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Quim Gil leaving Nokia, joining Wikimedia Foundation

Last week Quim Gil announced he will be leaving from Nokia after more than five years with the company and joining the Platform Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation: "There I will help improving the volume and quality of community contributions in technical areas like QA, sysadmin and development of features for Wikipedia and related projects. I don’t need to tell you how excited (and impatient) I am about diving into such massive and complex project full of openness and freedom."

Quim has been a fantastic link between Nokia and the Maemo community, by being *part* of the community. It's been a real pleasure to work with him over the years - including the exciting times when Maemo/MeeGo was Nokia's future. We wish him well, and poignantly stop to think what could have been.

Read more (flors.wordpress.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Quim Gil leaving Nokia, joining Wikimedia Foundation
2. Development
   • Last week of the maemo.org coding competition
   • Reverse engineered open source version of N900 virtual keyboard
   • Lipstick-powered Maemo 5-style homescreens for Nemo Mobile
3. Devices
   • New Nemo Mobile release for N900, N950, N9 and x86
   • Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean - alpha release for N9
   • Leaked details of RM-581 - the N8-like Harmattan device from 2009
4. Announcements
   • Mini-web server for wifi transfers updated for N900 and N9

In an effort to increase transparency and access for the community, Council holds public meetings each Friday at 18:00UTC. This was an specific meeting with Nemein about infrastructure.

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs) at 15:00 UTC

Attending:  SD69, X-Fade, merlin1991, ivgalvez

 

Summary:

## Transference of administration to volunteers.

Merlin1991 was granted with some administrative rights on repositories (delete and promote applications), however it's not yet working correctly. X-Fade will dig into it.
We have also requested to add more administration permissions and more people to the working group. Next meeting will take place at same time next week.

## Current needs for voting system

- Council elections might take place beginning October, we'll need X-Fade support to setup voting process.
- By-laws approval might take place beginning October at the same time than Council election, we'll need X-Fade support to setup voting process.
- Coding Competition will need voting mechanism by mid September, we'll need X-Fade support to setup voting process.

## Situation of servers and contracts

- Council will talk to Henri, from Nemein, to know the required budget for hosting Maemo services.

- New Council, if by laws are approved should decide about keeping servers with Nemein by end October, so a proper decision about continuing with Nemein will be ready beginning November.

- Servers are paid by Nokia until the end of December so contract could be transferred to legal entity in the beginning of November.

- If decided, migration could begin in November, to avoid getting too close to December and holidays.

 

Next meeting with X-Fade will be held #maemo-meeting next Friday September, 7th 15:00 UTC

While it's been just over 5 months, the current Council feels that due to timing considerations the next Community Council elections are due at this time.

While it's been just over 5 months, the current Council feels that due to timing considerations the next Community Council elections are due at this time.
This election will be a very special one, considering the state of Maemo and Nokia and how things have unfolded over the past few months.

Front Page

Upcoming Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation board member elections

Craig Woodward, current chair of the Community Council, has announced that the council will be curtailing their term (slightly) to have an election

"While it's been just over 5 months, the current Council feels that due to timing considerations the next Community Council elections are due at this time. [...] This year there are two elections to be run in parallel."

"COUNCIL MEMBERS - The council is a body of volunteers taken from the Maemo community that acts as a focal point for the community. [...] The role of Council will continue to be as it was before, as a group to work with the Community, and act as a focal point for communication with group in charge of services needed by the community to continue, whomever that turns out to be."

"BOARD MEMBERS- Due to Nokia's state, its funding for maemo.org in 2013 is uncertain. The community is working on bylaws for a new legal entity (currently with the working title “Hildon Foundation”) that can legally inherit the domain name or have donations (monetary, hardware and/or data) from Nokia."

Obviously both elected groups will have to work closely together, and the creation of the "Hildon Foundation" will fundamentally change the nature of maemo.org. They are, therefore, crucial elections to follow and participate in (whether by questioning candidates, nominating people, standing yourself, or just plain voting).

Nominations open from next Saturday (15th September) and run for two weeks.

There is more discussion on the TMO thread linked to from the bottom of the blog post.

