Sugar running on the Nokia N810

Hey all,
This past week I managed to do something quite interesting. I got sugar, running on my Nokia N810, compiled for armel.

The trick that made it work was thanks to easy Debian chroot, that got me access to installing sugar without a few good hours of compilation for arm (and I did that before).

Touchscreen is cool!

The first thing that I found pretty neat was running sugar on a touchscreen device. It really felt better, since most people that I let play with my XO and flip its screen 180 degrees naturally try touching the screen, expecting it had a touchscreen. Sugar was actually quite good with it on the Nokia.

Any hardware – Any use

It is refreshing to see Sugar running on a different system, let alone a difference architecture (armel). Sugar seems to be attributed to OLPC and its unique hardware. I guess this comes to show that to in order to get sugar really to reach its full potential, we should take in to account it can run on anything: Why not old hardware? Why not smartphones? OLPC uses the XO, but everyone else can use anything else really.

This also is connected to things going on in our pilot in OLPC Israel. I won’t get in to it in this post, because Netzach and I are going to write a report about it regarding a pilot we are doing with 9 Bedouin kids in the Ilan Ramon Youth Physics Center.

More about the hardware – How to get Sugar in your pocket

If you are wondering if this actually worked fully on the Nokia (unlike people who claim Android worked there, and it’s just the x86 emulator). Well, it did pretty much work. However it was slow, and you wont get the browser working on it with 128MB ram. However I did get avahi-daemon working (remember to turn it on). Then I got in to the Chat system, and I could share things, etc. You might need to enlarge the easy chroot iso image, so you have space to install sugar. I also guess that if someone installs it on Mer (an Ubuntu-based distro for the Nokia),  it might even work faster.

Another problem is that the Nokia keyboard has no F1-F12 keys. They are essential in sugar. So I had to plug in an external USB keyboard for that. It could be fixed with an Xmodmap script.

Thats all for now more pictures below.

Watching the network view

Sugar on the Nokia talking to an XO

Nokia N810 and XO together

Sugar running on the Nokia N810

Hey all,
This past week I managed to do something quite interesting. I got sugar, running on my Nokia N810, compiled for armel.

The trick that made it work was thanks to easy Debian chroot, that got me access to installing sugar without a few good hours of compilation for arm (and I did that before).

Touchscreen is cool!

The first thing that I found pretty neat was running sugar on a touchscreen device. It really felt better, since most people that I let play with my XO and flip its screen 180 degrees naturally try touching the screen, expecting it had a touchscreen. Sugar was actually quite good with it on the Nokia.

Any hardware – Any use

It is refreshing to see Sugar running on a different system, let alone a difference architecture (armel). Sugar seems to be attributed to OLPC and its unique hardware. I guess this comes to show that to in order to get sugar really to reach its full potential, we should take in to account it can run on anything: Why not old hardware? Why not smartphones? OLPC uses the XO, but everyone else can use anything else really.

This also is connected to things going on in our pilot in OLPC Israel. I won’t get in to it in this post, because Netzach and I are going to write a report about it regarding a pilot we are doing with 9 Bedouin kids in the Ilan Ramon Youth Physics Center.

More about the hardware – How to get Sugar in your pocket

If you are wondering if this actually worked fully on the Nokia (unlike people who claim Android worked there, and it’s just the x86 emulator). Well, it did pretty much work. However it was slow, and you wont get the browser working on it with 128MB ram. However I did get avahi-daemon working (remember to turn it on). Then I got in to the Chat system, and I could share things, etc. You might need to enlarge the easy chroot iso image, so you have space to install sugar. I also guess that if someone installs it on Mer (an Ubuntu-based distro for the Nokia),  it might even work faster.

Another problem is that the Nokia keyboard has no F1-F12 keys. They are essential in sugar. So I had to plug in an external USB keyboard for that. It could be fixed with an Xmodmap script.

Thats all for now more pictures below.

Watching the network view

Sugar on the Nokia talking to an XO

Nokia N810 and XO together

Hi,

are you looking for an IDE to help you on maemo programming? Or a tool that helps you to get connected with device using different communication interfaces of Internet Tablet (Bluetooth, WLAN or USB)?

IDE Integration project provides a full feature environment with IDEs, programming environments and conectivity tools. Therefore, you can start maemo development a lot quicker (and much easier :).

Take a look at this post on Forum Nokia Blog page.

A few days ago the Maemo 5.0 Beta SDK was announced. I was more exited then I expected myself. I already played with the Alpha SDK and was able to install the Beta without pain on my amd64 based machine.

The install on amd64

The amd64 bits architecture is not officially supported as host for the SDK and in the past I have had troubles installing the SDK. This time the installer worked pretty well. But before you install the sdk and /or sbox you need to add "vdso32=0" to your kernel command line. this can be done in /boot/grub/menu.lst . I used the “tar.gz” based install on a “not supported” arch to install scratchbox.

root@ijssijs:~# ./maemo-scratchbox-install_5.0beta.sh -F -s /scratchbox

The only drawback of this method is that you have to start and stop scrachbox by hand when you want to use it. The “default” ./maemo-scratchbox-install_5.0beta.sh -F appeared to work at first but the install of the Maemo SDK failed after wards (I guess this is something related to fakeroot) . After that I follow the normal install using

keesj@ijssijs:~/downloads$ ./maemo-sdk-install_5.0beta.sh -y 

The biggest difference compared to the Maemo 4.x SDK in that the Xephyr X-server now requires the composite extension where it used to be disabled explicitly when starting the server

Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac 

Trying some QT stuff

Trying some qt is really childs play. I always likes qt and apparently it only gets better. the qt4 project on Maemo created packages that by now are in the fremantle extras repository. simply add

http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ fremantle free 

to your /etc/apt/source.list and apt-get install libqtgui4 libqt4-dev and qt4-demos . After that you can go to /usr/lib/qt4/examples and looks at the many demo's. The nice thing about this is that the demos are small get you started very quickly. I really fancy the clock example. it is very easy to create nice apps based on this.

OpenGL ES

Trying out opengl samples should be as easy as downloading the sdk from here
http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdk/KhronosOpenGLES2xSGX.asp

and copying the file to the SDK directory.

SDKPackage/Builds/OGLES2$
 cp -r Include/* /scratchbox/users/$USER/targets/FREMANTLE_X86/usr/include/
 cp LinuxPC/Lib/* /scratchbox/users/$USER/targets/FREMANTLE_X86/usr/lib/
 cp -r LinuxPC/Include/* /scratchbox/users/$USER/targets/FREMANTLE_X86/usr/include/

however this doesn't work for me

Next for me will be to create a small app in qt!

(sorry for the edits' a wiki page would have been a better solution)

What is Skype? What is it used for?

Time to recycle the first maemo server, phased out a long time ago and now waiting for its final death. (it's not just a server with a yellow maemo sticker on top, even if you can argue that :D )[Kudos to Jesus that spotted it in the corridor]

This week I have tried to implement a semantic annotation and resolution module. But there are some problems confused me.

1. the first problem is about where should I do the semantic work.

For my previous work, it's a system that have a server and a client. The server aggregates rss feeds and then classify those news items into different topics. On the client side, user can not subscribe news items by adding rss feed. Instead of , they subscribe news itmes by selecting topics they like. Then the server broadcast all information, client receive information based on result of selection.

In this system, I can easily implement semantic module, all work are done on the server side. I write a python program by using python-calais api to annotate each news items then resolve the response and generate a news item package with metadata.

However, in traditional rss reader system, this solution can not work. I plan to do semantic work in two different ways:

the first one is to use yahoo pipe, this way is similar to my previous solution. the rss feeds are imported to the pipe then the pipe would annotate those news items via using calais pipe. on client side, the resolution is done via separate metadate from news content. But this solution has the same problem with my previous solution that user can not determine which rss feed he or she want to use and the rss feed list is fixed.( In fact, I can allow users to use their ompl file to import rss lists, but the list would be fixed and any new rss feed can not be easily added into it.)

the second one is to do all semantic work on client side. Once a news item is download, then it would be annotated by calais, and resolved. But I wonder whether the device can perform such complex computation quickly and efficiently.

