd: garmin_gps not active.gpsd: gpsd_activate(1): opened GPS (4)gpsd: SiRF packet seen when NMEA expected.gpsd: FV 0x06: Firmware version: MEW-05-00-030627Wgpsd: FV 0x06: Firmware version: 2.4.02.02 0800003f21
Get you position:
Maemo-omap1710:~# gpspipe -rgpsd: client connect on 7gpsd: client(0) turned on raw modeGPSD,R=1$GPRMC,000004,V,0000.0000,S,00000.0000,W,0.0000,0.000,090602,,*3C$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*32$GPRMC,000005,V,0000.0000,S,00000.0000,W,0.0000,0.000,090602,,*3D$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*32$GPRMC,000006,V,0000.0000,S,00000.0000,W,0.0000,0.000,090602,,*3E$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*32$GPRMC,000007,V,0000.0000,S,00000.0000,W,0.0000,0.000,090602,,*3F$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*32$GPRMC,000008,V,0000.0000,S,00000.0000,W,0.0000,0.000,090602,,*30$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*32
The filesystem used is based on Maemo.
I’ve just finished watching Canola 2 teaser (Flash or Html) and, folks, looks like we’ve got a killer application here! The new interface seems very promising.
The video (here) shows Canola 2 running on a 770 equipped with OS2007HE and the results are amazingly fluid, things should be even better on N8×0. Beside
Canola could really be a killing application for Internet Tablets N810, even if the single MicroSD on N810 could somehow be a threshold, 8GB MSD aren’t easy to find yet). Also being able to handle multimedia contents in such an easy and comfortable way could really help making more people aware of what IT can be “useful” for, beside simply accessing the internet.
Portable media players are another kinda interesting market. What about an Internet Tablet which can be made in a portable media player with a single touch of your finger? Scree real estate isn’t really a problem on IT family, as well as definition and brightness, after all.
We only have to wait 9 more days!
Comments welcome…
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
This is my Arabic related TODO list for maemo. It's my personal one not the Nokia employee one :-)
* katoob should be fully functional (I'm learning here). Actually I did more work today and I guess it's fine.
* Package and publish some Arabic fonts (I know there's one provided by the browser team).
* See what can be done regarding input (Low priority. Sorry to say that I don't like the HIM plugin interface).
* Check arabeyes.org apps. Is there anything useful and needs "porting" ?
* glibc/x11 Arabic locale ?
* Any suggestions ?
I'll not translate the UI for 3 reasons:
* I'm not of a translator.
* The license you agree to while downloading the OS image prevents me from doing that.
* Because we are using logical IDs in the code, we will f*** up the UI unless all of the strings are translated.
I am not sure which one is the beast and which one the beauty. But I think both midgard-python and midgard-core may be both :)
Python seems to be the second Midgard's scripting language now. Two weeks ago I wrote about initial usable bindings work, and today there's much more:
Midgard Replicator is not yet fully implemented for midgard-python because it simply doesn't exist in Midgard2 ( aka trunk ). Reason why it hasn't been moved there is fact that replicator uses language specific SQL queries while Midgard2 itself uses something which you could name "built in" languages support. Whichis nothing more like languages persistant cache in details.
You can take a look at midgard-python test examples and compile module if needed. And I think I should start count days to first Midgard2 alpha release, and first python applications for gnome or maemo :)
I am not sure which one is the beast and which one the beauty. But I think both midgard-python and midgard-core may be both :)
Python seems to be the second Midgard's scripting language now. Two weeks ago I wrote about initial usable bindings work, and today there's much more:
Midgard Replicator is not yet fully implemented for midgard-python because it simply doesn't exist in Midgard2 ( aka trunk ). Reason why it hasn't been moved there is fact that replicator uses language specific SQL queries while Midgard2 itself uses something which you could name "built in" languages support. Whichis nothing more like languages persistant cache in details.
You can take a look at midgard-python test examples and compile module if needed. And I think I should start count days to first Midgard2 alpha release, and first python applications for gnome or maemo :)
For maemo software development, many people seem to use a bunch of terminal windows inside and outside Scratchbox. Some alternatives exist, such as Laika, the Maemo-plugin for Eclipse, and work is apparently underway for Anjuta as well.
Anyway, I've been coding using Emacs for almost a decade, so obviously I'd like to integrate it with the Maemo/Scratchbox-environment as well - and yes, it is possible to do the following:
First, make sure the same source code can be reached using the same path both inside and outside Scratchbox, by using symlinks, for example:
$ ln -s /scratchbox/users/djcb/home/djcb/src/my-app /home/djcb/src/my-app
;; compile inside scratchbox
(defun scratchbox-c-mode-compile ()
(interactive)
(compile (concat "scratchbox make -C "
default-directory)))
(define-key c-mode-base-map (kbd "<f8>") 'scratchbox-c-mode-compile)
Now, what's a blog entry without some screenshot? Here's one, running Emacs 23 (from CVS) inside Scratchbox - unrelated to what discussed above, but a nice picture anyway :)
Obligatory dot-emacs link. Happy hacking!
I’ve made a new release of Exaile for maemo 4.0 (i.e. OS2008, chinook). This drops a bunch of backward compatibility patches needed for OS2007, and takes advantage of some gtk 2.10 features. Also, there was a bug in the gtk shipped with OS2007 that prevented activating items in the sidebar. This has gone away, so now there are more playlist actions available.
Note that the previous release won’t work on OS2008 because the id3lib gstreamer element is called id3demux in OS2008.
