Front Page

Maemo autobuilder & package interface now fully working again

Ivaylo Dimitrov has completed a substantial part of rebuilding and maintaining the maemo.org infrastructure: the autobuilder and Packages interfaces are now working again (for Maemo 5, at least):

"All of you who were using extras-devel as a replacement to extras, disable extras-devel and extras-testing repositories. Now our packages infra is(or at least looks like) functional, we should revert to the way all this is supposed to work. Testers/users - please do your job and vote for the packages in testing. Developers - promote the stuff to extras." maemo.org is still understaffed, so anyone with any PHP skills, interested in maintaining the Midgard infrastructure which holds everything together, should get in touch with techstaff@maemo.org.

Read more (gossamer-threads.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo autobuilder & package interface now fully working again
2. Development
   • Devel RT @jukkaeklund: Porting apps from #MeeGo Harmattan to #sailfishos. https://t.co/qkRfRY2647
3. Announcements
   • Power Menu QML

Here is a video interview of me talking about the origins of NoFlo, the flow-based programming environment for JavaScript:

You’ve seen short pieces from this in the NoFlo Kickstarter video, but most of the material is new. This was shot when NoFlo turned two, and so I’m obviously spending some time talking about where things came from.

The video should work well to support the hacker’s perspective of our funding campaign. Please support us and spread the word!

It is pretty amazing to think that since my last post on Friday, we’ve almost doubled the amount of contributions. Thanks to all the nearly 500 backers who have already helped us to change the world of programming!

Dear maemo/meego enthusiasts and Linux lovers,

as most of you likely know, Nokia stopped supporting the maemo.org infrastructure at the beginning of the year. After two server migrations (Nokia -> Nemein in December 2012, Nemein -> community), maemo.org is now completely community supported. Unfortunately, maemo.org was delivered to the community in less-than-100%-working order and our small techstaff team succesfully manged to move the maemo infra to community owned servers and keeping services alive until now. But they are totally overloaded and are yet to have dedicated maintainers for all divisions.

So we, the maemo community council and the Hildon Foundation decided to ask the community for their urgent help. We are seeking maintainers for
- bugzilla
- drop
- garage
- midgard/cms/web
- repository
- wiki
- XEN
- other co-sysops for Apache, mysql, php, Python

Understanding of requirements of a productive system is mandatory. You need to know about peer-review and proper documentation and coordination with sysops. We have no manuals about how stuff works, you need to find your way around by investigating the existing system. Due to the lack of documentation for midgard and maemo.org, we need your knowhow in order to point techstaff to solutions. Without sufficient manpower, the problems we are facing are putting the whole infrastructure at risk. If things remain unsolved, we will be forced to shut down critical services or even the whole of maemo.org sooner or later. We need your assistance in resolving these issues.

This request comes with no particular expectations and it may seem quite obvious, but we have to stress the fact that without community help, a community-driven infra will fail.

You are probably the right one who knows about these services well enough to help us keep them operating. Even just a small contribution of time is extremely welcome. Whether that's having some time set aside for a walkthrough of the architecture; the ability to answer a bunch of questions; or pointers to documentation we may have missed - we'd appreciate anything.
So if you think you can help, please offer it here or send a mail to techstaff@maemo.org.

Thanks for reading and kind regards,
Maemo Community Council & Hildon Foundation

Joerg Reisenweber / joerg_rw
Michael Demetriou / qwazix
Rüdiger Schiller / chemist
Christian Ratzenhofer / merlin1991
Craig Woodward / Woody14619
Ryan Abel / GeneralAntilles
Jaffa / Andrew Flegg
Gido Griese / Win7Mac

Those that have been following my blog for a longer time know that I’ve been talking a lot about making the Linux desktop and mobile platforms location aware.

Thanks to the amazing advances in adoption of mobile platforms, this dream has more or less become true, especially in the more widespread Apple and Android ecosystems. All these devices know where they are, and developers are coming up with different smart applications to utilize this information.

The free software world has been at risk of getting left behind. GeoClue, the location framework designed for these environments was in a state of flux for a long time with very little happening to it. But now we have GeoClue2, a rewritten implementation of the original idea.

LWN has a good write-up:

Zeeshan Ali spoke about GNOME’s geo-awareness, which is undergoing a rewrite. Geo-awareness consists of four major pieces, he said. The first is geolocation, or the “where am I?” question. The second is the opposite; the user wants to find a different location: a particular address, a nearby restaurant or gas station, or other points of interest. The third issue is routing, finding the best way to get between locations. Finally, there is the user interface topic: locations, points of interest, and routes all need to be presented to the user on a map.