2. the second problem is about what I should finally do
I think my original idea about this project during GSOC is to implement a smart filter not a complete rss reader system( In fact, I would continue my work after GSOC, and finnaly implement a new rss reader system). I plan to test semantic , context-aware module on my previous system.But if I do so, then no one else can test the work I have done. If I choose to implement a complete rss reader, then I don't think I have enough time to finish my work. I want to know whether maemo community or google would test my work on mid or final evaluation? If they would do this, that means I should quicly choose a open source rss reader system in garage, and try to integarte my work with it, then any one in community can test during GSOC.


Do you have any suggestions or solutions on above two problems? tell me, please

This is a statement I have been hearing a lot lately, and I must say I would have to agree with it. There are lots of times that that I just don’t get it. The current theme and attitude of the powers that be at Maemo.org the subject of my current topic. I do not [...]

Amazing talk: Charles Leadbeater: The rise of the amateur professional

These are my favorite quotes:

• How do we organize ourselves without organizations? … You don’t need an organization to be organized.
• One of the reasons [this view] is wrong, is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline. The ideas are coming back from the consumers, and they’re often ahead of the producers.
• Big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success. They’ve got so much sunk in it, that it’s very difficult for them to spot new markets. Emerging new markets then, are the breeding grounds for passionate users.
• What we are seeing is a complete corruption of the ideal of patents and copyrights; meant to be a way to incentivize innovation, meant to be a way orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge. They are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place.
• The reason why despite all the efforts to cut it down, to constrain it, to hold it back… why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force, is that they multiply our productive resources, and one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers, consumers into designers.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-04-27 through 2009-05-03

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-04-27 through 2009-05-03

GUADEC will be arranged this year together with aKademy as the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit on July 3rd - 11th. The event will be an excellent opportunity to learn about some new technologies for the Linux desktop:

• GeoClue and libchamplain presentation (Sunday morning):
  GeoClue is the position information service, and libchamplain is a very nice Clutter map widget. Together they provide a powerful framework for making the Linux desktop location-aware. We will present the projects together with Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, the guy behind libchamplain and Empathy's location-sharing features
• Midgard2: Content repository for desktop and the web (Tuesday afternoon):
  Midgard2 is a generic content repository that enables you to develop mobile, desktop and web applications that synchronize their data together using D-Bus and XMPP. It can be used anywhere from Maemo handhelds to proper data centers.

I will probably also have to defend my title in the Ice Cream Deathmatch. See you there!

Technorati Tags: geoclue, gnome, midgard, libchamplain

While developing Tinymail, a library for writing E-mail clients, I was convinced that the storage of the summary was something Tinymail itself must handle. Back then there was, even pragmatically, nothing that could cope with the requirements of E-mail on mobile devices for this task.

... and it's cheaper than I thought. US $699. I was tempted to put down the credit card now, but other major expenses snuck up and bit me. I hope to buy it for myself for my birthday in June.

We'll see.

Still no news on the Maemo 5 tablet, but Ars Technica has a good article on the SDK status.

I am proud to announce the release of libchamplain 0.3, the first development release toward 0.4.  libchamplain is a map widget.  It is the work of many months (as far as November) and many contributors since FOSDEM.  Here is a short list of what you get:

• Support for proxies
• Support for custom map sources
• A way to list the available map sources
• Support for 2 new built-in map sources: Cycle Map and Osmarender
• A bunch of new function to allow more control on the UI
• A nicer, more flexible Marker API
• Nicer default markers: they are now grey, have rounded corners and cast a shadow!
• Notification when the view is loading content and when it’s done
• Support for locking down available zoom levels
• A more intelligent cache that can be purged
• Bindings (in the works): Perl, Python, C# and C++

Of course being a development release, the API isn’t entirely stable yet.  For instance, the code surrounding the ChamplainMapSourceDesc introduced this weekend is subject to be reviewed in the next weeks.

Yet, this release is a big step forward introducing a lot of the desired features while leaving some for an upcoming release (such as the ability to draw lines on the map).

You can grab the tarball or clone the source code.  You can read the NEWS or read about the API.

On a side note, libchamplain as been officially proposed as an external dependency for GNOME 2.28.

Many of us were excited when Nokia officially unveiled a few features for the newest Maemo 5 operating system at the Maemo Summit in Berlin in September 2008. The feature list for Maemo 5 included support for TI OMAP 3 processors, Cellular Data Connectivity, High Definition Camera and Hardware Graphics Acceleration. The future looked bright for Nokia's Internet Tablet line. Then reality set in for some of us: Nokia would not be officially providing Maemo 5 and future OS releases to the N8X0 and 770 lines of Internet Tablets. Significant hardware differences was one factor leading to this decision, and Nokia's future business strategy was likely another. Rage ensued in the tablet community! This so-called sham was compared to the 770-to-N800 transition, where Nokia support for 770 users initially stopped at OS2006 (later, 'Hacker Editions' of OS 2007 and 2008 appeared, and were made available on Nokia's own firmware upgrade site).

A few weeks ago I pointed out some similarities between community software projects and critical mass. After watching Chelsea-Barcelona last night – an entertaining match for many of the wrong reasons and a few of the right ones – I wanted to share another analogy that could perhaps be useful in analysing free software projects. What can we learn from football clubs?

As stated in the Fremantle SDK Installation Notes, Xephyr on Ubuntu 9.04 crashes when clicking on a text field in the Fremantle Beta SDK. It also says that the Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10) version works better. Here is how you can compile and install Intrepid's Xephyr version:

sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xephyr
sudo apt-get install build-essential devscripts
dget http://at.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/x/xorg-server/xorg-server_1.5.2-2ubuntu3.dsc
dpkg-source -x xorg-server_1.5.2-2ubuntu3.dsc
cd xorg-server-1.5.2/
debuild
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i xserver-xephyr_1.5.2-2ubuntu3_i386.deb
Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac &

Now you can start the Fremantle Beta SDK and run it without crashing all the time :) You can delete the rest of the .deb packages created - they are not needed for Xephyr. If you want to go back (well... "forward" really) to Jaunty's Xephyr package, you can simply use sudo aptitude install xserver-xephyr to upgrade it.

It's been a while since the last Expert Python Programming review on Planet Python. Y'all might've forgotten about this book by now. Time for a reminder? (Actually, I'm just lazy busy, and this is why this review hasn't appeared sooner.)

Ok, well it's just an interview of me, but hopefully Steven Lake, the owner/operator of Raiden's Realm will interview the others as well.

Anyway, if you want to know a little more about me, maemo.org (especially the recent website redesign), and the Maemo Community Council, head on over to the interview.

 

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-05-04 through 2009-05-10

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-05-04 through 2009-05-10

I’m working on some example code for Maemo 5 as standalone modules with full autotools files.

I now have Desktop Widget example code working in the Maemo 5 Beta SDK, showing a simple clock face, using the drawing code from Davyd Madeley’s cairo-based custom widget example, with his kind permission. Implementing a Desktop Widget is much like implementing a regular GTK+ Widget: You can draw in the expose-event handler, or add child GTK+ (or Hildon) widgets.

I’ve filed documentation bugs to make it easier for the next person to figure out how to implement and install Desktop Widgets, and a few bugs about the Hildon documentation in general.

I expect the final Maemo 5 version to have many standard Desktop Widgets, far more attractive than this:

In Desktop Edit mode, you can move the Desktop Widgets around by dragging them with your finger, remove them by touching the X icon, or configure them by touching the spanner icon. You can add extra widgets (if installed) by touching the “Desktop menu”. Note that you need to apt-get update and upgrade after installing the Beta SDK to see the X and spanner icons.

The rendering artifacts (such as the white line at the top) are just a known bug in Xephyr (on the PC). They won’t appear when running on an actual device.

I hope that next Maemo device would support “standard” xhtml+css+js widget framework, like the one that is provided with Nokia phones…

@Manrique: That’s offtopic here. For explicit enhancement requests, feel free to file a ticket in bugs.maemo.org (though »“standard” xhtml+css+js widget framework« sounds very vague and might become a WONTFIX. I don’t think there’s something i’d call standard in this area yet).

