The Enlightenment Project DR17, the project known by non releasing any official packages, has now released their first library as “alpha”: EET.

README says:

Eet is a tiny library designed to write an arbitary set of chunks of
data to a file and optionally compress each chunk (very much like a
zip file) and allow fast random-access reading of the file later
on. It does not do zip as a zip itself has more complexity than is
needed, and it was much simpler to implement this once here.

It also can encode and decode data structures in memory, as well as
image data for saving to eet files or sending across the network to
other machines, or just writing to arbitary files on the system. All
data is encoded in a platform independant way and can be written and
read by any architecture.

This library is very stable already, with almost no change in the last years, the last addition was the “inlined strings” that are kept in their own read-only section, so you get them mmap()ed on load.

It’s the core of E17, being used to handle configuration data and Edje themes (includes images, scripts and regular data). What I find great about it is the easy- to use struct serializer/parser that you can use to save and load structured data, including lists and hash tables. And it is almost dependency-free, just: libc, libz, libm and libjpeg.

If you are a packager of some distro, or you know some, please package it. If you find out any problems, let them know, but it should be very straightforward, with Ebuild, RPM and DEB packages already available from some sites.

Funny fact: enlightenment is the project ID “2″ at sourceforge.net, the sourceforge.net project itself is the number “1″

You might know that INdT released Youtube plugin as free software, it’s great feature-wise and touches almost every part, providing new models, views and controllers, those with complex use cases like threaded models so GUI will not block during HTTP requests and even options menu.

That’s cool because one can do lots of things (and some users are already showing us some nice plugins!), but we still need some base text introducing people to the concepts, with smaller code, so here it is: Canola URLBookmark source code and text.

This introduces you to some concepts, explains about “plugins.info” and how plugins are loaded and in the end you have a list of URL to play. Of course this hard coded list of URL is on purpose so you take some time to change it to something more useful. If you ask me, I’d like to see UPnP, MPD, Samba, Avahi, Shoutcast and lots more.. I did my part, everything you need to know is there, now it’s your turn.

So it’s that time of the year again, almost summer in North, winter here in South and Google helping free software projects with its Summer of Code. I’m glad some projects I’m involved were accepted, including: Enlightenment and BlueZ.

I’ll be a mentor for Enlightenment and we have great ideas, if you’re interested in them, mail me or go to #edevelop @ irc.freenode.net so we can discuss your ideas, experiences… It’s a great way to get involved in computer graphics and a platform that is growing everyday on mobile systems, with adopters like Canola2 and now OpenMoko!

As for BlueZ, I’m not mentoring, but some friends are, they also have great ideas, things that will benefit every GNU/Linux bluetooth user, from mobile to desktops to laptops, some are really interesting like better audio support. It’s a way to get into kernel and low-level user space world, and get paid for it

So BossaConference ‘08 is over, what a great conference! Lots of great people, some are still around, doing some hacking with us at INdT office, it’s really great to have some time to discuss new ideas, drink some beers and play jokes

Let’s hope next year we can keep it to the level! Congrats to all the organization members.

After another heavy working week, we managed to deliver a new beta of Canola2, this time with lots of bug fixing (thanks for reporting!), features and optimizations. Also features 770* support, a new tool to merge albums (collections or albums with similar name) and lots of new media formats (wma/wmv and real media included!).

UPDATE: Since we replaced our download manager, previous packages conflicts! Please remove Canola2-beta1 before installing the new one. If you got it wrong, apt-get -f install from Xterm should fix it.

Hope installation will be smoother this time!

More information at: http://openbossa.indt.org/canola2/

* 770 support: gregale is regular install, but for Hacker Edition (bora ported to 770) you need a special proceeding (ain’t you hackers!?):

1. disable all repositories
2. add the repositories:
   1. deb http://repository.maemo.org gregale free non-free
   2. deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras gregale free non-free
3. update list
4. install canola2
5. remove gregale repositories

These steps are required because Hacker Edition kernel doesn’t provide inotify and we compile bora EFL packages optimized for n8xx (omap 2420, arm1136jf-s).

Thanks to Levi Bard we now have ruby-lightmediascanner, with even API docs!

On the bug fixes front, after Canola2 was released and it was tested with multitude of media I could fix lots of bugs with parsers, mainly on jpeg and id3lib.

Last but not least, thanks to Renato Chencarek we now have ogg support, and I also added png and audio-dummy to register known media files we still have no specific parsers (real, wma, …)

It’s already stable, when I have time I’ll add a non-dual process version of process and check, so people with “correct” media files can use this and benefit from a much faster version (however this will rely on developers adding support to choose both implementations).

And so the time has come, almost 1 year since the first Bossa Conference 2007. That was an amazing conference, with exuberant place near the beach, great speakers and lots of time to enjoy both. Since the scope is well defined: Linux and other Free Software in mobile devices, the speakers are really well selected, we could manage to have free time to talk to each other, without going from one side to another, running like crazy and if you have attended conferences before you know what I mean: these casual chats are the best way to know about new features and plans (maybe unofficial or secret ;-)), elaborate new ideas, etc.

That conference was so great that INdT is now promoting another, actually much improved:

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.

INdT released today under LGPL the public release of LightMediaScanner (LMS), a lightweight media scanner that will be used by Canola 2.0 and, we hope, many other multimedia software!

Lightweight media scanner meant to be used in not-so-powerful devices,
like embedded systems or old machines.

Provides an optimized way to recursively scan directories, handling
the parser in a child process, avoiding breaks of the main process
when parsers break (quite common with such bad libs and tags).

Parsers are plugins in the form of shared objects, so it’s easy to add
new without having to recompiling the scanner.

The scanner will use SQLite3 to store file-mtime association, avoiding
parsing files that are already up-to-date. This SQLite connection and
the file id within the master table ‘files’ are handled to plugins for
relationship with other tables.

Check out the code, it’s really simple to use and write new parser plugins:

• C API
• Python API
• SVN
• GIT - LightMediaScanner
• GIT - Python-LightMediaScanner

After many, many… did I say many? sleepless nights finishing the new Canola version, some guys at the office were like this:

The actor is Kenneth, our little danish fellow.

Eager to test new Canola? Check http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/index2.html!

Our designers did this wonderful piece of work in order to us developers check what/how to do things and now they made it available to everyone so you can start to wonder how it would be to use it

As Marcelo said in his blog, this is a teaser, not the real product, so you might expect some different bits here and there, we’ll fix these issues as we find them.

Also, for those that looked at the website and thought “ah, not much compared to the previous version”, don’t understand this release as a feature release, but instead as the foundations that we’ll build upon and then release new feature releases. It was a huge amount of work to improve underlying system, rewrite everything in Pyhton, write bindings to new libraries, rethink how some things should be done.

For those Free and Open Source developers: unfortunately we’ll keep it closed for now (same talk as before), but at least much, much more of our work is open source that you can already use and benefit from our improvements: The whole graphical ui is based on EFL, media scanner is based on lightmediascanner, UPnP will be based on BRisa, video player is MPlayer…