GeoClue2 can determine location from four different sources: coordinates from GPS devices (the most accurate), the location of nearby WiFi access points (which is accurate to just a few hundred meters), the location of 3G cellular towers (which are accurate only to a few kilometers), and IP addresses (which are accurate only down to the city level).

A major shortcoming that the new service addresses is privacy:

GeoClue2 also offers better privacy controls; the previous version of the library would provide the current location to any application; with GeoClue2, GNOME will require the user to confirm location requests from each application.

Kudos to Zeeshan and the others involved for keeping the location-aware dream alive!

I haven’t personally been involved much in the free desktop world lately. This is mainly because I’ve been busy trying to change the worlds of web publishing and software development, but also because I don’t really have a desktop at the moment. Instead, I do my work with an Android tablet and a web browser with an attached keyboard. But despite that, I hope this will be picked up not only by GNOME, but by the other Linux ecosystems as well.

Those that have been following my blog for a longer time know that I’ve been talking a lot about making the Linux desktop and mobile platforms location aware.

Thanks to the amazing advances in adoption of mobile platforms, this dream has more or less become true, especially in the more widespread Apple and Android ecosystems. All these devices know where they are, and developers are coming up with different smart applications to utilize this information.

The free software world has been at risk of getting left behind. GeoClue, the location framework designed for these environments was in a state of flux for a long time with very little happening to it. But now we have GeoClue2, a rewritten implementation of the original idea.

LWN has a good write-up:

Zeeshan Ali spoke about GNOME’s geo-awareness, which is undergoing a rewrite. Geo-awareness consists of four major pieces, he said. The first is geolocation, or the “where am I?” question. The second is the opposite; the user wants to find a different location: a particular address, a nearby restaurant or gas station, or other points of interest. The third issue is routing, finding the best way to get between locations. Finally, there is the user interface topic: locations, points of interest, and routes all need to be presented to the user on a map.

GeoClue2 can determine location from four different sources: coordinates from GPS devices (the most accurate), the location of nearby WiFi access points (which is accurate to just a few hundred meters), the location of 3G cellular towers (which are accurate only to a few kilometers), and IP addresses (which are accurate only down to the city level).

A major shortcoming that the new service addresses is privacy:

GeoClue2 also offers better privacy controls; the previous version of the library would provide the current location to any application; with GeoClue2, GNOME will require the user to confirm location requests from each application.

Kudos to Zeeshan and the others involved for keeping the location-aware dream alive!

I haven’t personally been involved much in the free desktop world lately. This is mainly because I’ve been busy trying to change the worlds of web publishing and software development, but also because I don’t really have a desktop at the moment. Instead, I do my work with an Android tablet and a web browser with an attached keyboard. But despite that, I hope this will be picked up not only by GNOME, but by the other Linux ecosystems as well.

ownNotes is a note taking application designed to be easy to use. Support some part of the markdown syntax to render text. ownNotes is currently not available, but will be soon for Harmattan, Sailfish OS (JollaMobile phone) and desktop.

The core feature are written in Python and used from QML. For this i use a fork i made of PyOtherSide (available at http://github.com/khertan/pyotherside). If you would like to make application using PyOtherSide, i suggest to use the official version of PyOtherSide (available at http://github.com/thp/pyotherside

And now a video of ownNotes running on the SailfishSDK simulator :

And yes that a Python / Qml apps running with Qt5.

If you are currently porting application from Harmattan to Sailfish OS, you probably notice that there is any similar Silica Components for Harmattan InfoBanner.
So here i write a minimal one, that can display text only, i use the DockPanel component.

Code

/*

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2013 Benoit HERVIER <khertan@khertan.net>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR
COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

*/


import QtQuick 2.0
import Sailfish.Silica 1.0
import net.khertan.python 1.0
import Sailfish.Silica.theme 1.0

DockedPanel {
    id: root

    width: Screen.width - 2*Theme.paddingSmall
    height: content.height + 2*Theme.paddingSmall

    dock: Dock.Top

    Rectangle {
        id: content
        x: Theme.paddingSmall
        y: Theme.paddingSmall
        width: parent.width

        height: infoLabel.height + 2*Theme.paddingSmall
        color: 'black';
        opacity: 0.65;

        Label {
            id: infoLabel
            text : ''
            color: Theme.highlightColor
            font.family: Theme.fontFamily
            font.pixelSize: Theme.fontSizeMedium
            width: parent.width - 2*Theme.paddingSmall
            x: Theme.paddingSmall
            y: Theme.paddingSmall
            wrapMode: Text.WrapAnywhere
            }
        MouseArea {
            anchors.fill: parent
            onClicked: {
                root.hide()
                autoClose.stop()
            }
        }
    }


    function displayError(errorMsg) {
        infoLabel.text = errorMsg
        root.show()
        autoClose.start()
    }

    Timer {
        id: autoClose
        interval: 15000
        running: false
        onTriggered: {
            root.hide()
            stop()
        }

    }
}

How to use

In your ApplicationWindow add :

    InfoBanner {
        id: trucmucheBanner
    }

And when you need it, call it with

trucmucheBanner.displayError(errMsg)

Download Link: InfoBanner

A year and a half ago I published some pictures with the new changes that I was preparing in Butaca, hopefully "to be released soon". Unfortunately, there were some stability issues that I never had the time to investigate and fix properly, so all the new features have been sitting in GitHub for some time already.