Then again, it shouldn’t be that hard to put a GtkWebKit widget in a Maemo Desktop Widget. Then you can do what you like.

@andre: sorry for the offtopic, but it was a fast thought about similar platforms like Nokia WRT (http://www.forum.nokia.com/Resources_and_Information/Explore/Web_Technologies/Web_Runtime/), Opera Widgets (http://widgets.opera.com) and W3C (http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/) and Bondi (http://bondi.omtp.org/default.aspx) work on this area towards a standard…

@Murray, that’s what I am playing with (and with QtWebkit too)…

With the recent release of the Maemo 5 Beta SDK, I was given the task to update the Maemomm bindings maintained by Openismus and upload them to the extras repository. I had previously done some packaging for the Maemo 5 Alpha SDK, but this was to be a much bigger job.

Much of the work was quite simple, as Murray had pointed me to his short guide on updating Debian packages. For some simple packages it was sufficient to bump version numbers, check and update dependencies and upload to extras. Where libraries were concerned, I also had to be sure to update the .so version correctly.

Some of the packages that I updated did not provide debug symbol packages, so these had to be added. This was a case of checking the debhelper compatibility level, and passing the correct package name to dh_strip in the debian/rules file. For some unknown and stupid reason, when the debhelper compatibility level is set to less than or equal to 4, and dh_strip is passed the --dbg-package=packagename argument, the specified "debug package" is stripped of its debug symbols which are then placed in a new package with "-dbg" appended to the original packagename. When the debhelper compatibility level is greater than 4, this behaviour is (correctly) reversed, and the --dbg-package argument really does specify a "debug package", traditionally named "packagename-dbg", and not a stripped package.

I also had to make some tarball releases, as most of the packages that needed packaging for Maemo 5 had received changes to keep current with the updates in the SDK. This was quite simple, as all the packages made use of autotools, so a "./autogen.sh && make && make distcheck" was sufficient in most cases, after updating version numbers, ChangeLog, NEWS and some package-specific things. This meant that for the first time I got to commit my changes to a public SVN repository. It was quite a scary experience as opposed to Git, where committing changes is local, and only pushing them is scary.

The final stage was uploading the packages to the Maemo autobuilder, where the source is built using a minimal dependency list (generated from the "Depends:" line of the debian/control file), and, if the build was successful, uploaded to the extras-devel repository for wider consumption. The status of the build is made available once the process is complete, allowing changes and a re-upload if it failed, or adding the package to the extras-devel repository on success.

I now feel a bit more confident about Debian packaging (although I have surely made some mistakes), so hopefully next time the process should be even smoother.

I think offering Qt with LGPL was already a good change towards openness, but now Qt opens some more with public Gitorious repository!

Changes in this release:

- Use g_printerr() instead of g_critical() in case of problems.
- Initialize the GError to NULL at declaration.
- Declare variables as const to setisfy the compiler.
- Add missing casts.
- Use g_content_type_is_a() to compare mimetypes.
- Correct the order of mimetype check.
- Iterate over item resources rather than renderer protocols.
- Port all UIs to use GtkBuilder.
- Bump-up Gtk+ requirement to 2.16.

Removed dependency in this release: libglade.

Contributors to this release:

Sven Neumann
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download tarball here:
http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-tools/gupnp-tools-0.7.1.tar.gz

I’d like to make people aware of something my colleague Daf pointed out to me: one cannot use Python’s SSL code (this also applies to other Python projects such as M2Crypto) in a GPL licensed application because it uses OpenSSL.

The problem resides in OpenSSL’s license which requires :

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
must display the following acknowledgement:
“This product includes cryptographic software written by
Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com)”
The word ‘cryptographic’ can be left out if the routines from the library
being used are not cryptographic related :-).

and (because of its dual license)

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
software must display the following acknowledgment:
“This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project
for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/)”

This requirement as been marked as GPL incompatible.  Therefore, any GPL application using it is in license violation. While the OpenSSL FAQ stipulates that you can use it with GPL applications, this opinion is not shared by everyone. This is a quite big unadvertised licensing problem.

Now, I am not a lawyer but I can point to some existing solutions to this problem:

1. Fix Python to not use such a poisonous (to GPL) licensed library.
2. Do not use Python’s SSL code and use other implementations such as python-gnutls.  This solution less appealing as replacement libraries often don’t completely cover python’s API.
3. Relicense your GPL application to “GNU GPL  with the OpenSSL special
   exemption.” (as wget did) and add mentions to OpenSSL in your advertising materials. This solution is sometimes hard to implement as you have to contact all past contributors.

It's been a while.

One guy just told me he's reading my blog. I guess I better start writing ...

Let me spam this time with two topics only:

Look at Qt opened up. Pretty cool. You can see the work in progress.

Look at Maemo and Moblin work. oFono.org is a place to design an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications.

I was meant to blog about the imminent Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend but… Tomorrow.

Detail from westergas_section, by josh jackson (some rights reserved)

The first Maemo Summit ever was a big success last year. Today starts the walk towards the second edition!

October 9-10-11 - WesterGasFabriek - Amsterdam  (get a feeling)

3 days: 1 organized by Nokia and 2 by the community.

4 post-industrial spaces surrounded by culture, parks, canals and fun:

• Transformatorhuis: keynotes & track 1.
• Machinegebouw: track 2.
• De Kapel: track 3
• Oostelijk Meterhuis: special activities.

Location plan (pdf 1,1MB)

Registration

Not yet, but for you to know:

Free entrance! Registration needed to grant you food, drinks, a maemo.org shirt and a seat.

300 participants expected: developers and engaged users, community members and curious newcomers, from many countries and The Netherlands too.

Organization

Bootstrapping. See Maemo Summit 2009/Organization

FAQ

See also the discussion at talk.maemo.org (formerly known as internettablettalk.com – community united!)

Interesting stuff guaranteed. See you there! (or before)

Tagged: Amsterdam, community, development, events, Fremantle, Harmattan, maemo summit, WesterGasFabriek

Ladies and gentleman - if you needed an excuse to take a vacation to Amsterdam, now is a good time. Quim Gil just posted that this year's Maemo Summit will be there on October 9, 10, and 11.

Last year's Summit brought some good ideas, good direction, and great enthusiasm for platform development. We also found out what the next tablet will contain. Seven months later, we still do not see a new tablet but the Maemo 5 SDK is solid and I am sure Nokia is allowing the developers to lead with applications that will be ready when the device is launched.

Personally, I hope to see a new tablet by August at the latest. I don't know if it will be released before the end of June as that is too close to the Nokia N97 launch date and there will be very few people who would buy both but likely a lot of overlap in those who would buy one OR the other.

For myself, I want both for different reasons. The N97 will be the most advanced phone available and the Maemo 5 tablet will be the most portable full-featured Internet/Social Networking device combined with the most advanced Linux handheld ever.

That's what I believe so far. Let's see what arrives!

I wanted to do a quick blog post with some resources for packaging python apps for Maemo. The resources I’ll post here are going to be debian related since maemo packages are based on debian packages. Later on I’ll go into more detail on the differences between debian python packages and maemo python packages, but I think you’ll find these resources to be useful for getting started or for tracking down a problem in your python app’s deb.

The first resource is a link to the debian wiki entry for the Python Modules Team;
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/PythonModulesTeam

These folks package a lot of python modules for debian, so their documentation will be pretty authoritative and looking at their packages will probably teach you a lot.

The next link is to the Python policy. Boring I know, but you will be directed there for answers to various questions, so you might as well have a handy link to it.
http://python-modules.alioth.debian.org/python-modules-policy.html

Here is an interesting and pretty darn good screencast and tutorial showing how to package a simple python application as a deb on Ubuntu!
http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=linuxJensMakingDeb

Ubuntu also has a Packaging guide which might be useful, I haven’t read all of it and it is more general than just python programming.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide

Hopefully that is enough to get started. I hope for follow up with more info on packaging python apps for maemo and for debian.

Time to talk about The Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend! Just in case you missed the announcement:

Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend
May 30-31 + Friday night party (29th).
IT University of Copenhagen (see map & pictures & more pictures)

The Maemo and Mozilla projects are organizing a joint developer camp in Copenhagen the last weekend of May. If you are working on Fennec, Fennec add-ons or Maemo 5 applications this call is for you!

