I am very excited for the next weeks! The reason why is that the first edition of the Bossa Conference will be held in Recife from the 12th to the 14th of March. Actually the event will take place in Porto de Galinhas, a wonderful beach in the southern coast of Pernambuco. Here is the conference site and the agenda.

Many experts of the Linux Community will be present focusing on Embedded Software in three main categories: Connectivity, Multimedia and Platform.

Besides the invited speakers, the whole INdT from Recife will also take place in this event, gathering and disseminating information about its projects and the maemo community in general.

It will be an excellent opportunity to share knowledge and to build new ideas!

Will there be Maemo-related exhibits at the CeBIT this year?
I asked the same question on the maemo.org mailing lists, alas, no response. The CeBIT appears to be losing importance…

A few days ago tigert pointed me at an interesting article from the excellent blog "Creating Passionate Users". The main points are: 1. Don't make the demo look done, 2. How 'done' something looks should match how 'done' something is, 3. The more "done" something appears, the more narrow and incremental the feedback. Following Michael's post about hildon theme tools, I have been playing a bit

Dougt from MiniMo has improved and checked in a patch I sent to him applied against the spatial navigation mozilla extension.

** new minimo maemo port release is coming.

** we are heading to BOSSA 2007 =) !!!!!

--Antonio Gomes

Small computers are great, so this was exciting to hear: After years of hype, the Vulcan Flipstart has finally become an actual product. Hopefully it will be shown at CeBIT 2007 somewhere.

Looking at the specs, photos and James Kendrick’s informative video, the product doesn’t look too promising, though. Pretty ugly design, no touchscreen, quite heavy and a rather high pricetag. What a disappointment.

The Raon Vega, the Sony UX, the Oqo and the upcoming Arima UMPC (to be sold in Europe by Medion and Gigabyte) all look far more advanced and better engineered.

All of these devices share a major problem, though: They are small bricks. Compare that with the Nokia N800, which weighs just a bit more than 200 gramms and runs for days on a tiny battery. The above-mentioned UMPCs need a big battery and still run a few hours, only.

Update: “Days?” Read Karel Jansens’ clarification below.

I have a very old laptop with PII 300Mhz CPU. I managed to install Gentoo Linux before, but seldom use it. Today, When I was cleaning my desktop, found it, but I forgot almost everything about Gentoo when I want to install sth.
It is burdonsome to install anything on such a old Gentoo box, so, it is the time shift to a light Linux distribution, such as DSL and puppy.
After spend 10mins to download DSL 3.3 RC2, it bootup the PII in 1 min. Wow, it really rocks on my ancient machine. Unfortunately, it does not support Chinese. However, by studying mydslPanel (the tools to install software on DSL) for half an hour, my Firefox can display Chinese fonts properly already.
To install chinese fonts, please do:

1. Install japanese-fonts using mydslPanel on desktop, it will download japanese-fonts.tar.gz to /tmp by default.
2. copy /tmp/usr /usr
3. copy some fonts file from another Linux system supporting Chinese. I am running Ubuntu on another laptop, so, I copy all /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/* from the Ubuntu to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
4. run /usr/bin/japanese-install.sh

Now, your DSL is chinese-awared.

Last weekend finally I was finished the Mono packages for Nokia 770/800 devices, Wade helped me to get apt repository available. To make things more easy we made available an "Single Install Click" for Mono runtime and for Paco's PEditGtkSharp an small gtk-sharp text editior. Dependency check really make life easy, as example when you install PEditGtkSharp all need stuff (mono-runtime, gtk-sharp and maemo-sharp) is also installed.

For who wants install packages by hand, the N770 repository is:

deb http://go-mono.com/maemo mistral user

and N800:

deb http://go-mono.com/maemo bora user

Scratchbox developer kit is also available as binary. An wiki entry is also set up to give more information about Mono on Maemo.

The screenshot comes from Torello Querci. Unfortunately I cant buy Nokia N800 from Brazil, today I receive a mail from Nokia and they saw that to buy a device I must have a credit card emitted in USA. Maybe they can also restrict the Maemo download for non USA/Europe people ;-)

Last weekend finally I was finished the Mono packages for Nokia 770/800 devices, Wade helped me to get apt repository available. To make things more easy we made available an "Single Install Click" for Mono runtime and for Paco's PEditGtkSharp an small gtk-sharp text editior. Dependency check really make life easy, as example when you install PEditGtkSharp all need stuff (mono-runtime, gtk-sharp and maemo-sharp) is also installed.