As time went on, I had less and less time and motivation to do MeeGo development, and eventually I just assumed that only the brave people having Butaca built from upstream would benefit from the latest changes. This year, back in May, I received an email from The Movie Database announcing that the 2.1 API (the one used in Butaca) was reaching its End Of Life in 15th September, a bit less than a month from now.

I always thought I would just sit during a weekend, fix these stability changes and replace the API, but the truth is that after I moved to the UK, the kind of "relaxed weekend" needed for that doesn't seem to come too often. In short, I don't plan to update Butaca before this deadline, so it will stop working.

So what are your chances as an user? You can use Pop Flix: since they use Rotten Tomatoes, they shouldn't have any issues with deprecated APIs. Regarding your favourite movies and artists, they are saved in a very simple Sqlite database, so you can manually retrieve the values from there. Of course, since it is Open Source, you can go to the repository, fork it and do the changes yourself.

I really enjoyed developing Butaca. Although it didn't get to be extremely popular, it achieved more than 10000 downloads, and a really nice 5-star average of 74 reviews. Thanks to everyone who used it and enjoyed it, and specially to those who sent me an email with feedback... and even patches!

ownNotes Beta 1.0.0 is now available for SailfishOS and MeeGo Harmattan.

ownNotes is a markdown notes taking application with ownCloud/WebDav synchronization.

Screenshots

To compile ICS (and probably any new version of Android platform >= 4.0), you
might have some problems with the compilation tools.

Finally, back to this :-)

Lately, I have being developing a new project which basically needs some kernel changes on Android Goldfish kernel. Initially, I thought that this would be something like "traditional" kernel development, but NOT. Android kernel is, of course, a Linux kernel but it has some peculiarities that impact on the development phase.

[NOTE] I'd rather provide a link to the source that I used than replicating the same information.

So, I split my experience into the following topics:

1. Building Android ICS
2. Building/Running Android Goldfish kernel 
3. Creating a Goldfish kernel module
4. Adding new syscalls into the Goldfish kernel

Among the tasks for build an Android kernel development, building the Android Goldfish kernel is the easiest :-) (I mean, no compiling errors...)

First, you need to have access to the cross-compiling tools. The Android source code provides them in folder /prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/. 

Steps


1. Set the path to include the pre-build toolchain
   # export PATH=/prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.4.3/bin/:$PATH
2. Set the Kernel config file. In this case, we are compiling for the ARM emulator (armv7).
   # make ARCH=arm goldfish_armv7_defconfig
3. Run make
   # CROSS_COMPILE=/prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.4.3/bin/arm-eabi- ARCH=arm make
4. Change var ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT
   # export ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT=/out/target/product/generic/
5. Run the emulator
   # /out/host/linux-x86/bin/emulator-arm -system /out/target/product/generic/system.img -kernel /goldfish/arch/arm/boot/zImage -data /out/target/product/generic/userdata.img -ramdisk /out/target/product/generic/ramdisk.img -skindir /sdk/emulator/skins/ -skin HVGA -verbose -show-kernel

Issues

• The option CONFIG_MODULES is NOT enabled by default. If you want to insert modules into the kernel, make sure to set CONFIG_MODULES;
• Android emulator does NOT work with Kernels > 2.6.X So, make sure to use the proper Kernel. For devices, any support Kernel will work.

Front Page

Autobuilder & Extras Assistant for Maemo 4 fixed

More good news on the autobuilder and Extras Assistant front. Ivaylo Dimitrov's continued hard work has brought them back online for Maemo 4: "I am glad to say that freemangordon have fixed Maemo autobuilder & Extras Assistant for Maemo 4. The packages appear in Maemo Packages interface, are promoted, etc."

Big thanks for the continued hard work from all of the community volunteers helping to ensure both that the maemo.org infrastructure keeps running and that degraded services are brought back to life.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Autobuilder & Extras Assistant for Maemo 4 fixed
2. Applications
   • Wazapp nightly 34 test
   • Gameplay video of chro.mono
3. Announcements
   • Deb packages creator for Harmattan