Read more (maemo.org)

Videos and slides from Devaamo Hack Day

Videos of the presentations given at the weekend's Devaamo "Hack Day" have been posted. The event had

"The response on Twitter was positive, so those with interest in seeing more about Mer, Nemo Mobile or Jolla should watch."

Read more (devaamo.fi)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Upcoming Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation board member elections
   • Videos and slides from Devaamo Hack Day
2. Applications
   • Easy Chroot/Debian for Harmattan
3. Development
   • Setting up a development target for Nemo Mobile and Mer development
   • Assistance available for those interested in porting Qt apps to BlackBerry & BB10
4. Community
   • Meeting between Nemein and Community Council about maemo.org handover
5. Devices
   • Leaked Nokia "Lauta" shows keyboarded version of N9 - i.e. production version of N950
6. In the Wild
   • "Unique" Lumia apps already existed in MeeGo
   • Nokia apologise for "confusion" caused by new adverts being "not shot with a Lumia 920"

It’s that time of the year again where we have a look at what happened in the project in the last 6 months. In mere weeks it will be released with the shiny GNOME 3.6 (best.release.ever), but since release notes don’t write themselves here’s a sneak preview of all the new toys in Web-land.

Looking for a business development manager.
Just go to  http://careers.us.samsung.com. And use the information bellow to look for the position:
- Post title : Business Development Manager
- Company : SISA
- Location : San Jose, California

This is quite an important position to substain/steer our research and development from the business point of view. You need to have imagination and you need to know the silicon valley ecosystem.
Send me your application by mail.
Please forward this blog post or retweet if you know about somebody who might be interested

Overview

Erudite makes it possible to use Amazonâ€s Cloud Reader service under MeeGo. You can either read books online, or download them for reading offline. Your progress in a book is kept synchronised between your N9 and other Kindle devices.

Name change

Unfortunately since Amazon own a wide range of “Fire” themed trademarks, and the application’s operation is heavily related to the same areas that these trademarks are used in, Amazon couldn’t really let me carry on using the name “Firestarter”. It was entirely my own foolishness that caused this hassle by going for a “clever” name without even considering the potential trademark implications, thankfully the lawyer who got in touch with me was very understanding and patiently helped me work through the various issues. I’m just glad that Amazon handled everything so amicably, rather than wading in with heavy-handed legal threats as some companies might.

So from now on the application is called “Erudite”, a name that’s clever in a different way.

New features

Added in 1.2:

• The application name has now changed to Erudite.
• A number of buttons and menu entries have been made larger and easier to press.
• You can now switch in to and out of fullscreen mode by pressing a toggle button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

Added in 1.1:

• The application can now start up completely offline. You still need to be online for the very first usage and to download books, but once you’ve downloaded some books you can now always access them offline.
• A progress indicator shows when the application is loading.
• Keyboard bug is fixed. Previously you needed to tap on text fields twice to bring up the virtual keyboard, now it pops up on the first tap.

Download

Available for the Nokia N9 and N950 in the Ovi Store: http://store.ovi.com/content/307241

After a very pleasant experience in Finland (Tampere), I’ve finally come back to Italy. I had the opportunity to work for three months in Nokia as “Qt Expert” in “Nokia Developer Forum” and it’s been an amazing job!

To be more precise I left Finland on August 31th, but I didn’t have much time to blog about this. Finally I can use my desktop PC again and I’m not anymore limited to my small netbook. Trust me… spending 3 months with a 11” netbook and pretending to work normally is really frustrating.

Now I have more spare time (too much :\ ) to contribute to Ubuntu and to play with some new technologies: I’m working on a project that uses Arduino, Android and some “robotic” parts, with people of Pistoia Linux User Group and it’s really an amazing learning experience!

Talking about Ubuntu, if you have never contributed to it and you would like to start with something easy, I suggest you this interesting initiative https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/BugFixingInitiative

In the mean time I’m also looking for new opportunities and challenges (aka = looking for a new job), so if you think you may be interested in me, take a couple of minutes to give a look to my LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreagrandi

I will attend next UDS in Copenaghen (99% sure) and I already have a couple of topics I would like to work with, but I will talk about these later, first I want to properly create a blueprint in Launchpad so we will have a starting point.