For who wants install packages by hand, the N770 repository is:

  deb http://go-mono.com/maemo mistral user

and N800:

  deb http://go-mono.com/maemo bora user

Scratchbox developer kit is also available as binary. An wiki entry is also set up to give more information about Mono on Maemo.

The screenshot comes from Torello Querci. Unfortunately I cant buy Nokia N800 from Brazil, today I receive a mail from Nokia and they saw that to buy a device I must have a credit card emitted in USA. Maybe they can also restrict the Maemo download for non USA/Europe people ;-)

Visiting CeBIT this Saturday, I’m sure not to miss the booth of Beijing Peace East Technology Development Co. Ltd. Chippy from UMPC Portal was there, already, but didn’t gather much new information.

The ARM-based device comes with any feature you could wish for, including a harddisk, GPS receiver, WLAN, Bluetooth, USB, PCMCIA, SD and a kitchensink. Looking at the device’s screenshots, it appears to be running Maemo, yet the company or its Chinese developers haven’t appeared publicly on the Maemo mailing lists. The software package announced for it is also unheard of on maemo.org.

Quite a mystery device. Do you know more? Do you have suggestions what I should ask them at CeBIT? Do you have information about it? Let me know!

Update: I’ve seen the device at CeBIT. It’s running Linux, it’s not Maemo but obviously inspired by it, it’s a lot bigger than I expected, it’s quite fascinating, it’s not a real competitor to the Nokia devices. The full report with pictures will follow tomorrow.

Hi all,

Finally I managed to fix the feature related to context menu and the inventory dialog. Now works fine with Nokia 770 (tested on mistral and scirocco) and with Nokia N800 (tested on bora).

Thanks to Tilman Vogel, he sent me a patch with some more features. Mainly sumarized as:

- Toolbar expand/unexpand depending on full screen state
- On toolbar added new commands "What's here?" (:) and "What's there?" (;)
- Fixed endless loop asking for "more details?" when using the central minipad button with the "identify a map symbol" command
- Changed search button icon.

Enjoy with this new release.

From March 12th to 14th, BOSSA conference took place in Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco, Brazil, one of the sites of INdT. It was a great experience for all who attended, from both the technical and non-technical point of views: high quatily talks during the days, and *free* dinners, parties and delicious food and drinks after that.

• 1st Day:

• Milko Boic's talk about "Building Digital Media Solutions with Helix DNA Client" - specially the demos part - showed how powerful this open source multimedia framework is. However, what really paid me attention was its robust plugin-able capabilities. After the talk, I came to him and asked if he was aware of any work being done around an embeddable Helix based plugin for mozilla browsers, and he said there are some already , and I am going to follow them :-).
  
• Chris Hoffman's talk about "Minimo: lessons learned, and New directions for Mozilla Mobile Development" was the best of the day (at least for me). He pointed out
  
• the evolution of Minimo and Firefox in the market share;
• pictures of minimo getting mature since its conception;
• some problems of web sites design in the mobile world;
  
• plans of mozilla for for reduced resource devices. VERY COOL !!!
  

• 2nd Day:
• Win Taymans (Gstreamer), John (J5) Palmieri (D-Bus Desktop Glue - reshaping our thinking of application development from embedded to the desktop) and the showman Marcelo Oliveira/INdT (Canola) both proofed how simple and efficient their technologies are.

• Furthermore, Chis Hoffman (Mozilla), Marcio Galli (Mozilla), Ilias (INdT) and I (INdT) had a productive talk about how we can push minimo and mozilla to linux based embedded devices during a "Browser Lunch BOF". Btw, I am going to blog about in separate.

• Juho Paasonen (Interaction design in open source environment: introducing the Movial Widescreen UI) was very interesting as well, showing some cool GL-like stuff.
  

• 3rd Day:
• Johan Bilien (latest evolutions on Hildon) and Johan Dahlin
  (PyGTK) were the highlights.

