Imagine a big aquarium and inside it computer programmers, challenges and prizes instead of fishes. This is how the FISL Programming Arena looks like.
Planet maemo: category "feed:1c14209b4044eeb5293d79b9fb03ce48"
Marcelo has recently posted a Canola portrait test video on his blog.
The most impressive thing it that almost of Canola fits on rotated screen without any extra efforts by Canola team. These guys are doing a great work and I believe that as soon as possible they will release full support for vertical screens.
You can test it installing Canola and following Jott instructions to install xrandr and Xomap screen rotation support.
Have fun.
It is great when you can contribute to others work. It is amazing to have access to the code, read and improve it.
But it is amazing when you see that there are other people improving your own work.
Jott has improved my Linux patch for Xomap Rotation and created an applet to make our lives easy when rotating. Take a look at his install instructions.
I hadn’t published my compiled kernel and .deb packages for chinook yet because I found a bug when switch screen on after automatically switch off, but Jott’s patch has fixed it. 
Thank’s Jott.
It has been passed a long time since I promised a post about my dual boot menu.
So here it is:
I took this picture of my N800 that has Mamona on its flash and Nokia ITOS2007 (I used “Maemo” for simplicity) on a memory card.
I bet that your questions are: “How did you do it?” What have you done with kernel and initfs?”
Initfs: Unfortunately Mamona needs Nokia’s initfs to work properly (watchdog, wireless module, etc). But our initfs is obviously modified to have this boot menu. I took the idea and the binaries to get the input from Maemo wiki page.
Kernel: At this moment I’m using the 2.6.18-omap1 of Nokia ITOS2007 and flashing every time that I need a different kernel for Mamona 
.
There are some ideas to have different kernel versions on the same device, but I haven’t try none of them yet.
The first and stupid idea is to maintain them on /boot of rootfs and on initfs move (using dd) one of them to the kernel partition. The smarter one is to change the boot loader, but unfortunately we can’t do this one.
Come and enjoy a innovative conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms. Located in Porto de Galinhas, one of the tropical paradises of Brazil, the Bossa Conference will happen during 16th to 19th of March at Summerville Beach Resort. The perfect combination of developers, pleasant environment and good ideas.
Let’s go! We’re waiting for you.
Information and registration: www.bossaconference.org.
Speakers confirmed until now:
AARON SEIGO - KDE/QT4 On Embedded Devices
ALEXANDRE OLIVA - Red Hat / GCC / GNU Binutils / GNU Libc
ALP TOKER - Webkit
CARL WORTH - Cairo
DANIEL “THOUGHTFIX” GENTLEMAN - Noise to Signal
DENIS KENZIOR - Trolltech
HARALD WELTE - Ex-Openmoko
JOHN “J5″ PALMIERI - Optimizing D-bus
LENNART POETTERING - Pulseaudio
MARCEL HOLTMANN - BlueZ
MARCELO OLIVEIRA - Canola
MICHAEL “MICKEY” LAUER - Openmoko / Open Embedded
OYVIND KOLAS - Clutter
RASTERMAN - EFL
ZACK RUSIN - KDE
I’m proud to announce that Mamona 0.1 has been released.
You can run the Mamona linux distribution 0.1 on your Nokia Internet Tablet (N800 or N810) or use it as a SDK in your PC running emulated over qemu.
Current Features
In this first release we have:
- Glibc - 2.5
- Gcc - 4.1.2
- Full Python 2.5 support
- Enlightenment Window Manager
- USB Networking - As mainly input method.
- Bluetooth support
- Wireless - Open and WEP support only
- Noemu Packages
- ARM EABI Version 5 and QEMU (user mode emulation) 0.9.0 for Mamona SDK
You can check for other features under Mamona 0.1 - Package List.
You can run it on:
What’s planned?
Next release is planned to have:
- Mamona SDK for Maemo (Chinook Compatible)
- Full ARM EABI Version 6 support
- Wireless with WPA Support
- Usefull virtual keyboard and more applications for E-wm
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everybody who helped making this release possible.
Bug reports, as always, should go to Mamona’s Trac; check out http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Contributing#Bugs for links to posting and querying bug reports for Mamona.
Giving sequence to it’s universities cooperation program, INdT is going to make more two Tech Days. The first one on november 20th and 21th at Sociesc in Joinville, SC - Brasil, and the second one on november 26th and 27th at UFAM in Manaus, AM - Brasil.
Click the image to more information about Joinville’s Tech Day.
INdT team (Openbossa Lab) will present:
- Python for Maemo;
- QEMU for Kernel Linux development;
- Application development with mozilla;
- Developing microb extensions;
INdT is offering too (for free!!!) a twelve hours duration course on developing for Maemo Platform.
Enjoy it!
As soon as possible I’ll post more information about Manaus one.