Next Wednesday I will be attending the Automotive Linux Summit 2012.

It will be a good time to meet the key people pushing the usage of Linux in the automotive arena and I hope to have a great time at the Heritage Motor Centre in Warwickshire.

If you happen to attend the event and want to have a good chat with an Igalian about any of the technologies in which we are strongly involved: WebKit, rendering, compilers, Grilo, GStreamer, the kernel, Qemu, Yocto, OSTree, Skeltrack, OpenCV, a11y, Qt, Gtk+ and so on. Just poke me whenever you see me around

Front Page

Tim Samoff running for Hildon Foundation board

On Saturday, the nomination period for the Maemo Community Council and (new) Hildon Foundation board opened. Running for two weeks, before elections to both bodies are held, Tim is the first to throw his hat into the ring:

"While I haven't been interested in taking part in Council business over the last couple of years, I am still very interested in seeing the advancement of (and even helping to steer) the community into the future. I don't see a lot of hope for Maemo as a specific "product" of any sort (which, in the end, may end up disqualifying me from running for this position), but I am still very hopeful for the community at large. Maemo is more than just a product anyway, it's a philosophy. And, more than any other open source community that I've been involved with, Maemo community members are the most transparent, dedicated, and involved in the life of that philosophy."

Tim has been a member of the Maemo and MeeGo communities from almost the outset, and served on the council three times; each time with your editor - an experience that was extremely positive.

Read more (maemo.org)
Read more (mwkn.net)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Tim Samoff running for Hildon Foundation board
2. Applications
   • Amazon Kindle reader app for Nokia N9 now called "Erudite", improved offline usage
3. Development
   • Windows 8/Metro-style QML components (demoed on Harmattan, works on BlackBerry PlayBook)
   • Beta of Qt Creator 2.6.0, with Android & QNX support, but drops Symbian
4. Announcements
   • Klippr - N9 client for link organiser, kippit.com

Firefox for Mobile Metro Firefox without Windows 8 - http://limpet.net/mbrubec... September 19, 2012 from Matt Brubeck - Comment - Like

Given that Maemo Planet is pretty quiet these days, I thought people wouldn’t mind a quick and almost, but not quite, off-topic post. Also, it’s hard to resist turning a bad pun into a blog title :-)

A couple of weeks ago, we at Igalia got a number of plugins published in the Nokia Store: Enlarge & Shrink, Gallery Tilt Shift plugin, and Facerecognition Reset Plugin. We had them ready for some time already, but still it was very difficult to pass the Nokia Store Quality Assurance: there is a list of valid directories where a Debian package can install its files, and they had missed the ones for Gallery plugins. So, in order to finally get over that problem, my friend and colleague Andrés had to "fight" with the Store QA people quite a bit: don't forget to thank him for this!

Although I developed only the Tilt Shift one, I will briefly introduce you the other two as well

I received a Raspberry Pi this week (thanks Nokia & QtonPi!) and naturally baked Qt5 into it as the first thing. Started by just installing premade RPi Qt5 package, but as qmlscene is not yet included, went for building Qt5 following loosely these instructions. About 2 hours later, I had system setup with latest Raspbian image running Qt5 QML apps.

Last month when Qt5 first beta was coming together I prepared this "Qt5 Cinematic Experience" technology demo and got some good feedback. Samuel Rødal (btw check out his awesome "Qt 5 based 3D Wayland compositor" video!) kindly tested that it works also in RPi. Yes, it worked and was pretty fast also, but not even close to perfect... Now armed with RPi I wanted to spend some quality time with it, experimenting what the GPU (Broadcom VideoCore IV) likes and hates. So here comes "Qt5 Cinematic Experience - Raspberry Pi Edition":



The changes made for this RPi version are:

• Original version was quite scalable, but it was optimized for ~N9 screen resolutions. I wanted to run RPi in full HD 1080p (1920x1080) so adjusted things to fit better for the larger screen, making everything bigger and better. Though more pixels means more work for CPU&GPU so..
• Added FPS item in the top-left corner which shows how frequently QML animation loop gets called. Seeing this all the time while developing gives good feedback on how different changes affect the performance and also adds some demonstration sugar.
• Reduced smoke particles amount & size as that was a clear bottleneck.
• Another slowdown was DropShadow effect for big movie title texts, switched it now to plain Text.Outline style.
• On the other hand, increased shooting star sprite and its particles sizes as these changes didn't notably decrease the performance.
• On the RPi side used 128/128 CPU/GPU memory split and to get even more juices out, overclocked it to "medium" 700MHz -> 900MHz (see instructions)
• Went for a more colorful theme by default, raspberries are bright!

These RPi tuned sources as well as original ones are are available from here if you wanna grab and hack!

Front Page

Hildon Foundation Board nominations

Randall Arnold has put forth his candidancy for the upcoming Hildon Foundation Board election. Randall is a 3-term past council member with a long history of community involvement. Part of Randall's announcment stated: "I've been very concerned with the negative tone I see permeating our community" Randall joins Tim Samoff as the candidates who have declared so far.

Read more (maemo.org)
Read more (wiki.maemo.org)

New version of open source flasher (0xFFFF) for Maemo devices released

The Open Free Fiasco Firmware Flasher (0xFFFF) has long been the only open source alternative to Nokia's own FIASCO flasher. Last week Pali Rohár announced a new release: "Now after 4 years new version 0.5 of Open Free Fiasco Firmware Flasher 0xFFFF was released. It is only bug fix release which fixing generating and unpacking Fiasco images used on Nokia N900." Pali is rewriting the next version for better FIASCO image handling and additional protocol support (eMMC, cold flashing). The current release is available from his website, and the source is on git.

Read more (maemo.org)
Read more (nopcode.org)
Read more (github.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Hildon Foundation Board nominations
   • New version of open source flasher (0xFFFF) for Maemo devices released

I've somehow lost my good old "MaemoSDK" VirtualBox VM, so while I'm setting up the new VM, here are the instructions in case I or somebody else needs to do that again.

gPodder 2.20.2 has been released today, and gPodder 3.3.0 has also been released. Version 2.20.2 is for users of Maemo 4 (N800/N810) and Maemo 5 (N900) and version 3.3.0 is for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan users (N950/N9).

The reason why another 2.x release comes out at this point in time is because YouTube downloading was broken by another website change recently, and of course we don't want to leave our good old Maemo users without their daily YouTube video fix. A full list of changes for Maemo 4 and 5 can be found in the 2.20.2 release announcement.

Version 3.3.0 for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan brings some nice features like download resuming, filters for unfinished files, scroll position improvements and display of the publish date and file size in the shownotes. Of course, 3.3.0 also includes the YouTube download fix. A full list of changes can be found in the 3.3.0 release annoucement.

As a side note, Maemo 5 support has now been completely removed from the master branch as of 3.3.0 (it has never been officially supported, but you could kind of run in on the N900 with some motivation and work). N900 users really wanting to use gPodder 3 should use it on Nemo Mobile, supporting gPodder 3 and its QML UI in Maemo 5 is just too much work, and the time working on gPodder is better spent improving the Harmattan version and making sure that the 2.x branch doesn't break.

Here's the run-down of the release status for various versions and targets:

gPodder 2.20.2 is ready for testing in Extras-Testing for Maemo 5 Fremantle.
gPodder 2.20.2 is already in Extras for Maemo 4 Diablo.
gPodder 3.3.0 has been uploaded to Nokia Store QA for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan.
gPodder 3.3.0 has also been uploaded to the MeeGo Community OBS.

“Igalia wallpaper for the N9/N950”

Some weeks ago we decided to do an upgrade to the information that we are showing in our Igalia’s website. Due to these changes, I had the chance to play a little bit with some new graphic material that was used in the upgrade.

As a result, I’ve created based on Opsou’s Pedro Figueras original idea some different wallpapers for most of my GNU/Linux powered devices.

Just click in the images and go to download them at their original resolution.