If you are in need of a player that handles Ogg Vorbis, m4a and mp3 (among others) on OS2008 and has decent playlist management features and you are willing to put up with a slightly slow and fat app then Exaile for maemo may be for you. 
I just got a package of photographs that my mom had taken while she was visiting me during/after my surgery…
I had forgotten about this one. Even in my sorry state, I was still looking for laughs.
As you can see, the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet made it onto the cover of Time Magazine‘s Best Inventions of 2007 issue.
Ok, stop all of that laughing! It could happen.
Really…
Hey, now…
Today Finland is celebrating 90th birthday of the Republic, and so it is appropriate to write about how things are better in Sweden, where I'm visiting the first Scandinavian Free Software Conference.
The example this time is computer usage in trains. While VR has only grudgingly added some power outlets to long distance trains, SJ's X2000 trains have them for every seat.
And even better, there is onboard internet with an updating map of the train's position:
Unfortunately the train position is embedded in the map image and can't be read programmatically. It would make for a nice, specialized GeoClue position provider...
Technorati Tags: finland, public transport, wifi, railway, sweden
http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=12/2007#04
Written on my new Asus 701 PC, this diary entry compares the N810, Asus mini-laptop and the last, great Psions.
"[...] It's a nice little device, and a bargain for less than 220 quid, but the software lets it down. There's some promise in the simplified interface, but little things like confusing set-up of wireless LAN access (there are two icons in the status bar: one for configuration only, one for status of wifi & ethernet connections); the use of big, heavyweight sub-optimal applications like Amarok and the lack of optimisation for the screen estate. [...]"
Maemo's Hildon desktop often gets a lot of stick, but it could be worse - see the Eee...
Read more on my diary.
Here are my notes from updating to OS2008 for getting root access via ssh and taking an early snapshot of the image filesystem with rsync:
[17:03 today] <juergbi> pvanhoof: i’m reading email with a vala tinymail client now :)
I added initial support for the built-in Media Player. It’s untrivial to get everything working properly as the FileManager, the Metalayer Crawler, and the Media Player are all close source applications and their behaviour is not really documented anywhere.
The change log:
Known issues:
The Crawler did fill in the artist etc. for my ogg files at one point, but I don’t know why. If you have any hints for these issues, I’m all ears :)
PS. The MP now plays oggs with Theora video and Vorbis audio too :)
You may already know that several crazy people modified RS-MMC slot in 770 and hacked inside full SD card or mini/micro SD card adapter. For such people there is now kernel which supports SDHC cards so storage above 4GB is now possible with 770. For more details see http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/#sdhc and ITT thread http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?p=106244#post106244
I came up with something in my experiments where I needed to parse a comma separated list to vector of floats.
I googled the Internet and found more examples for other languages than for C (there are numerous examples around and mine may not be the best one), but I decided that maybe I’ll put the C how-to to my blog since there are number of places where you could need it, for example when writing some application for Maemo. For example if you have your configuration in an XML-file and want to describe RGBA -color in Cairo compatible format, for example you have this inside mycolor-tag:
1, 0.6, 1, 0.7
You can obtain the mycolor-tag from the xml file with libxml2 with ease (and there is tons of documentation and examples how to use libxml2, for example my and Kate’s EFIS -project uses it to parse configuration files, if you want know how to do that, please go to the Katix EFIS project page on garage.maemo.org and have a look), but now I’ll tell you one way how to get the numbers. Here is one way to do it:
Little example:
char *csv="1, 0.6, 1, 0.7";
double mycolor[4];
...
parse_csvf(csv, 4, mycolor);
...
And then the parsing can then be done as follows:
void parse_csvf(char *csv, int len, double *list){
int place=0;
int slen = strlen(csv);
int i;
int itemcounter=0;
char item[255]={0};
int overflow=0;
double fitem=0;
for( i=0;i<slen ;i++ ){
if ( csv[i]>='0' && csv[i]<='9' || csv[i]=='.' ){
item[itemcounter++]=csv[i];
} else if ( csv[i]==',' ){
fitem=0;
item[itemcounter++]=0;
fitem = atof( item );
list[place++]=fitem;
if( place>=len ) {
overflow=1;
break;
}
item[0]=0;
itemcounter=0;
}
}
if(overflow==0){
item[itemcounter++]=0;
fitem = atof(item);
list[place++]=fitem;
}
}
You could maybe use some helper function from some higher level library, but here is one way how to do it. And you might also end up with a lot cleaner-looking solution if you used C++. However, this is C and many Maemo-programs are written in C. My older C-versions used more than one for-loop, this does the parsing in single pass and might be faster.
Trying out a posting from MaemoWordPy on the N810. The keyboard certainly is nice. Still a lot of work to be done in porting apps over from previous versions though. I miss my home screen apps.
Calendar and contacts support still doesn’t seem to cross to the phone at all. There is no calendar app built into OS2008 still. Contacts don’t sync from my N95 to the N810 either. In an ideal world I would be able to use the N810 for everything, even voice calls and sending and receiving SMS messages, without having to take my handset out of my backpack.
him-arabic.png
HIM Arabic plugin is on its way.
The code is available from my svn repository
svn co http://home.foolab.org/svn/projects/him-arabic/trunk/ him-arabic
* The code is UGLY. A lot of the functionality is still missing.
* No packages yet. I'll create them but my cold doesn't help much :-)
* The above screenshot is for scratchbox not for the actual device. I didn't try yet to run it on the device.