Let me repeat this: Maemo developers not related with Fennec/add-ons are welcome as well! (some people wondered). In fact we have already a good representation with Fremantle Stars, other remarkable projects with a foot in Maemo 5, GSoC projects and Mer.

The meeting is open and free, although registration is needed if you want us to have enough sandwiches, drinks and memorable shirts.

So if you’re in a hacking mood and want to participate, or if you know people who would love to participante, please help spread the word, blog about it, make some noise ! We definitely want a packed house and as much hacking as possible (c) William’s Blog

Register – Who is coming.

Once you have registered, go for the logistics:

Schedule: the weekend is for hacking but there is place for presentations, demos, workshops and other activities. Show your stuff and book a slot in the auditorium or one of the rooms.

Accommodation: there is a group reservation in the Hotel Cabinn Scandinavia for those looking for a place to stay.

Party: join us at the ITU student bar on Friday 29 May from 19:00 to 23:00.

Tshirt: specify your preferred size in the registration form (S, M, L, XL or XXL).

Vi ses i København!

Tagged: community, Copenhagen, development, fennec, Fremantle, hackfest, maemo, mozilla

Update: The story continues, but solution is not in sight yet.

I upgraded a buildbot slave to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) recently and now I'm getting a strange intermittent failure: sometimes cp -r /local/dir /nfs/mounted/dir fails ("process killed by signal 1", i.e. SIGHUP).

I wonder if NFS is relevant or incidental to the issue?

Google finds an old thread from 2005, with a workaround (usepty=False), but I'd like to understand the problem before applying random fixes.

So far three different build steps doing cp -r have failed during 10 days. I've now changed them all to cp -rv, so I can at least see if the failure is in the middle of the copy or at the end, if it fails again.

Update: so far 4 build steps have failed on 6 separate occasions:

May  5 02:31: cp -r local-dir1 nfs-mounted-dir1  
May  6 02:31: cp -r local-dir1 nfs-mounted-dir1  
May  6 04:33: cp -r local-dir2 nfs-mounted-dir2  
May 15 02:00: cp -r local-dir3 nfs-mounted-dir3  
May 17 04:32: rm -rf nfs-mounted-dir4            
May 20 04:31: rm -rf nfs-mounted-dir4            

I see no particular correlation between step duration and results, e.g. the rm -rf step usually takes between 2.2 and 4.6 seconds. The two SIGHUPs happened after 2.4 seconds.

They all make no output. When I changed the cp steps and added a -v, they stopped failing, but that could be just a coincidence.

We're having an email conversation with Jean-Paul Calderone ("exarkun") about the possibility of this being PTY-related, with no clear resolution so far.

And, hey, now this blog supports comments ;)

The Open Web Foundation was conceived last year to create a framework which helps communities behind open web specifications navigate the non-technical organizational and legal challenges that successful specifications are bound to encounter. Many community-driven standards efforts falter when it comes to the heavy investment of time figuring out how to work within our existing intellectual property laws and are often forced to create their own non-profit organization just to support a ten page specification.

I've just spent the whole night setting up blog comments. PyBlosxom doesn't make it painless, sadly, more like the opposite.

First: don't be scared by the list of comment-related plugins on the PyBlosxom site. There's only one important plugin: comments. All others depend on it and enhance its functionality. The last three or four times I was about to add comments to my blog I got scared at step one: evaluate the available plugins. Don't repeat my mistake!

Second, follow the instructions carefully. There's no shortcut.

Third, fix what's broken. Be prepared to debug the source code. print >> sys.stderr, "message" is your friend.

Fourth, fiddle with the look (CSS and HTML).

Fifth, write a blog post and eagerly await your first comments.

Step 3 screams for an explanation, doesn't it? Problem 1: the comments plugin requires that you use categories in your blog. I'm not (I'm holding out for tags). Workaround: comment out if entry['absolute_path'] check in cb_story and cb_story_end.

Problem 2: the AJAX post returns "Empty response from server". Workaround: modify cb_story_end to call readComments directly if entry['num_comments'] is None, since cb_story, which usually does the read, is not called during the AJAX post.

Problem 3: if you enable comment moderation (by setting comment_draft_ext to a different value from comment_ext), the AJAX post returns "Empty response from server" once more. Workaround: modify cb_prepare to notice this case and set data['moderated'] = True, create a new template comment-moderated and render it in cb_story_end just like the preview template is rendered; also modify __shouldOutput to return True when rendering comment-moderated.

I'll post patches to the pyblosxom mailing tomorrow, unless I forget. It's 6 am already, and I'm kind of sleepy. I just hope I haven't inadvertently broken my RSS feed or flooded any planets.

Oh, and a helpful hint: don't name the post you're writing comments.txt, or the #comments anchor will point to the start of the story instead of the comments.

A few days ago Intel and Nokia announced that they are collaborating on an initiative to develop what seems to be an open source telephony platform named oFono. This raises a lot of questions, Why are Nokia helping to develop another open platform when they have Maemo and the newly opened Symbian OS to contend with? Why are Intel interested in anything in the open source world outside of Moblin and their netbook strategy? And in the face of the ever expanding world of Android, what does this mean for Maemo?

Well, the future isn't exactly clear but it could mean a boost for Maemo. Exactly why is clouded in mystery somewhat.

read more

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-05-11 through 2009-05-17

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-05-11 through 2009-05-17

Thanks for the example.
What worries me the most is the amount of knowledge required to create such a widget.
(debian packaging,autotools,c programming ,gtk and glibc pragmas,hildon additions)

Lets create some more lightweight ways’ of doing this

Embedded Lab has launched the 2nd edition of Effort Competition (website on portuguese), an interesting challenge for undergraduate and graduate students. The main objective is to make that students explore Nokia mobile platforms (maemo, S60, ...) to generate interesting and innovative projects.

The winners will receive Nokia 7310 Supernova devices as prize :) Unfortunately, Effort Competition 2nd edition subscriptions are over, but keep on eye on it - 3rd edition is coming!

You can also check more comments on Forum Nokia Blog.

keesj,
> What worries me the most is the amount of knowledge required to create such a widget.

Well, it’s incredibly easy for anyone used to using GTK+ already, which is many people.

Otherwise, well, programming is hard.

I believe there is a bookmark system to add simple images that go to websites when clicked. I also hope that Desktop Widgets can be implemented with the python bindings soon, which would be slightly simpler than using C.

Or do you have something else in mind?

Another milestone has been reached in the Mer project on its way to eventually replace Maemo on the N8x0 devices. It will be possible to play videos with Mer 0.13. The current SVN version of MediaBox supports Mer and uses the libxine backend for video playback.

After installing libxine and MediaBox SVN version on Mer, you will need to install the D-Bus-Xine service. D-Bus-Xine is a simple D-Bus service for embedding libxine in applications. It was originally written for enabling DVD playback
with MediaBox on PCs.

A version compiled for Mer-ARMEL can be found here. If you want to compile D-Bus-Xine yourself, you can also download its source code.

I haven't built deb packages for D-Bus-Xine yet, so you'll have to manually extract the tarball in the root directory (/) on Mer.

After having started MediaBox, you should enter its preferences view
and set the media backends to Xine for all filetypes that you want to be able play.
However, there is no sound support yet in Mer 0.13, so don't expect too much.

EDIT: see the comments for how to get sound

I've got no information on the validity of the claimed Harmattan screenshots that are floating around, but anyway wanted to comment on a part of it:

Having your today's meetings on a map would be really cool.

This is something I've wanted to do with OpenPSA ever since the days I spent motorcycling around office districts of Helsinki giving Midgard demos. I'd often have only 15 minutes to move from one presentation to another, and at that pace figuring out the locations was a pain in the ass.

Geocoding meeting and TODO item locations would be a problem, but if that was solved this would be a killer feature. Maybe something we could do with GeoClue and libchamplain?

Technorati Tags: maemo

Looks like MobileCrunch has an inside source with two new articles: One showing the screenshot above with some commentary and one speculating that the OS shown will be on ad-supported phones. I don't have time to do my own analysis right now (day job) but will post my impressions later. Looks interesting.