I’ve uploaded it to a public Git repository which you can download with the following command:

~#  git clone http://git.igalia.com/art/wallpapers.git

“4×3 Igalia wallpaper”

“16×9 Igalia wallpaper”

“Igalia wallpaper for the N900/N810/N800/N770”

Due to time demands meeting minutes were not produced until 9-25.  Sorry for the delay!

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)
Attending: Woody14619, Ivgalvez, SD69i, DocScrutinizer05, Kerio

Summary of 15:00 meeting with X-Fade:

• Council elections were announced, X-Fade will help w/ elections.
• Discussion on using a single token for multiple elections.
• X-Fade commits to handling CC if Woody can make single-token work.
• Bergie will look at why Merlin can't get access.
• Nokia rep for giving SSL certs for sites has gone missing.

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):

• Council Elections Started
• Infrastructure status
• Bylaws updates

Topic 1 (Council Elections Started )

• Woody announced elections, things are moving along.

Topic 2 (Infrastructure discussion)

• Woody will look to update the voting software to do multi-token voting.
• We should be able to use the machine for CC if that gets done soon.

Topic 3 (Bylaws updates)

• New questions are being asked, some require more info, all please review.
• SD69 is doing a revision with required legal bits.
• We should attempt to settle bylaws before the 15th.
• We should re-post articles into TMO/ML/Blog, etc.

Topic 4 (Misc)

• Discussion about bylaws and Karma, how to codify?

Due to time demands meeting minutes were not produced until 9-25.  Sorry for the delay!

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)
Attending: Woody14619, SD69, ZogG, djszapi, DocScrutinizer

Pre-meeting discussion:

• A primary worker in QT5 development takes issue with those getting awards for QT5 development, but not helping on porting for the N9.

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):

• Elections (Council and CC)
• Update on bylaws
• Misc topics

Topic 1 (Elections)

• Woody14619 has updated scripts to allow single-token to multi-election voting.
• The CC will be setup and in effect will be a test of the system, having 7 elections on one token.

Topic 2 (Bylaws)

• SD69 will have yet another revision out this weekend, shaping up nicely.

Topic 3 (Misc)

• SD69 discusses issues around Foundation setup.
• OBS and such are discussed, movement to continue collaboration with Mer touched on.
• Discussion from before the meeting continues...

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)
Attending: Woody14619, Ivgalvez, SD69

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):

• Elections
• Bylaws updates
• Legal status and paperwork
• Back-burner items and path forward
• Misc topics

Topic 1 (Elections)

• Elections for CC are underway, all looks to be working well.
• Banners were posted on TMO by Reggie for CC Election and Council Elections.
• Ivan suggests Woody14619 do a thread/wiki page about the voting system.
• The ML moderation is not happening, need to check X-Fade on that.

Topic 2 (Update on bylaws)

• Updates from Woody and TMO are posted in TMO.
• We should do at least one more round, using blog/ML, etc.

Topic 3 (Legal status, paperwork)

• Hildon Foundation paperwork is in, we now exist (or will very soon).
• Next steps include setting up a bank account, negotiating contracts.
• Ivan suggests we use the donation policy from Mer.

Topic 4 (Path forward)

• Discussion about the next steps for the Foundation and Council.
• The suggestion of creating a to-do list to hand to both next cycle is made.
• One Council member suggested that the community and potential nominees don't know the status of Reggie's reluctance to transfer TMO, and that the status should be made public before the election nomination period closes.  The majority felt it was not prudent to disclose it announce it publicly, but instead to inform nominees directly.
• The suggestion of creating a "things candidates should know" list is made.

Topic 5 (Misc/reminders)

• SD69 wants to setup a "coming soon" landing page for Hildon Foundation.
• SD69 takes action to donate his domain and the one NielDK has to foundation.

The nomination period for Council and the Board of the new Foundation are ending in just under 48 hours.  To date we have had NO submissions for Council and only two for the Board.  If there's no interest in keeping Maemo.org going, ignore this and it very well may go away.

 

Also, what may be the final version of the bylaws (version 5) has been posted on the TMO thread where there's been a lively discussion going on.  For those involved in that, thank you.  For those who would like to check them out and comment, please hit the link.