* You will also need an Arabic font. I packaged one here: ftp://foolab.org/pub/apt/pool/arabic/t/ttf-kacst/ttf-arabic-kacstbook_1.6.2+mry-1.0.1_all.deb
I know there's one provided by the browser team. It was me who did the packaging for it but I'll be providing multiple fonts soon so ttf-arabic is now a virtual package.
Several requests for OGG in Internet Tablets, but no definitive answer why not.
Now there is an answer: According to Nokia, Ogg is “proprietary technology” and they fear that it is “encumbered”. The reasoning behind this appears to be “risk of submarine patents”.
Which is curious, since Nokia is one of the supporters of software patents in Europe. So do they like software patents or not? It’s not clear. This particular choice of OGG being risky is also curious, since Linux, Gnome and Mozilla and other software foundations of Maemo Internet Tablets are IMHO equally at risk of being plastered with submarine patents.
There are other companies happily selling OGG-capable hardware and software. Why is (e.g.) Samsung not afraid of the very risk that Apple and Nokia fear?
So, what is the problem with OGG? The whole explanation doesn’t add up. And the way we handle patents still sucks.
It’s lovely to see Nokia embracing “Web 2.0″…
You can participate too, with a related issue. Help convince Nokia to provide out-of-the-box support for Ogg Vorbis:
According to Nokia’s Ari Jaaksi, some time ago, “There’s nothing technical that prevents it. However, the 770 is a consumer device. The challenge is that there is not much [Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora] content right now.“.
I hope Wikipedia qualifies as “content”, not to mention personal music collections.
Meanwhile, the intrepid Tuomas Kulve has released a new version of ogg-support for maemo that enables the built-in media player to play Ogg Vorbis files. He notes, “It’s untrivial to get everything working properly as the FileManager, the Metalayer Crawler, and the Media Player are all close source applications and their behaviour is not really documented anywhere.” Hopefully this situation will change.
See also:
tablet-encode v2.15 is now available to download, making it even easier to convert your videos to a format suitable for the Nokia Internet Tablets.
The primary enhancement in this release is the addition of a simple GUI mode, in addition to the full-power of the command line from previous versions:
![[Selecting an input video]](http://mediautils.garage.maemo.org/images/gui1.png "Selecting an input video")
The GUI is entirely optional: if you have the gtk2-perl bindings installed it will be opened if you don't specify any command line options. You can also get a progress bar up, if you pass --gui in along with your command line options. This is particularly suitable when putting tablet-encode in to your "Send To" menu.
There are a number of other small enhancements, thanks to all those who gave input or contributed patches. Full details are in the change log.
After many, many… did I say many? sleepless nights finishing the new Canola version, some guys at the office were like this:
The actor is Kenneth, our little danish fellow.
I am developing hardly Maemo WordPy so the next version (0.6) is a great application for blogging. To even be much better than most blogging software that can be found on the desktop 
When you are in your computer and you think “I am going to write an article on my blog”, you leave the computer and you are going to write to the tablet because Maemo WordPy offers you a few advantages that no other software doesn’t offer, then I will think “Eh Maemo WordPy finally is a good software”.
After these thoughts, I am going to present a feature that will be availably in Maemo WordPy 0.6. This one is image edition. Maemo WordPy will be able to edit live images, some of its characteristics are:
There is a video available in youtube showing how this works: Image handling in Maemo WordPy.
I don’t like flash videos here, but the original ogg/theora video (propietary? :)) is 7 Mb, and the server doesn’t want more than 500kb files.
The video is somewhat slow but it’s for the way of recording it, that was some tricky. In the device the most operations in the image handling are fast.
Please comment what options you would add to the image handling in Maemo WordPy. Or how that could be improved. Now is the perfect time.
There will be many changes more in Maemo WordPy 0.6 when it is launched, but I wanted to write this article to report on this feature before tomorrow it is launched Canola2 and it takes all the protagonism
Technorati Tags: maemo, wordpy, maemo-wordpy, n800, n810, 770, internet tablets, wordpress
Igalia and Dirk-Jan C. Binnema from Nokia just announced the availability of Modest’s first public beta. You can find the one-click install link at their announcements.
That means that you don't have to compile things yourself anymore¸ but simply click & install - hurray!
Some important notes:
In a previous blog entry, I already discussed some of the features modest offers. I think it's pretty cool. Maybe not as cool as Canola2, but definitely a lot better for reading/writing email :-)
Remember, modest is 100% open source software, released under a BSD-like license. It's not perfect, but we're working hard to make it the best mobile e-mail client. Patches are welcome, as are suggestions -- post them on the feature request tracker. Even bugs are welcome in Maemo Bugzilla, and make sure you use Communication/Modest (don't use Communications/Email, that's for the stock email client). Specificy as clearly as possible the problem, and how we could reproduce it, thanks.
In some future blog entries I will discuss various cool features in Modest, but try it out yourself, and let us know what you think!
I’ve been using Modest for a few weeks now and it’s gotten progressively better and more stable with each incremental release. While it’s still in beta, anyone can give it a try now. The official site is live and I suggest you check it out if you’ve been seeking a more substantial email option on your OS2008 enabled tablet.
I’ve got my Gmail account setup with IMAP and my own personal identity rather than @gmail.com which works as you would expect any modern email client to work. The main issue which I believe will be resolved as it reaches release (non-beta) status is that Modest does not currently give you the option to replace the default email client for mail duty so unless it’s open when you click a mailto-link or choose to send via email, the other app will open. That said, I’ve had it working in the background on my N800 (and previously the N810 before I sent it back) with great success. Connections over Bluetooth DUN and wifi work quite well.