Wow - it's been a long time since I posted a poll. The voting is on the right side of tabletblog.com (if you catch me through an RSS reader) and asks:

Would you use an ad-supported Internet Tablet?

• No - it's far too annoying
• Yes - it doesn't bother me
• Yes - but only if the internet service was free
• Yes - but only if the service and device were free

I go back and forth on ad-supported devices. Advertising dollars on blogs have gone to nearly nothing - but that's because my target audience is too tech-savvy to view the ads and far less likely to click. I wonder what kind of market an ad supported Maemo tablet will have and what the click-through ratio would be?

Now that Last.fm is restricted in most countries, the obvious alternative (already discussed in previous posts) was to start offering support for similar services for people that cannot / don’t want to use Last.fm anymore.

So here is Vagalume with support for Libre.fm:

(this is not ready yet, but expect a new release in a few days/weeks)

Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol wondered recently if there are too many mobile Linux platforms.

The context was the recent announcement of oFono by Intel and Nokia, and some confusion and misunderstanding about what oFono represents. Apparently, several people in the media thought that oFono would be Yet Another Complete Stack, and Fabrizio took the bait too.

As far as I can tell, oFono is a component of a mobile stack, supplying the kind of high-level API for telephony functions which Gstreamer does for multimedia applications. If you look at it like this, it is a natural compliment to Moblin and Maemo and potentially a candidate technology for inclusion in the GNOME Mobile module set.

Which brings me to my main point. Fabrizio mentions five platforms besides oFono in his article: Android, LiMo, Symbian, Maemo and Moblin. First, Symbian is not Linux. Of the other four, LiMo, Maemo and Moblin share a bunch of technology in their platforms. Common components across the three are: The Linux kernel (duh), DBus, Xorg, GTK+, GConf, Gstreamer, BlueZ, SQLite… For the most part, they use the same build tools. The differences are in the middleware and application layers of the platform, but the APIs that developers are mostly building against are the same across all three.

Maemo and Moblin share even more technology, as well as having very solid community roots. Nokia have invested heavily in getting their developers working upstream, as has Intel. They are both leveraging community projects right through the stack, and focusing on differentiation at the top, in the user experience. The same goes for Ubuntu Netbook Edition (the nearest thing that Moblin has to a direct competitor at the moment).

So where is the massive diversity in mobile platforms? Right now, there is Android in smartphones, LiMo targeting smartphones, Maemo in personal internet tablets and Moblin on netbooks. And except for Android, they are all leveraging the work being done by projects like GNOME, rather than re-inventing the wheel. This is not fragmentation, it is adaptability. It is the basic system being tailored to very specific use-cases by groups who decide to use an existing code base rather than starting from scratch. It is, in a word, what rocks about Linux and free software in general.

Some anonymous Planet Python poster (at least I couldn't find the author's name on the blog) Christian Wyglendowski asks about a surprising difference between old-style and new-style classes. Since the comments on their blog are closed (which you find out only after pressing Submit), I'll answer here.

The question, slightly paraphrased: given a class

class LameContainerOld:
    def __init__(self):
        self._items = {'bar':'test'}
 
    def __getitem__(self, name):
        return self._items[name]
 
    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        return getattr(self._items, attr)

why does the 'in' operator work

>>> container = LameContainerOld()
>>> 'foo' in container
False
>>> 'bar' in container
True

when the equivalent new-style class raises a KeyError: 0 exception? Also, why does __getattr__ appear to be called to get the bound __getitem__ method of the dict?

>>> container.__getitem__
<bound method LameContainerNew.__getitem__ of {'bar': 'test'}>

What actually happens here is that LameOldContainer.__getattr__ gets called for special methods such as __contains__ and __repr__. This is why (1) the 'in' check works, and (2) it appears, at first glance, that you get the wrong __getitem__ bound method. If you pay close attention to the output, you'll see that it's the __getitem__ of LameOldContainer; it's just that repr(LameOldContainer()) gets proxied through to the dict.__repr__ when you don't expect it:

>>> container
{'bar': 'test'}

Special methods never go through __getattr__ for new-style classes, therefore neither __contains__ nor __repr__ are proxied if you make the container inherit object. If there's no __contains__ method, Python falls back to the sequence protocol and starts calling __getitem__ for numbers 0 through infinity, or until it gets an IndexError exception.

From FastCompany:

In an effort to boost the local Finnish economy, they're throwing open their thousands of unused patents so that any company in Finland can pursue ideas that Nokia has abandoned.

This article (link for more) really raised my eyebrows. I don't know of any consumer electronics company who'd be willing to make such a move. In these troubled economic times (drink!) it would behoove more companies to foster way for others to make money too. More money = more customers with money = more sales. It's never that simple.

I raise my mug to you, Nokia. Hope all that works out.

This post is an introduction to some of the higher level concepts of packaging, more about the whys than the hows. I plan to start a series of posts on the anatomy of your average deb for Maemo, but before that I wanted to go through some of the reasons for packaging so that the details fit into a larger purpose. That purpose is simply to make life easier for your users by doing the hard work for them.

The hard work is compiling, determining dependencies, and building for the chip architecture of your software. All this stuff is quite esoteric to the average user – they just want to know: how do I install? Does it work with my tablet? With packaging we can answer in the affirmative the latter question and we can make install painless. That makes users of your software happy and more likely to use it.

Debian has as part of its mission the goal of putting users first, this makes Nokia’s choices of debian as an operating system fortuitous. Debian has worked really hard at making software easy to install and their success has made it one of the most popular linux distros out there. Debian’s user-centric focus created the APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) system, with apt-get and aptitude, which Maemo has inherited. This means that maemo packages can take advantage of all the well tested debian tools and the infrastructure which debian has built.

Building packages correctly allows you to insert software onto a variety of architectures, Maemo supports two and Debian supports at least eight.

Packaging has some fringe benefits as well, it forces a certain amount of discipline upon the developer and alerts them to the needs of their users. This is unfortunately something that we as programmers forget to do – to put the user at the center of the experience. Software should be written with users and usability in mind, otherwise no matter how good it is, no one will use it. Packaging helps to enforce best practices which make the installation and upgrade of software standardized. By standardizing distribution of software we are realizing the spirit of the GPL and bringing some pretty amazing technology to everyone, not just the alpha geeks who know their way around a C compiler.

Quick recap: Packaging allow us to

• Build software for numerous architectures
• Make software easy to install
• Follow best practices in the development and distribution of software

So that is the point of packaging; to make software easy to install. It’s good to remember this when you are jumping through the hoops of dpkg and its various tools.

After the discussion on the Seed proposal thread about what flavor of JavaScript should GNOME as a project use, I made a point of figuring out what’s the current status on the ECMAScript standarization saga.

This is old news by now, but some of you might not know that the ECMA committe responsible for JavaScript decided last year to pretty much do a full reset and try to move forward step by step instead of doing everything and the kitchen sink in one go; that is, instead of the ES4 revolution we would have the ES3.1 spring cleanup. Well, 9 months later and, ironies of life, the next standard will be called ES5 instead of ES3.1 (although it’s still an incremental improvement), and the final draft is already available (PDF).

So, what’s in it? These google slides do a pretty good job at introducing the changes, but I’ll try to do a warp-speed summary here:

• A new ’strict mode’ to ease robust and defensive programming. You can look up the details in the slides, but a single feature would have been worth it for me back in my litl days: failed assignments throw an exception in strict mode.
• Function.prototype.bind to fix one of the first WTF moments one has when learning JavaScript: closures do not capture ‘this’.
• Higher order array methods: map, every, some, filter, reduce… all are there.
• Built-in JSON implementation.
• getter/setter properties, plus syntax for fine grained control of properties access.

From my limited experience with JavaScript I think this fixes some obvious issues in the language, while others are in the backburner for future revisions (lexical scope, const, destructuring assignment, …), so I’d say things are looking pretty good.

Of course, the bigger issue is: should we require the JavaScript in GNOME to follow ECMA standards (ES3 now, ES5 and following in the future) in order to be able to use any compliant implementation, or should module owners be allowed to use vendor-specific extensions if they think it’s in their benefit to do so? I guess that’s up for debate, but it seems to me that we live in too interesting times to paint ourselves in a corner with a given implementation at this point.

