After the suggestion from a member of this community (I don't want to nominate him because I don't want to influence anyone) I've decided to candidate myself for the Maemo Council. Here I'm! You can read something about me and about my motivations in the rest of this post.

Name: Andrea Grandi
maemo.org: Andy80 - http://maemo.org/profile/view/andy80/
Corporate affiliation: none

Introduction: My name is Andrea Grandi, I'm 28 and I live in Pistoia (Tuscany, ITALY). I'm a programmer, in particular very interested in Linux and opensource. I've been working for some years as computer programmer, then I decided to begin studing at university, and currently I'm attending at "Università degli studi di Firenze" to get the Computer Science degree. I spend lot of my time to manage the Pistoia Linux User Group I founded in 2001.

My life in the community: I'm part of the community since I bought my first Nokia 770. I started contributing to the mailing lists, I wrote some tutorials (in italian language, then I translated them to english) and I ported SPIM (a MIPS emulator) to Nokia 770. Later I had the possibility to buy a N810 and I was able to experiment more with the Maemo SDK. I was at the Maemo Summit in Berlin, doing a light talk about Maemo development using Eclipse, PluThon and EsBox plugins.

Motivations: I really would like to be able to do more for the community and one of the best way could be to be part of the council, to help both users/developers to explain their requests to Nokia and Nokia to understand the requests from the community. There are a lot of fantastic ideas comung from the community that could improve what we are doing: the key is to organize them and giving them more attention. This is what I've always looked for: working together to build something great!

Paul Ferrill has written a serie of three articles about writing a GPS-aware application for the Nokia N810, using the Maemo SDK, Eclipse and PluThon plugin.

Here is the complete serie:

• Develop a GPS-aware application for the Nokia N810, Part 1: Development environment: Learn how to configure a development environment targeted at the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, including setting up Eclipse on a target development machine for the Python language.
• Develop a GPS-aware application for the Nokia N810, Part 2: Consider your options: Discover the details of code design, library selection, unit testing, and user interface choices that make the most sense for you.
• Develop a GPS-aware application for the Nokia N810, Part 3: Finish the job: In this last of three installments, you'll put the final touches to the GPS trip tracker and get it ready for release.

This year the Maemo community will try to join the Google Summer of code program again. Google Summer of code can be a very good opportunity for the Maemo Community, and can also give a lots of good things, like new projects/features and new people developing for Maemo.

In order to apply to Summer of code, we need help from the community, we need project ideas, mentors and interested students. The mentor organizations submissions starts in March 9.

There is a wiki page with some information regarding the Maemo participation in GSoC, feel free to add more information to the pages, especially for people that participated in previous editions of GSoC.

In 2007 some Nokia employee offered their help as mentors and backup mentors, will be fine if that happens this year too.

Note: I reported this news thanks to Valerio Valerio who wrote this on maemo-community mailing list.

A new update for Os2008 is available for Nokia N810. The released version is 5.2008.43.
You can upgrade it OTA (over the air):

• connect to Internet
• open the Application Manager
• install updates

Thats's all! Enjoy and test the new updates!

In these days I was thinking about: what could be done to improve Maemo Development and power user experience? There are some points that would need to be improved. This little list pretends to be just a starting point. I hope to get some feedback so we can discuss further in the maemo-developers mailing list.

Documentation: Maemo developers use different libraries and toolkit (GTK, libui, ecc...). There is not a common place where I can look for documentation. I've to visit each library website and get it. It would be great to have a tool just like Qt Assistant, integrating all documentation, including examples and aggregating external articles using a "live RSS aggregator".

Kinetic scrolling: I really love Mauku application because of its kinetic scrolling, thanks to the Miaouw library. It would be great to have this kind of scrolling to be part of Hildon UI. Of course I'd love to have Python bindings too

Eclipse Support: I think Eclipse support should be improved. I'd like to have a tool that makes .deb creation easier so developers can spend more time coding and not packaging applications. I'd like to see a GUI designer integrated into Eclipse (for "integrated" I mean something like Visual Studio GUI designer.... not an external tool like Glade).