Some notes from the announcement on Maemo.org:
Some highlights:
- the basics: POP/IMAP/SMTP (normal/secure)
- MAP folders support, and IMAP-IDLE (”push-email”)
- easy setup of new accounts
- send and receive of rich text-emails
- managing mail with your fingers
- 100% open-source with a BSD-like license
Some important notes:
- modest will *not* replace the official e-mail program
- it does have the same name/icon in the menus, so don’t get confused!
- Modest uses English, regardless of your settings
- Modest works great with Gmail; don’t forget to use ‘user@gmail.com’ as your username, not just ‘user’.
Technorati Tags: modest, email, chinook, os2008, tinymail, maemo
I was playing around a bit more with the N810 this morning. What I’m aiming to do is not need a laptop when I leave the house. The N810 should be perfect for that. What I was trying to get going was syncing the calendar that I keep on my desktop and N95 to the N810 as well. Seems like it should be easy. I use iSync on my Mac to sync up the laptop and the N95, I was expecting to find something that would allow me to relatively simply pull in some software that would allow the N810 to participate in that. I did find some interesting bits of software that would lead in that direction, but didn’t get it working. Then I was trying to get a read-only version of my calendar on the N810 using the GPE Calendar program. But even though I have ical exports up on my server, the calendar app was failing to subscribe to them. Finally I had to settle for using Google Calendar subscribed to my ical feeds to view them on the device. Google Calendar, also, is not syncable using iSync. There’s some commercial software that provides it… but no thanks. Why is it that calendar and contact management still blow after all these years? Wasn’t the standardization on Bluetooth as the transport supposed to fix this whole data problem?
While playing around with Google Calendar I was also poking at the new Mozilla based browser. Check out the info about it here. I’m happy to see that it supports extensions, which in some case can be simple repackages of desktop extensions. No UI elements for the browsers though, which is kinda restricting. Something I wanted to poke at was support for bookmarklets. Do they work? How do they compare to their desktop equivalents? Questions for another time, need to go run about for a while… with my laptop unfortunately.
One of the most popular Firefox add-ons, Adblock Plus, is a content-filtering extension for Firefox that prevents nearly 99% of web advertisements and banners from being downloaded and subsequently displayed. Now it is available for MicroB!
The installation process is straightforward:
If you get in trouble see the Notes section at the end of this post.
As soon as you define filters that match ads, the ads will no longer appear. Here is an example of how a page (ebaumsworld.com) looks with before/after using Adblock Plus:
Adblock Plus Disabled
Adblock Plus Enabled
The following steps will enable you to select pages and domains that bypass Adblock Plus by defining a whitelist:
Unfortunately I could not port all the Adblock Plus features, for example:
ABP provides some preferences you can set in Firefox but not in MicroB, most of them are dependent on XUL or XBL, a full listing of these preferences is available.
The most important options available are in the ABP preferences pop up.
The extensions.adblockplus.showinstatusbar preference controls whether the ABP button is visible in the bottom-right corner of web pages.
INdT released today under LGPL the public release of LightMediaScanner (LMS), a lightweight media scanner that will be used by Canola 2.0 and, we hope, many other multimedia software!
Lightweight media scanner meant to be used in not-so-powerful devices,
like embedded systems or old machines.Provides an optimized way to recursively scan directories, handling
the parser in a child process, avoiding breaks of the main process
when parsers break (quite common with such bad libs and tags).Parsers are plugins in the form of shared objects, so it’s easy to add
new without having to recompiling the scanner.The scanner will use SQLite3 to store file-mtime association, avoiding
parsing files that are already up-to-date. This SQLite connection and
the file id within the master table ‘files’ are handled to plugins for
relationship with other tables.
Check out the code, it’s really simple to use and write new parser plugins:
I was looking in the Italian Nokia official shop, and I noticed that the N800 price was decreased to 259 € instead of 289 € You can verify it on the official website.
It’s almost a month since I last posted something here, but it’s because these last weeks I have been really busy.
However it was definitely worth it. Last Wednesday the first beta of Modest, the new e-mail client for the Maemo platform was released.
I’ve been working on Modest with some colleagues at Igalia for some time now and we have been doing our best to create a good e-mail client. Modest is still in beta, but I think that it’s reasonably usable now and we’re looking forward to improving it. The reviews we’ve seen so far have been positive and that encourages us to keep on working! Thank you all!
I’d also like to thank Philip, the author of Tinymail, for all his help and contributions and for being such a nice guy.
And, of course, the great Dirk-Jan from Nokia, the best possible leader and an amazing guy who had the good taste to announce Modest quoting one of the greatest records ever made. And he even uses Vagalume! ;-)
Well, and what happened to Vagalume then? Of course I haven’t forgotten about it, it’s just that I haven’t had much time to work on it. However I managed to introduce some new features and bugfixes, so Vagalume 0.4 is here. As usual, details in my webpage but for the impatient here are the highlights:
Here’s how Vagalume looks on a PC:
By the way, this time I compiled Vagalume packages for Ubuntu too. I haven’t tested them but they should work.
And that’s all! I hope you enjoy both programs!
I know a lot of people love blocking ads and now there’s an effective way to handle this on your Nokia Tablet. Adblock Plus has been developed from the full Firefox version to work on the tablet. I’ve yet to try this on my own system, but here are a few shots of what to expect…
Before:
After:
I’d recommend reading the installation and usage instructions as there are a few differences in what’s possible on the tablet from within Firefox.