Some months ago I last touched on the prospects of Nokia's relatively new internet service, Ovi.com, and recent news made me believe it is now time for a follow-up [...]

since starting liqbase one of the most important aspects for me is how my Nokia device feels when using it.I am pleased to say it feels good!the entire liqbase playground is shaping up even better than I could imagine and everything I am attempting to achieve is slotting into place.I have now restored the core mechanics into the system and everything flows as before, but now with the framework operating at peak efficiency I can take a step backwards and admire the bigger picture:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt7qB37sLLoI can now draw again and I have an awesome calendar and image viewer. theres also an extremely friendly tagcloud system which is simply a joy to use. the zooming works exactly like I thought it would, obviously work will continue and I will have all original functionality and more in the release.A tremendous search capability has emerged with a natural organic layout bringing different components together which will literally blow your mind!I still have lots to do, but I am getting help now from numerous quarters.zach has just started his google summer of code residency and has begun creating his network monitor skeleton and is helping document the framework.kot is constantly reminding me about linux in general and how stupid I am for putting fixed paths in the app :pkeesj has started to publicly track the .git and is looking at the packaging and how to actually bring liqbase into a more standard debian layout.the encouragement I receive from all quarters lets me know I am doing the right thing :)its gaining stability and strength now, I can see more of what I would like to do with it. :)

since starting liqbase one of the most important aspects for me is how my Nokia device feels when using it.I am pleased to say it feels good!the entire liqbase playground is shaping up even better than I could imagine and everything I am attempting to achieve is slotting into place.I have now restored the core mechanics into the system and everything flows as before, but now with the framework operating at peak efficiency I can take a step backwards and admire the bigger picture:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt7qB37sLLoI can now draw again and I have an awesome calendar and image viewer. theres also an extremely friendly tagcloud system which is simply a joy to use. the zooming works exactly like I thought it would, obviously work will continue and I will have all original functionality and more in the release.A tremendous search capability has emerged with a natural organic layout bringing different components together which will literally blow your mind!I still have lots to do, but I am getting help now from numerous quarters.zach has just started his google summer of code residency and has begun creating his network monitor skeleton and is helping document the framework.kot is constantly reminding me about linux in general and how stupid I am for putting fixed paths in the app :pkeesj has started to publicly track the .git and is looking at the packaging and how to actually bring liqbase into a more standard debian layout.the encouragement I receive from all quarters lets me know I am doing the right thing :)its gaining stability and strength now, I can see more of what I would like to do with it. :)

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-05-18 through 2009-05-24

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-05-18 through 2009-05-24

Hi,

Maemo Eclipse Integration 2nd Edition Beta 1 was just released, including Maemo SDK Virtual Image :)

On a recent post on Forum Nokia blog, I described about how Maemo SDK VM can help you to properly configure your Maemo programming environment, specially on those cases that you have to configure a lot of machines for a Maemo programming workshop, for example.

In addition, if you want to customize your Maemo SDK VM for a specific case (for example, distribute an old Maemo SDK release), you can check here the requirements list we've considered to provide Maemo SDK VM version 0.10.

I recently came across the rather cool Kickfire analytics appliance, which not only does hardware-based database query execution but is also based on F/OSS technologies.

Similar to the Azul Java compute appliance the secret is in the bespoke silicon which has been developed to do one thing and to do it well. When a job can reasonably be targeted to hardware and in doing so will execute much faster, why burden a general purpose processor with it and an associated software stack? Frankly, I think it is nothing short of ridiculous that we have data centres across the globe with millions, if not billions, of general purpose processors executing, with relative inefficiency the same tasks. It might be good news for hardware manufacturers and ISVs, but it’s bad news for the environment, CFOs and the armies of poor souls that have to manage spiralling complexity.

Of course there is nothing that new in the Kickfire and Azul appliances, nor in virtual machines and storage area networks and virtual LANs etc. And in fact many of these extremely popular and frequently hyped technology approaches of more recent years have their roots in the mainframe:

• ICL Content Addressable Filestore –> Kickfire
• IBM VM –> Xen &VMware etc
• DEC VAXcluster –> Veritas, Sun and F/OSS Linux clustering
• The Computer Bureau –> Cloud Computing

One of the major differences between then and now however is that we have a much greater degree of interoperability and with applications and data being much more portable. We are not, or rather we have the choice of not being locked into a single vendor.

I would suggest that to get round imminent scaling issues (SMP has effective limits and not everything works well across many cores) and to drive costs and energy consumption down we must do more research into what might be considered novel computing architectures. We need to stop saying “Oh, yeah but CPU is cheap”, and instead to think how we can optimise. It’s obvious that writing everything in assembler is not the answer, and it would appear that many of technological approaches that were displaced by the PC are now making a serious come back, and so we know roughly where to look.

So, let’s have more application-specific silicon, but which supports open applications. Bring back ancillary processors. Off-load the main CPU(s). Accelerate common functions. Put DES and AES etc on the die. Execute Java btyecode natively. And so on…

Jürg and me have started working on the rearchitecture plans that we have for Tracker. You can follow the code being changed here and here.

What is finished?

• Jürg took all database code out of the indexer. The indexer is now a consumer of tracker-store like any other. It commands tracker-store to store metadata. The indexer now also queries tracker-store for things like the modification time. Currently it has no access to the database directly. This might change, for performance reasons, we’re not sure about that yet.
• The trackerd process got renamed to tracker-store.
• The DBus object in tracker-store now executes the SPARQL Update requests itself. It used to send this request to tracker-indexer.

• Jürg moved the watching and crawling code that used to be in the daemon to the indexer. This means that tracker-store doesn’t depend on inotify anymore. This work made it possible to make your own indexer or not to have an indexer at all. This was quite a big task and got pushed today. This is of course being tested as we speak.

• I wrote an internal API to queue database store requests, making it possible to asynchronously deal with large amounts of data when multiple metadata deliverers will be giving tracker-store commands to store their metadata.
• I also ported existing code to use this internal API. This task item is ongoing and being tested. For example the Turtle Import, support for removable device caches in Turtle, Push modules (support for E-mail clients) and the DBus SPARQL Update API are affected by this.
• The class signals feature, which now doesn’t require involvement of the indexer, got fixed.

What is left to do?

Right now the indexer will instruct an extractor process to extract metadata from a file. This extractor process communicates the metadata first to the indexer, which in turn communicates the same metadata to tracker-store. This can be done more efficient by letting the extractor communicate the metadata directly to tracker-store.

We also have quite a few other plans for the indexer’s code. Such plans are a bit less short term planning. For example splitting support for the removable devices and the normal filesystem into two processes.

Again, some late news, but I thought it would be of interest of the readers of Planet Maemo. This post in MobileCrunch reveals a lot of details, including release dates, of the so expected next generation of Internet Tablets.

If I understood correctly, by reading the article you'll see the most unexpected and exciting news, which is of course, the cellular voice, which turns the N900 in the first phone by Nokia running Linux. How cool is that? Now the oFono.org launch makes perfect sense.

More links:

Engadget
Discussion thread on Talk

UPDATE: Boy Genius Report points to CellPassion which shows a lowres photo of the new tablet:

Maemo pc-connectivity project provides a nice script to exchange ssh keys between two machines (e.g PC and N8×0). A passwordless ssh login is a good idea to speed up development and crucial to some tools like sbrsh. To use the script is very simple:

1. Download its debian package from here and install it

- Or download the script itself from here and copy it to one folder in the path, e.g. /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.

2. Run the script:

$ ssh-key-exchange -l <local_pc_ip> -r <remote_device_ip> -u <device_user>

Host Address: 192.168.1.1 <local_pc_ip>
Target Address: 192.168.1.2 <remote_device_ip>
Target User: root <device_user>

Adding trusted host to ‘known hosts’…OK!
Exporting identity to remote host…root@192.168.1.2’s password:
OK!
Verifying remote user identity and creating it if necessary (this may take a few minutes)…OK!
Authorizing remote host key…OK!