To be continued ... =)

--Antonio Gomes

Visiting CeBIT, I had the chance to meet Steven from UMPCPortal. He owns an N800, too, and we were both intrigued by Beijing Peace East Technology Development Co. Ltd‘s claim of an UMPC based on Linux, so we arranged to visit their both together.

This weekend GUAdemy, a mixed conference between GUADEC and Akademy, lands in Coruña. As in most of Gnome related events, Igalia is going to be there.

For me, I’m going to give a talk about maemo on Saturday afternoon, as Miguel, Chema, Susana, Iago and Sergio are going to give other talks about several Gnome related issues.

If you want to learn about the Gtk based environment for embedded devices created by Nokia, come and join us.

See you soon!

After using the N800 for a few weeks now, here are some follow-ups to my initial review.

Steven from UMPCPortal reports that his N800 broke after accidently dropping it from just a few centimeters of height. Ouch! So to reiterate: This is a fragile device.

It is just slightly too long. Unlike the Palmpilot, which was designed for a shirt pocket, the N800 cannot be carried comfortably. If Nokia could just cut a few centimeters off the case… (Does the N800 really need stereo speakers?)

Thanks to its size, it’s hard to find a good case for it. This is the ugly thing I use right now. It’s too big for my coat:

Siarhei Siamashka, the developer of mplayer for Maemo, made some benchmarks and found out that the graphics bus bandwidth to the video framebuffer is 3 times slower than on the Nokia 770. So despite its better CPU, the N800 will most likely never be able to display full-resolution video at 800×480 @ 30 fps. Daniel Stone confirmed this and explained in related discussions that the N800 uses a different hardware architecture. Since the TI OMAP CPU’s system-on-a-chip LCD controller was not suitable for the N800’s screen size, the device required the use of an external LCD controller.

Frankly, this looks like a design mistake on behalf of Nokia: They have chosen hardware with closed drivers and apparently it’s still not the best fit for the targeted screen of the device. This is a major disappointment, since video on the go is my personal killer application.

Disclaimer: This was a personal review of some small issues that bother me, not a general “Nokia’s hardware sucks!” complaint. Actually, I like the N800 quite a lot.

The install file for maemo 3.0 'bora' SDK repository.

License Free (source available, Open Source license) Version 3.0 Status Stable OS version IT OS 2007 Submitted by

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Rated by Tim Samoff:

Sort of necessary isn't it? ;)

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The install file for maemo 2.2 'gregale' SDK repository.

License Free (source available, Open Source license) Version 2.2 Status Stable OS version IT OS 2006 Submitted by

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Rated by James Sparenberg:

At this point I know what I think it is, but I'm not sure if I'm right and without docs I can't be sure.

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As I told you before, Hildon Desktop now has a new plugin system and one of the cool things about it is the Python support. Just for the sake of demonstration, I recorded a screencast with the step by step process of writing a “Hello World” Python plugin for the Home area of Hildon Desktop.

Yes, it’s really simple. Of course, this is a useless plugin but I just wanted to demonstrate how easy and simple is to have the basic infrastruture done.

Enjoy!

Update 1: the GIF image is too heavy and people are having problems to watch the screencast. I’ll upload a new (and better) file tomorrow as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience. :-/
Update 2: I removed the link to the screencast for now just to avoid other people to have the same problem and complain about the same thing.
Update 3 The link is updated with a new/more-complete version of the screencast.

Ok, I created a new screencast in theora format now. It has a nice complement about how to make resizable applets.

Update: I removed the audio. The music was too noisy. :-P

I just installed the first N800 update which was released on the 23rd. I tested to see if flash is faster but I can't see/feel it, the browser seems to be faster.

Two problems I really wanted to be fixed got fixed: the DUMMY IAP and the Metalayer-crawler problem (I had this fixed myself, but it is nice that it now just works).

I wonder if USB host mode is supported in this release. I need to find some time to check it out.

During the BOSSA conference we had a very productive discussion about browser trends in mobile/embedded market, some Mozilla plans in this regard (not only minimo=), as well as ideas for pushing minimo on linux embedded, SoC projects (???) and so on. It was there Ilias, Henry, Anderson and I (from INdT) and Chris Hoffman and Marcio Galli (from Mozilla).