Technorati Tags: maemo, microb, mozilla, extensions, adblockplus, n810, n800, OS2008
For the joy of all italian people, the internet tablet Nokia N810 is available in the italian Nokia shop.
It’s been almost 5 months since the last time I blogged about Epiphany. Attentive followers may have noticed that there hasn’t been any Epiphany releases in the 2.21.x cycle so far; why? I’m glad you ask!
First, the GtkMozEmbed situation was a bit chaotic, and we were not really sure if we’d manage to have trunk in release quality levels by 2.22. Thankfully it seems the embed code will travel in time a bit, which will allow us to not take any drastic meassure. With that sorted out it seems likely know that Epiphany 2.22 will simply support both Gecko 1.8 and 1.9 through the archane but well known art known as “massive #ifdef mess from Hell”.
Second: WebKit! A lot has happened since July:
So: 2.21.4 will be released this weekend. Get it, test it, the WebKit backend works now much better than the code we shipped in 2.20.x. 2.22 will be released, as always, to the day; Mozila backend will be as awesome as usual and hopefully WebKit’s will be more or less dogfood-quality by then. But, 2.24? Man. 2.24 is going to be so awesome Jeff Waugh has promised he will personally go to your house and recite “Dónde están mis pantalones” in 25 languages when you download it. Honest.
Some questions I saw in various places:
Although the discount codes aren't working yet, I've managed to play with an N810 (which may well end up becoming my wife's). Here are some random thoughts:
Talking of bugs, there're a few irritating ones:
Overall, very impressed. Get one if you haven't got an N800 already.
I downloaded the latest packages of KDE4 (instructions can be found from Kubuntu page).
First impressions: somewhat works. On first attempt it ended up corrupting the settings file so that the desktop was empty on the next boot. I fixed it by removing .kde4 from home directory and starting the KDE4 desktop again.
Now the reverse-wow-effect. On Mac, the first impression is that wow, how easy this is to use. With KDE4, there are also desktop effects etc. on the desktop (which are by the way slower on GeForce 8800GTX high end graphics card with 768 MB video memory than similar things on Leopard with integrated Intel GMA950 low spec accelerator which uses system memory as video RAM), but first impression was that oh, how I can do something (if I can) and oh, what did it do now, did it crash? KDE4 certainly feels more like Windows Vista (I have tried it once in a computer store, and first impression was that I was disappointed and unimpressed) than Leopard (which impresses me still after using it now for a month or so). Paradigms are more redmondian than Appleish. The amount of originality is also pretty low, I did not see anything special new. Not so nice.
The hard-to use thing kind of culminated to the fact, that I did not figure out how to add application shortcut icons to the panel and I also did not figure out how to add programs to the favorites in the start menu (which is tiny box on the left bottom corner of my 30 inch monitor at resolution 2560×1600 - I even needed to scroll the menu in order to find something on a monitor size of 30 inches, perfectly understandable on a mobile device because of small screen and ease of use because of touch screen, but on a 30 inch desktop - what a waste).
With lack of workarounds for the usability problems, it did not take long before the Gnome desktop was booted back. Even though it is not as shiny as the Leopard on my Mac, it at least works for me and does basic stuff I need frequently.
KDE4 was not complete disappointment, it does basic things, it is free software and it is not extremely bad either, but because there are alternatives that suit me better, I am going to be using them.
XGalaga 0.0.7 is now available for OS2008 (n800 and n810). XGalaga is a clone of the classic game Galaga for the X Window System. Xgalaga is a space-invader like game with additional features to produce a more interesting game. Available on the Download page.
Introduction
Hi, I’m writing this tutorial largely because last time I tried to perform this procedure it was a heck of a lot more complicated. This time it seems to be much simpler, but seeing as my last howto made it into the IRC channel list as a decent howto, I thought it about time I updated it. I wanted to put together a nice clean easy to follow tutorial for getting Scratchbox working to compile and test software for the Nokia N800. Firstly a few disclaimers, this tutorial is right, as of today. Also it is designed for the N800, it may work with the N770/N810, I am not sure. It was also designed for Ubuntu Gutsy, so, I can’t guarantee it’ll work on everyone’s system.
Yet another modest-post. We received a lot of feature requests and a handful of bugs after our repeated requests. We're working hard on fixing the bugs, and let's see what we can do with the feature requests. It's not easy to find the right balance between keeping things simple and, on the other hand, adding features that people ask for. Being a long-time mutt and emacs user, I have some troubles keeping things simple & easy. But hey, nobody said it was easy. Let's discuss something that I found quite useful: reading feeds with modest.
I like reading feeds; whenever I need to wait for something (e.g. waiting for the food during a romantic dinner), I like to read something interesting - software, science, culture, whatever. Now, while there is a feedreader on my N810, obviously I'd prefer to use modest for that.