Done. See /tmp/exchange-ssh-key.log and /tmp/exchange-ssh-key.log.err for detailed information
Please, check if everything is correctly by connect to the remote host via SSH.

People are already talking at length about the supposed N900/Rover tablet of which MobileCrunch claims to have "exclusive knowledge." The mock-up above was included in their post over it.

The specs they report are no surprise: They're a combination of the existing N810, some features of the N97, and all the information we heard back in September of last year. What really throws me for a loop: TMO? Really? T-Mobile? One of the blessings of the Internet Tablets before were that they were carrier-agnostic and can be used with a tethered phone on any carrier supporting the service. This meant that the same tablet can be used globally. Adding a carrier means adding carrier restrictions and bending to the will of those carriers. There would be an advantage, though: It could be offered at a lower subsidized price. Still - I'm not sure about the placement of this one.

Thoughts?

Nokia will release this year the successor of the Nokia Internet Tablet N810, called so far, the Nokia Internet Tablet N900 or Nokia Rover. The information was reported first by MobileCrunch and CellPassion.

The nice picture above has been created by LinuxUK.

Some data compared between N810, N97 and N900:

Dimensions (mm): 72x128x14, 55x117x16, 59.7x111x18.2
Weight (g): 226, 150, 180
Screen : 4.13″ 800x480 (WVGA), 3.5″ 640x360, 3.5″ 800×480 (WVGA)

The question now is, who is interested in this new Internet Tablet ? What's the advantage of the N900 compared with the N97, the next generation high-end mobile phone from Nokia ? Maemo versus S60 ? Will Nokia succeed this time in bringing the N900 to the market or will it stay a niche product for a happy few like it was for the 770, N800, N810 ? How will be the video experience on the smaller 3.5" screen (resolution is the same as the N810) ? What about the thickness of the device, 18mm is much more then the 14mm of the N810, isn't it. When will the N900 become available ? When will it become available in Europe ?

A nice, and much more complete article, about the question 'Where will a new Maemo device fit in today? can be read following the LinuxUK link.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Hi all,

I’ve just updated the wiki and added some information regarding the Maemo SSO there, to let you know where we are right now. The status of the test-environment is not yet in a shape to make it public for testing for everyone, but as soon as we get there I will inform you. As there was some discussion about the concept and status and as there is a discussion needed about the Midgard integration, I set up a meeting in IRC (#maemo-meeting) and you are free to join if you have questions or ideas.

The test environment as such contains now the authentication service, based on CAS, the first integration of the mediawiki, and a first implementation of a user management system. Tomorrow I hope to get some feedback, ideas and give some more details, if there is interest.

Cu tomorrow then in IRC,

Cheers Daniel

Three days to land in Copenhagen to enjoy a Danish Weekend. It looks like we are going to have around 100 developers coming literally from all directions to hack and take part in several activities. I wonder where all these people is sleeping though since we have (aparently) many beds available.

Let me insist again that you need to register in order to get your shirt and other goodies (free-as-in-literally-beer). Speaking of shirts, william [at] mozilla dot com can get one of your size from XXS to XXXL if you send him an email in advance NOW.

See you in Friday’s party!

Tagged: maemo, mozilla

While we are at the topic ‘evaluation and development hardware’… here here a few lines about a similar piece of hardware. I promised to do something with a FriendlyARM board already – so I did. I choosed the Micro2440 because the board itself is very small and can be used for own design easily. The very similar Mini2440 has a lot of ports on board in contrast to the 2mm headers of the Micro2440. Both boards are available through local distributors in Europe and the US now so that its not necessary to place orders in China any more. Watterott Electronic was so kind to send me a Micro2440 board and the SDK baseboard for evaluation.

If you want to get started with embedded Linux the board might be exactly what you want: A 400MHz ARM9 based Samsung S3C2440A CPU which is pretty well supported by Linux. 64MB od RAM and the same amount of NAND flash and 2MB of NOR flash for a backup bootloader. The baseboard has the connectors for the serial ports, USB host and client, display, expansion and SD and adds an audio codec and an Ethernet chip. There are two variants available: One with a 3.5″ QVGA TFT (pictured) and one with a 7″ 800×480 TFT.  Both displays come with a touchscreen and in addition to this the board has a few buttons that can be used for a human interface. The whole SDK kit including Micro2440, SDK board, 3.5″ display cables and JTAG doesn’t cost more than 125 EUR incl. VAT which makes it even more appealing.

The ‘softer’ part of the SDK quite appealing too: The hardware is pretty well documented, even the schematics are available to the public. FriendlyARM released some demo images and Linux sources that are useful (but not perfect). The ‘Vivi’ bootloader used by the boards can be replaced with u-boot easily so that you get a 100% Open Source embedded development environment.

Thanks to the OpenMoko community the S3C is pretty well supported in Linux and u-boot. There is a public project providing up to date Linux, u-boot and QEmu supoort for these boards that can be found here. Like I usually do for a new piece of embedded or mobile hardware I used OpenEmbedded to built a GPE based filesystem image for it. Like you can see in the picture it works pretty well. For people interested in this I put together some notes I took and the binary images at KC Labs. Feel free to contact me about this… I plan to extend support for it a little bit and provide a toolchain and additional information.

Have a nice time!

PS: Sorry for the bad image this time, I had to use the webcam to capture it.

All the talk (and sometimes ranting) about Nokia's so called next tablet got me thinking about the state of the potential market for a device like this today.

First lets go on a trip down memory lane.

History

Nokia released their first Internet Tablet towards the end of 2005. It was announced at the LinuxWorld Summit earlier that year and was a curious device. Not quite a phone and not quite a laptop, the 770 came before the current wave of netbooks had begun descending upon us and was met with some resistance. Many complained about its apparent slowness, but looking beyond this one could see that it had potential.

The N800 came next at the beginning of 2007 to a better reception. A faster processor, more memory and greater expandability meant that the adoption rate was much higher for this device. An improved N810 came later that year which added a keyboard and GPS but by this time other devices had joined or were about to join the party.

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It's obvious that there is going to be a lot of fall-out and discussion about the "N900/Rover" phone/tablet reporting. If the leaked specs are fake, many blogs got taken for a ride and there will be both cheering and disappointment when the real device lands (depending on features.) If the specs are real, well...

What kind of person takes internal trade secrets and gives them to a blog without any level of confidentiality assured? It's nice to speculate and toss around wish-lists for new devices, but it's really quite rude and destructive to take internal specs and engineering samples and lay them out for the whole public to pick apart. There's also a huge difference between a leak through negligence (like FCC reports outside confidentiality or some partner company releasing advertising too early) and the active work of someone taking specs from confidential material and sending it off to a blog.

Anyhow - if someone did actively leak product documents, they will be found and fired I am sure. In the meantime, I'm pretty sure Nokia is working hard to lock down secrets again which - sadly - makes it harder on blogger relations.

Here's a thought: With reports indicating that the 4th generation tablet may contain a regular GSM phone, it may steer another article series in a different direction. Initially, I had planned to write a series of articles on extracting a user from the iPhone "walled garden" and migrating to a Nokia N97 or Phone+Tablet combination. If the 4th generation tablet includes a phone, that would make it easier as the article series would be abou the migration from iTunes to maemo.

I can start on that now - but need to know a crucial question: Will existing maemo apps still work in the maemo 5 environment? If not, I'll have to wait until maemo 5 apps arrive to start writing about that migration experience.

There is a new set of rumours on websites about next Nokia tablet. Name it N900 (speculation name) or Rover (which is internal name) or famous N00 which probably is on prototypes (Nokia uses N00 on proto phones and tablets).

As Jamie Bennett wrote on his blog it will be hard to sell this tablet. He compares it to netbooks but I see other device to buy instead — Touchbook which has similar internals but higher resolution (1024×600 instead of 800×480) on bigger screen (8.9″ instead of 3.5″). OK, it will not have GSM like N900 but I do not care about it — my current phone is good enough.

And then goes other problem — Maemo. I used Maemo 2005/6/7/8 on Nokia 770 and N810 and ok, it is fine and working system but… It is niche system — small amount of applications available and no other environments then Hildon one (chroot with KDE which runs in window under Hildon does not count).