Qt Creator: Trolltech (Nokia) just released a preview release of their Qt Creator. A very powerfull IDE to develop Qt/C++ applications. It's still in alpha release, but... what about integrating Maemo development into it? (Supporting Python development too).

Maemo SAS hosting: sometimes we (well.. me at least ) need to write an application that uses a server part too and need to expose some API. Maemo.org offers hosting for the project, but what about the server part of the application? It would be fine if developers had the possibility to have the server side hosted by Maemo.org or Nokia.

Better GPS support: the GPS unit shipped with N810 is something unusable yet. I've tried using A-GPS too, but position fixing time is still bad, compared to an external GPS/bluetooth receiver. I often have to use my external GPS receiver to use my N810 without problems.

More audio/video codecs: often I'm not able to listen to online radios, streamings ecc... just because of a missing codec for the default Media Player.

These are just some ideas. Please feel free to comment them, I'd like to discuss them together.

Fennec is a particular version of Mozilla, designed for handled devices and internet tablets. With the latest development version, stability has been improved, but the application is still a bit slow and "memory hungry". Speed an memory improvements are scheduled for the next release (Alpha1 - September 9, 2008).

Latest available version, Fennec M7, has the following improvements:

• Initial Add-on Manager support has landed. Tap "+" button in the sidebar to display the Add-on Manager. Use it to install, view and remove add-ons. Use the application menu button to dismiss the panel. Clicking on an add-on XPI in a webpage will also display the manager. The current UX design is not final.
• The top URL bar has been changed to work as designed: The bar will scroll into view at the top of the web content or will float over content otherwise.
• Support for kinetic scrolling has been added to the web content.
• Support for non-modal Password Manager UI was added.
• Some tabbed browsing fixes.
• Some zooming fixes.
• Some stability fixes.

To install it on your tablet, you've to configure Application Manager with the following parameters:

• Web Address: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/
• Distribution: chinook (Note: The chinook builds work on diablo as well.)
• Components: release

If you're not sure or if you want further instructions about installing Fennec, you can find a step by step guide on Mozilla website.

Note: M7 supports the Maemo chinook & diablo distributions.

A new update for Nokia Os 2008 is available for Nokia N810 (and I suppose N800 too).

All you have to do is connect to Internet, refresh package list and install the updates.

The main application that have been updated are Mail client and web browser. Map application has been updated too.

The total size to download is about 19 Mb and for the first time, no re-flash is required to update N810 firmware. At the end of the installation you're only required to restart the device.

N.B: be sure to have at least 19Mb free on the device, else the upgrade will fail.

Yesterday I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.10 to the new 8.04 RC and I "broke" my Scratchbox installation. I tried to install it again and I had still some problems logging into Scratchbox and installing the SDK.

The I found this page: http://suppressingfire.livejournal.com/35277.html

that explain how to fix these problems. In particular if you get this kind of error trying to log into Scratchbox:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso' failed!

You can fix it in this way:

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled

You can read the complete fix in my updated wiki: http://www.ptlug.org/wiki/Howto_Installing_Maemo_SDK_4

I've updated my previous howto that explain how to install Maemo SDK 4 (Chinook). The other howto was written when Maemo SDK 4 Beta was out, now it's updated to 4.0.1 version of the SDK.

You can find it, as usual, on this wiki: http://www.ptlug.org/wiki/Howto_Installing_Maemo_SDK_4

If you have any suggestion or if you want to give me any idea to improve this howto, please leave me a comment.

PyCon2 is the second edition of the Italian Python Conference and will take place on May 9/10/11, 2008 in Florence.

The conference is organized by Python Italia and more than 300 developers, students and researchers will be present for three days of tutorials and other important events.

PyCon 2008 edition will be opened by Richard Stallman with a keynote on Free Software and Free Ethics. Other famous developers will be presento too: Alex Martelli, Samuele Pedroni, Brian Fitzpatrick and many other.

I'll partecipate at the conference as speaker on May 10, with a talk on "PyMaemo: Python for Nokia Internet Tablets". In particular I'll talk about Maemo platform, Maemo SDK (how to install and configure it) and I'll explain how to use the two Eclipse plugins ESBox and Pluthon.

If you want to give me any suggestion or idea for this talk, please leave me a comment on this post, so I'll integrate it with my slides.