Well, that's perfectly possible using feed2imap. I am assuming a Ubuntu/Debian system here, but it should work for other systems as well, mutatis mutandis.
feeds:
- name: Planet Maemo
url: http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/rss.xml
target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/software
- name: Ririan Project
url: http://ririanproject.com/feed/
target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/misc
- name: Boing Boing
url: http://www.boingboing.net/atom.xml
target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/misc
- name: ScienceDaily Headlines
url: http://www.sciencedaily.com/newsfeed.xml
target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/science
$ feed2imap-opmlimport ~/feedlist.opml > ~/.feed2imaprc
(Note to planet maemo which sees just the first chapter: The post contains wallpapers for your enjoyment! :-))
So, the new internet tablet OS is finally out of our hands. One of the most apparent changes is the transparency in the theme – the panels are now translucent and show the wallpaper through. This works nicely as you can change the appearance of the theme quite radically by just trying out different kinds of background images. The applets on the home screen also look nicer since they blend smoothly to the background. Or at least we think they look nicer than before :^)
The theme is also visually much cleaner, I tried to achieve a simple, elegant look that would go with the smoother design of the device itself. Hopefully you all like the end result – I am pretty happy with how it worked out. We also tried to improve the finger-usability some more, as with the N810, at least I find it cumbersome to keep the stylus around while I am using the keyboard to type – it’s more natural to just reach the screen with either thumb when needed. Sure, there’s still room for improvement, but I think it is already better than before.
As some of us in the user interface team are enthusiastic photographers, we decided to make a little christmas present and dug into our photo folders, looking for nice stuff to be usable as wallpapers. Hopefully you enjoy them
Yeah! Finally i’ve a bit of time to add a homepage to maemo Qt4 project!
Visit maemo Qt4 Homepage!
Hi. Few more words about UI improvements in some applications and not forgetting additional wallpapers you can try with new OS2008
I finally got a N800 today and the first thing that any self-respecting geek would do is download the latest software and, coincidentally, OS2008 is out today too. So I headed over to http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/ and tried to download it. 45 minutes of 'connection time outs' and errors later I got a directory listing of all the files I could download. A further 15 minutes of trying and failing to download the correct file (timeouts again) I finally got a save dialogue.
(This post is huge with stacks of photos so I temporarily changed my site feed to "short." Visit tabletblog.com directly for the full article. I will return to full content feeds in a few days.)
Continuing on the OS2008 and N810 improvements, we added a hardware keyboard on the device and tweaked our input methods to take advantage of this. Of course we are pleased if the on-screen input methods were already sufficient for some users – hey, they’re not so bad after all
Download the lastest Nokia 770 Hacker edition Here!
This is a torrent to download the last N800 OS2008 Firmware, because the nokia's site is very slow and busy!
Torrent N800 Os2008 of download a direct file from: Here here here here or here!
Check MD5!
N800: 89e0661318f60420c691f4e1dd0c6ba3 RX-34_2008SE_2.2007.50-2_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin
N810: 25292105f0769680828ea2ccd36d6807 RX-44_2008SE_2.2007.50-2_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin
I finally flashed my Nokia N800 to the latest operating system release (aka Chinook): OS2008SE_2.2007.50-2 (if you are still having trouble with the “official” download, try this).
My immediate impression (of pretty much everything that has been updated) is…
Wow!
Daniel Gentleman (or, ThoughtFix of TabletBlog.com) has written an in-depth review of the new OS here. Here’s an excerpt:
As a portable device operating system, OS2008 scores a hit. The interface was built to focus on the Internet Tablet’s primary purpose: Internet use. The shortcuts, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and bundled software show that well. OS2008 goes beyond that to give the consumer something of value and interest beyond the browser, too.
I agree with him on pretty much everything.
There are still a few things I’m trying to work out, though:
Other than that, everything is pretty slick… For instance, the Application Manager now saves your selection position (i.e., no more scrolling and searching where you used to be in the application list!). The better-optimized finger navigation is great too — and navigation, in general, is very quick now. And, honestly, restoring all of my most loved apps seemed a lot smoother too (e.g., it only took me an hour or so to do what used to take a few).
So, if you haven’t, download and flash away!
This may be coming too late for many, based on the discussions on ITT and across Jaiku, but if you ran the beta OS2008, I would strongly suggest you skip restoring a complete backup when you update. Yesterday’s post about the missing stylus input, lack of thumbboard reliability and deactivated word complete are all functional with a fresh flash of 2008 and no restore.
I attempted a restore after seeing things work (not the restore during setup) and still found the bugs on restart. With a selective restore - Bookmarks and Application list only - I am back in action with OS2008. This is quite unfortunate as one of the key benefits I saw was the ability to have a better backup and restore process - and I believe something that took a fair bit of effort from the Maemo team.
My backup was originally done on the N810, restored on the N800, then backed up again on the N800 and restored once more with the release version of the OS. I never actually saw stylus input on the N800 with OS2008 until last night’s clean install (without restore) so it’s possible that this bug existed from the initial beta on the N810. I assumed actually that stylus input was just a bug during the beta release for the n800… clearly that was incorrect.
I’m hoping now that the N800 and N810 images are the same and on par with each other that no one else (who reads this anyway) will run into these problems.
Technorati Tags: maemo, os2008, nokia, n-series, N800, N810
Elsewhere
So what is happening elsewhere? I’ve got a bit mixed feelings.Linux and open source is clearly in the mainstream of consumer devices. We no longer discuss about can or should you build devices based on open source. Instead, we discuss how to do it well. We also see a lot of technologies maturing fast to be more and more suitable for devices and consumer goods.
Also, some killer products, like the Nokia N95, N810 and iPhone, kept us awake. I like them all a lot!
And...
The market share of Linux phones did not grow. I know it is not because of Linux or open source but because of –well- not so good phones. Good products with the right price point sell well regardless of the technology used.
Linux consolidation activities are struggling and I personally do not see their impact. CELF, LiSP, Limo and even GMAE, to be honest. What is happening – anybody home?