And question is how open will it be for other operating systems/distributions — I hope that Nokia will not follow 770/n8×0 way.

Related posts:

1. Nokia N900 discount
2. First days with Nokia N810
3. Feel the power of USB with Nokia tablet

(Again, not really tablet-related, but multiplayer could be ported to tablets eventually. Feel free to skip :)

The multi-touch table version of Tim Edmonds' NumptyPhysics gained support for multi-player modes and multi-touch drawing, dragging and deleting in the last few weeks. You can watch the evaluation video here or below.

New features and play modes include:

• Multi-player cooperative (single token and goal)
• Multi-token single-goal versus game
• Multi-token multi-goal versus game
• Draw multiple strokes at the same time
• Move drawn items with two-finger-drag
• Delete drawn items with three-finger-tap

Lesson learned: You need to get the level design right.

Word count for "multi" in this post: 10.

Vacations are great (and probably nobody will disagree on that, right ? ). It’s a time when you can relax, think about your life, check your health (doctor, dentist, etc..), set new work goals, evaluate the old ones and also visit your family: I’m spending all the time at my girlfriend’s house and that’s awesome!

No, this time I’m not going to talk about the wonderful new Igalia office opening party, nor about the Igalia summit that we’re going to have this weekend in a hotel near Santiago de Compostela. This time I’m going to talk about a new free software project I’ve been working on to take advantage of the paid hackfest ours that our company provides us. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to present the Meiga project to you.

As all of you already know, the current trend in the Internet is to publish contents in centralized servers to be shared to other people. Nevertheless, sometimes it’s handy for users to be able to serve their own contents directly from their desktops in a convenient way (instead of using a pendrive, for instance). Why bothering about publishing your contents if you can share them directly from your desktop to the LAN or even to the whole Internet?

To satisfy this need we’ve created Meiga, a tool that makes possible to share selected local directories via web. But that’s only the beginning. In fact, the ultimate goal of the project is to serve as a common publishing point for other desktop applications, such as the file manager, picture viewers or music players.

Meiga is lightweight, easy to use, network friendly and also application friendly. It’s written in a mix of Vala and pure C code, using existing Gnome technologies to perform its tasks: libsoup is used as a simpler alternative to fat web servers, libgupnp is in charge of doing port redirections if the network router supports UPnP, and DBUS exposes a public API to allow the GUI and third party applications to control what is served. Some advanced publishing features are already implemented, like the feed server that can render an RSS view of a given directory.

From the educational point of view, the source code of this project is a live example of Vala technology usage: pure Vala programming, different alternatives to interface Vala with pure C code (using Vapi files or running a child executable program) or the usage of a “programmable context” to handle sequentiation of asynchronous operations. An autotools based build system completes the set of interesting features. This system uses a Vapi file to pass configuration parameters from the config.h to the Vala program. Finally, some additional rule files allow the building of a Debian package, the last step to make the program available to final users in a convenient way.

Meiga is free software. It’s released under GPL 2.0 and can be downloaded just typing:

git clone http://git.igalia.com/meiga.git

If you aren't able to make it to the Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend, this...er...weekend, you can keep track of what's happening by following the #mozmae hashtag on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23mozmae

Also, view information about this groundbreaking event here, and check out a Maemo-specific schedule of sessions here.

The Maemo Community Council's own, Kees Jongenburger will be in attendance, as well as a bunch of Fremantle Stars and Mer developers. Be sure to treat them kindly if you are there (i.e., these people shouldn't have to buy their own drinks, ok?).

I described this even as "groundbreaking," and that's really what it is. How often do you hear about an open source mobile development platform partnering with a major web browser developer in order to make the world a better place? (Think I'm being idealistc? Hold your judgment until after the event.)

Mozilla, Maemo, Mer, Fennec, along with all sorts of cutting-edge developers, are going to be collaborating on some pretty amazing ideas for the next few days. We, as users of some (or all) of these technologies, stand to benefit greatly from the efforts. If you're lucky enough to be there, have fun! Those of us who will not be present are wishing safe travels and an amazing experience for you!

Rygel 0.3 (Berlin is cool if it doesn't rain) is out!

Here are is relase announcement:

Brief summary of changes since 0.2.2:

- Transcoding from any format (that gstreamer's decodebin2 can handle) to mp3,
 linear PCM and mpeg transport stream containing mpeg 2 video and mp2 audio.
- Plugin API to deal with user preferences.
- User preferences UI: rygel-preferences.
- New plugins:
  * Folder: Recursively exports folders specified in the user preferences.
  * ZDFMediathek: Exports online media from 2nd German TV station.
  * External: Exports media hierarchies provided by external applications
    through implementation of this spec:
    http://live.gnome.org/Rygel/MediaServer. The first application
    that utilizes this feature is PulseAudio.
- Drop xbox support. It didn't work anyway and we better concentrate on
 implementing standard stuff that it at least worthy of being called "UPnP" (
 at least for now).
- Tracker and DVB plugins are only loaded if their corresponding services are
 available.
- Export of duration for music and video items from Tracker.
- Use HTTP EOF encoding rather the CHUNKED for live streams.
- Ability to build rygel plugins outside it's source tree.
- HTTP proxying only if needed.
- Now that gupnp-av does DLNA profile guessing for us, no need to lie about
 DLNA profile anymore.
- Add a summary after configure.
- HTTServer is now internal API.
- Use git-version-gen to generate package version.
- Differentiate between modules and plugins
- Passive, asynchronous plugin loading. A side-effect of which is that modules
 can now load more than one plugin.
- Differentiate between name and title of the plugin.
- Plugins can now dynamically change their availability.
- Add API to get/list plugins.
- Re-use existing description from user's home directory. This not only speeds
 the start-up but also obsoletes the necessity to keep immutable data (e.g UDN)
 in user preferences.
- Provide gconf schemas.
- Lots of other improvements and bug fixes.

Dependency-related changes:

- Explicitly require and link to libsoup-2.4 >= 2.26.0.
- Don't require Vala (and bindings) in distribution tarball.
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.4.
- Require Vala >= 0.7.3.
- Require Gtk+ >= 2.16 if preferences UI is not disabled.

Bugs fixed in this release:

582173 - git-version-gen: generate versions with - instead of .
577000 - gupnp-av-cp does not like & in uris
576998 - Rygel wants to transcode audio files to video/mpeg
575935 - Add support for duration metadata field
574604 – bug connecting to PS3

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
Henrique Ferreiro 
Lennart Poettering 
Marc-André Lureau 
Rob Taylor 

Download source tarball at: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/rygel/0.3/

Here is me watching streams from 2nd German TV channel, transcoded to mpeg transport stream through Rygel on my PS3:



Here is the video clip if you are interested or don't believe me. :)

Some very interesting developments in desktop wiki land: Tomboy, the popular note-taking application for GNOME and OS X now supports web synchronization.

The developers of Tomboy have launched Snowy, a web service that allows you to synchronize and access your notes online. As the API is documented, I decided to add support for it in Midgard too. This way the Tomboy notes will become regular objects in the content repository.

At the moment there is only the sync service, provided as a component for the MidCOM3 MVC framework. However, a web user interface will also be coming soon. Here's how synchronization with Midgard looks like:

In addition to Tomboy, the Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend also showed new advances in mobile Midgard2 land: We launched a Midgardized version of Conboy, the maemo port of Tomboy. Both Midgard2 and Conboy were also built for Fremantle and tested on a developer preview machine. Very promising!

With the Midgard storage back-end Conboy will gain all the regular benefits of using a content repository:

• The data format is immediately scriptable with any language that there are Midgard2 bindings for
• Midgard's MVC framework makes it very easy to build web interfaces for managing and sharing the contents
• D-Bus signals are automatically fired for all changes to the content, allowing multiple applications to work on the data and still stay up-to-date with what is happening
• Contents can be stored to SQLite, MySQL, or any other backend libgda supports
• All content benefits from a set of standardized metadata

While there are plans to add web synchronization to next release of Conboy, the Midgard version will also be able to synchronize via XMPP in true peer-to-peer fashion.

Technorati Tags: midgard

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-05-25 through 2009-05-31