• Porting some WinCE specific features to linux:
• Context sensitive menus (partially done)
• minimo/components/gps/
• minimo/components/softkb (ported to maemo already)
• minimo/components/phone/
• minimo/components/device/

• Adding XPCOM-DBUS and GCONF support on minimo.

• Testing helix-mozilla plugin with minimo on n800.

• SoC:
• "webpage content summary": a graph model of a single web page is made up of hundreds of basic elements that are linked to each other in a very complex manner. Such structure is similar to the whole Internet, which is also made up of many interrelated web pages. The main point here is applying Information Retrieval techniques into webpages, providing a content zoomed page. Focus: reduced screen mobile devices.
  
• Development of mobile web applications which use FOF for relationship networks.

• Joey Project: Marcio, Doug and Chis are behind this.

• Launching Minimo 0.2 . They believe minimo has reached a mature enough stage so that it can get launched ... lets wait ! ;)

• "Local web served widgets as a means to access the OS built-in apps and
  functions". It rocks, but I can talk much ... ;)

• Usability improvements of minimo for not-so-educed-screen devices, like n800 and n770. Some SVG stuff already done by Marcio, and already available at newest minimo maemo port releases. What else do we need ?

Well, time to put hands on them.

--Antonio Gomes

I wrote a step-by-step guide to have Hildon Desktop running outside the Maemo/Scratchbox environment. Our major goal here is to make it easy for distributons to package Hildon Desktop so that developers can have a quick-to-setup environment for the development of plugins which doesn’t need to be built against ARM such as Python plugins. For now, this guide only applies to Ubuntu (If you can point out the changes needed to work on another distribution, please let me know). This is a call for testers and brave developers to follow the guide and report the missing/problematic bits.

  http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HildonDesktopPortability

There are some issues that still block us from getting Hildon Desktop in a distribution but we’re working on that.

Some people naturaly requested the Jhbuild moduleset for Hildon Desktop after I posted those build instructions in Maemo wiki. So, I added Jhbuild related instruction to the wiki page. Go Go Go!

“I saw the N800 and fell in love.. but then i saw the Sony UMPC… and wanted marriage… but saw the price tag and decided I was too young for marriage…” (from IRC)

Click to read 1076 more words

A theme to make the 770 and N800 look more like other Personal Access Display Devices on the Library Computer Access and Retrieval System

v2.0: N800 fixes, statusbar icons, second color scheme

• 

License Free (source available, Open Source license) Version 2.0 Status Stable OS version IT OS 2007, IT OS 2006 Submitted by

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Ok, now that I’ve shown how easy is to have the basic code for a Python plugin running in Hildon Desktop, I’d like to demonstrate something more useful and cool. I did this screencast presenting how to write a plugin which randomly shows images from your “Images” directory in your Home area. Cool hun?

Click on the image to watch/download the screencast (10 minutes, 8 MB).

Some (obvious) improvements for this plugin would be:

• A configuration dialog where you can define the images directory and the delay for image switching.
• Disable image switching when the device idle or when the Home area is not visible
• Switch to next random image when clicking on the plugin.
• What else do you want? :-P

Enjoy!

——–

Sidenote 1: yes, the screencast shows Hildon Desktop running on a 800×600 resolution. :-)
Sidenote 2: some people have been asking if Hildon Desktop is available in N800 already. The answer is no. Hildon Desktop is a major rewrite of maemo-af-desktop and will be shipped in the next major releases of Maemo. Of course you could run it on your N800 at your own risk. :-P

Ritorno dopo un lungo periodo di silenzio, nel quale ho pero' fatto tante cose: scivolate di carnevale, feste in costume, gite a Parigi e in cottage tipici, per parlare di un argomento un po' piu' serio stavolta: confronto dei salari fra Italia e Finlandia basato su un'indagine dell'Eurispes, relativa a tutti o quasi i paesi dell'Europa dei 12. Vediamo un po' cosa abbiamo:

Network Speakers

My office computer has no speakers, so I can't hear any sound. But with the help of my N800, it was easy to solve this problem:

1. open the terminal on the N800
2. run esd -tcp -public
3. make the (Linux) office computer use ESD for audio output
4. set the environment variable ESPEAKER on the office computer to point to the N800, like this: export ESPEAKER=192.168.22.80
5. enjoy the new network speakers!