It has been passed a while since my last post, and now I’m writing to answer some questions about it and to tell you were I am right now.
- Answering: http://labs.vivi.eng.br/blog/?p=31#comments
We intend to release the 0.1 version next Mounth. At this first version Mamona won’t be compatible with Nokia’s ITOS neither have Hildon or Matchbox. However they are on our plans.
Mamona doesn’t have binary compatibility with Maemo yet because we were thinking ahead, and hoping that when we have our first stable release, Maemo would be catching up on us in terms of package and toolchain versions. By taking a look at Chinook Beta, we can notice that Maemo is almost there. So, Maemo and Mamona will have very similar
packages at some point in a not so distant future.
At this first release we will have a Enlightenment window manager with a keyboard and my dream is to release with the Gustavo’s Keyboard but we will try the Matchbox-keyboard and others to see which one fits better.
- What am I doing?
I’m in Berlin attending OEDEM 2007. I’ll write about it latter…
It has been a while since I promised a post about Mamona booting on N800.
I haven’t post anything before because there is no beauty in a text mode booting. But now Aloisio has been done a good work to setup the Enlightenment in Mamona. He has been used OpenEmbedded to build the packages from Enlightenment’s cvs.
Check this out:
This is the boot of Mamona + Enlightenment on N800.
* Aloisio is a new INdT developer working on Mamona Project.
Thinking to leave the main flash memory free for Mamona tests I looked for a way to have dual boot in the N800. Then I found a good documentation explaining how to easily boot from MMC card.
The only step that I skipped was the “How to install a dual boot menu?”.
To use the system in memory card I’ve edited the initfs manually to access directly the partition created in the memory card. The only thing that I did was to add the code below in the begin of boot() function in linuxrc of initfs (My last post explains how to edit and flash the initfs in your pc).
load_mmc_modules
root_dev=mmcblk0p2
root_dev_name=”MMC”
root_dev_set=1
root_fstype=”"
root_fsoptions=”"
As you can easily notice it is hard coded. Actually I’m not using a real dual boot because when testing mamona I need to flash the kernel too, so I prefer to flash a different initfs for mamona every time instead of have to press a button during the boot.
However it is possible to have a dual boot changing the begin of boot() function of linuxrc in initfs to be like that:
boot()
{
load_wlan_module
if ! grep -q new_root /proc/mounts; then
text2screen -t “Press any key for MMC boot” -H left -y 80 -s 2 -B 0xffff
key_pressed 1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
load_mmc_modules
root_dev=mmcblk0p2
root_dev_name=”MMC”
root_dev_set=1
root_fstype=”"
root_fsoptions=”"
fi
mount_device “$root_dev”
fi
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
return 1
fi
…
Or following that step that I haven’t tried.
It is important to clarify that when you flash only the initfs and/or the kernel you don’t loose any data in your main flash memory or in your MMC card.
Another important thing to say is about performance. I’ve been using it for more than a week from internal MMC slot and couldn’t notice any lost of performance when compared to a system booting from main flash memory.
Are you curious about Mamona booting on N800? This is a topic for another post…
Hi, I’ve hacked initfs of my n800 to show my name and email as you can see in this picture. I know that it is not a big deal, but it can be useful to avoid undesired changes/mistakes when you work in a team that has more than 1 n800.This post is not only to show, but to describe how to do this hack.
- Download the image and flasher. (You can use the 0xffff if you prefer)
- Unpack the image:
flasher -F <image name> -u
- Mount the initfs.jffs2:
sudo modprobe mtdblock
sudo modprobe mtdram total_size=65536 erase_size=256
sudo modprobe jffs2
sudo modprobe loop
sudo dd if=/pathtoimage/initfs.jffs2 of=/dev/mtdblock0
mkdir /mnt/jffs2
sudo mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock0 /mnt/jffs2
- The /mnt/jfss2 directory is read only, so you need to create another dir and copy everything preserving the files:
mkdir $HOME/myinitfs
sudo tar pcf - -C /mnt/jffs2 . | tar xvf - -C $HOME/myinitfs
- edit the $HOME/myinitfs/linuxrc using your preffered text editor. Look for “want_menu=0″ and add something like the text below just before it.
text2screen -t “Your Name” -H left -y 12 -s 3 -B 0xffff
text2screen -t “your_email@server” -H left -y 50 -s 2 -B 0xffff
- Create your new initfs image:
sudo mkfs.jffs2 -r $HOME/myinitfs/ -o $HOME/myinitfs.jffs2 -e 128KiB -l -n
- Flash it:
sudo flasher -n $HOME/myinitfs.jffs2 -f
That’s all. Enjoy it.
Another thing that I want to talk about is that I’m using the OS 2007 entire in a memory card (MMC) leaving free the main flash memory where I’m going to put Mamona. But this is a topic for another post…