So what’ll happen 2008 …
Let me prophesize:
Linux and open source will go to a declining hype cycle – steps 3 & 4 . It is no longer sexy to be open or create products with Linux and open source. That’ll scare honey bees and suits away and we'll see decline in publicity. But, because these technologies are now in the mainstream, open source will have bigger impact on technology and products than ever before. It’s not a Hollywood story any more, though.
Let me hope:
Peace (inside and outside), cool products, happy families, and a proper winter!
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
Hey, finally Canola 2 Beta 1 is out! It’s been a tough time hacking from infrastructure part up to application itself to make everything work. I hope you all have good times using it and please report to us any bugs so we can make it even better. Let the new era of Canola 2 begin! ;-)
http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/ Is still pretty much unreachable, but I’m beginning to feel that there’s something more to it than people upgrading their OS to 2008.
Because for me http://repository.maemo.org/ and http://repository.maemo.org/extras are also 95% of the time unreachable. Is this a classical case of Nokia not paying the ransom and getting the internet hammer also known as DDOS? Share your own thoughts 
PS. Happy Holidays!
* Download the latest Nokia 770 Hacker edition Here!
Canola2 was released yesterday and it’s really quite nice! While it’s a beta and there are a few rough spots (importing and dealing with podcasts and internet radio) I would recommend this to anyone looking to take advantage of media on their tablet.
I just did a quick video overview using a cool new service called Qik live from my N95 — Here’s a 5 min overview:
Technorati Tags: canola2, canola, photos, video, music, multimedia, mediacenter, maemo, n800, n95, topgear
This project aims at using Trolltech Qt4 packages on maemo devices. In this way your tablet will be able to run many Qt4 applications. The first step is completed and the user and developper packages are available on http://qt4.garage.maemo.org.
The second work is now the Hildonization: To move the menubar to the menu system and allow to use a virtual keyboard. A first application is already ported, it's SpeedCrunch a fast, high precision and powerful desktop calculator, available in the same repository.
The end is nigh - the shortest day of the year. Next week, I'll be spending some time in the lovely city of Amsterdam, enjoying various Christmas-related festivities. No matter how nice it is here, it will be good to leave Helsinki behind for a couple of days, and do something different.
At last, the OS2008-images have been published. A big improvement, I should say, and there should be little reason not to upgrade... One more reason to upgrade, is that you can then install modest :-) Just this afternoon, we've published updated packages. I also look forward to play with Canola2, created by those talented Brazilians. It would be even better if they could release it under the GPL, as has been suggested.
Yes¸modest... Even though our public public bèta is not even two weeks old, we have a lot to look back on. It's been an incredible year, even just looking at the modest-microcosmos. I am very proud of the the team, a group of truly amazing individuals. Nevertheless, we won't rest on our laurels, and look forward. The latest release (Friday 21.12) should be the best so far, and will also be the last of 2007. As I said before, if you find bugs, or feel something is missing: please visit bugs.maemo.org (component: Communication/Modest). We've already cleared up quite some of the issues that were reported - your voices are being heard! In 2008 we will return with our batteries fully recharged...
Merry Christmas to All!
Brent Fulgham has been merging Cairo graphics backend features from the Adobe Apollo/AIR branch of WebKit (#16558, #16577, #15382). The Adobe developers have been cooperative and their code is well-written — hopefully they’ll start merging their own work soon. This puts the graphics backend a couple of weeks ahead of schedule (the original target was GNOME 2.24):
Luca Bruno has provided the last (#16365) in a series of fixes to get the Acid2 smiley face rendering correctly. This should help dispel rumours that the WebKit/GTK+ team is dropping acid.
Google engineers have contributed a handful of improvements (#15974, #16169) to WebKit’s image decoders, which will be shared between the GTK+ and Android ports.
Mobile features designed for Android can also now be easily enabled in the GTK+ port (eg. LOW_BANDWIDTH_DISPLAY support, r28960). It’s great to see cooperation on features like this.
The Maemo/Hildon mobile platform (used in Nokia internet tablets and Ubuntu Mobile) is now an official component of the GTK+ port. This means that these libraries can be used directly in WebKit instead of being maintained out of tree.
The JavaScript engine has seen recent optimizations which bring it further ahead of the stock browser shipped in OS2008 for the N800/N810 devices. Check out any of the freely available JS/AJAX benchmarks if you’re interested in performance.
Initial printing support (#15576) has landed. Cairo’s paginated surface API lacks some features we need to implement this fully. I’ve posted a proposal for new API that will be useful in matching the print functionality of the Mac and Win ports.
The post WebKit HTML5 canvas enhancements, Acid2 support and more appeared first on Alp Toker.
I decided to take a few of the photographs that I’ve shot over the past year and turn them into desktop images for your OS2008-enabled Internet Tablets. The Internet Tablet versions are below (the originals are available here).
Click on the thumbnails to view the full versions and to save to your Internet Tablet(s). Or, download all of them in a single Zip file here:
Who said Christmas only lasted one day?
A weird quirk I’ve run into while fooling around with doing a little development on the N810, there doesn’t seem to be a way to enter redirection characters (great than or less than signs, or angle brackets, whatever you want to call them) using the hardware keyboard. They’re not on the keyboard itself. And there’s a “Chr” key that brings up a character picker onscreen for odd characters, but the greater than and less than signs aren’t there.
Escape and page up/page down are on the toolbar. So I figured maybe I could use the onscreen keyboard to add the characters I wanted to the toolbar, but also no dice. Making an entry on the toolbar with a name of ‘gt’ and value of ‘>’ just seems to generate nothing at all when I tap it.
I don’t see any general remapping tools for the hardware keyboard (though there are for a bluetooth keyboard). Any way to get these characters easily accessible? Right now I have to just use the onscreen keyboard (or use the hardware keyboard and physically close the slider, bring up the onscreen keyboard, type my characters, and switch back). There’s gotta be an easy way to get those characters available though.
*
This is another night on maemo Qt4… it’s really fun!Today i’ve compiled and partially ported keepass (a password manager writed in Qt4) on maemo OS2008.The ported application page is now updated!
Thanks to Joni Valtanen the Media Player should now play Oggs without restarting the device.
As another minor change I added NoDisplay to ogg-support’s MP’s .desktop file to prevent it from showing in the menus.
I've been using OS2008 final since launch day (via a torrent see (http://linuxuk.blogspot.com/2007/12/os2008-ssllllooooowwww-downloads.html)) and I must admit I'm pretty happy with it. The problem is that there seems to be a 'vista like' outcry at the moment with various people complaining about one thing or another but personally I think that this is a massive step forward for the Nokia and Maemo team.
import graphics
img = gtk.Image()
img.set_from_pixbuf(graphics.icon)
graphics/
+ __init__.py
+ icon.png
+ logo.png
+ background.png
test.py
import os
import gtk
_RESOURCE_PATH = os.path.dirname(__file__)
def _load_resources():
# Find all .png files in the resource directory. This construct is called
# "list comprehension" and will be covered in detail in episode #3.
# This returns a list of the names of all files in the resource directory
# ending with ".png".
resources = [ f for f in os.listdir(_RESOURCE_PATH)
if f.endswith(".png") ]
# load resources into module namespace
for r in resources:
# the filename without extension will be the name to access the
# resource, so we strip off the extension
name = os.path.splitext(r)[0]
# this is the full path to the resource file
path = os.path.join(_RESOURCE_PATH, r)
# Now we can load the resource into the module namespace.
# globals() gives us the dictionary of the module-global variables,
# and we can easily extend it by assigning new keys.
globals()[name] = gtk.gdk.pixbuf_new_from_file(path)
#end for
# load the resources when importing the module
_load_resources()
import gtk
import graphics
win = gtk.Window(gtk.WINDOW_TOPLEVEL)
img = gtk.Image()
img.set_from_pixbuf(graphics.logo)
win.add(img)
win.show_all()
gtk.main()
Nokia's Linux-based internet tablet was Amazon's best selling computer in 2007, and top 3 personal computer in holiday sales. Congratulations to the maemo team!
There was some discussion on Amazon's listings on Slashdot. As I've noted every year has recently been predicted as the one when Linux desktop takes over I thought this comment particularly insightful:
Now, the "Linux Desktop" fantasists can finally let it go. There will be no "year of the Linux desktop", just as there will be no "year of the Linux mainframe".
...
Pushing for a change in the desktop from Windows to Mac or Linux is, in 10 years, going to seem like striving to continue the VMS vs Unix wars on the VAX platform.
What 2008, 2009, and 2010 are going to be are the "years where appliances took over half the desktop functions" - you still want a big monitor and ergo keyboard to Photoshop, do development of web pages and code, and so on. But people sitting right at their desktop will whip out their paperback-sized appliance to do E-mail and chat, because that's where their communication apps live.
And, yes, those new appliances will mostly run Linux. What else?
As I've seen the nice, new N810 internet tablet take over more and more roles from my MacBook I can only agree.
I fooled around a little bit with the mapping application built into the N810, but wasn’t too impressed. Sure, it could be useful for when I get lost and need to find out where the hell I’ve ended up. A situation which I admit isn’t all too uncommon. But it did seem pretty much like a teaser application, bare bones functionality with the desire being to upsell me on some navigation package so that I could get access to the rest of the features. No thanks.
I’ve been poking around with remapping the keys on the N810 keyboard and got xmodmap working this morning. I didn’t think it was available for OS2008, but you can snag the xmodmap binary for OS2008 from here. I used some of the information on the page about using a Bluetooth keyboard with older Maemo releases, but also just read some general hints about how to use xmodmap and where to find info about keysyms.
I started out just testing the modifications I wanted from the command line in xterm. You can use a command like the following to test out a mapping before adding it to any config files:
xmodmap -e ‘keysym m = m M bar bar bar’
My targets for remapping were the euro and pound signs (Fn-M and Fn-; on the built in keyboard). I live in the United States, and as everyone knows one of our favorite pastimes when not destroying other countries during religious crusades is to ignore them completely. So the chances of me needing to use those symbols is pretty low unless I suddenly decide to write some kind of political satire. What I wanted there were the tab character and the pipe character. Essential to sanity when doing a lot of command line stuff, which I do. So I ended up with this .xmodmap file:
keysym m = m M bar bar bar
keysym semicolon = semicolon colon Tab Tab Tab
Fantastic! Now I can run ‘xmodmap /home/user/.xmodmap’ and get the remapped keys I want. I had seen mentions on some of the discussion boards about the keymappings getting reset with every keypress or something. I’m not seeing that on my relatively recent OS2008 install (1.2007.42-19). Once I set the mappings they stay around till I reboot. What I can’t figure out how to do however is to run xmodmap automatically at startup and have it work. I tried adding it to a bunch of different places in startup files, but the remappings weren’t active for some reason. So I just created a nice short script I can run from xterm, which is mostly when I want to enact these mappings anyway. Good enough for now. Still, would be really slick to just have them working, is there a thread out there with a working example for .19? I didn’t run across one in my wanderings.
Samoff IT Backgrounds 2007
