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.

I report this news from Andrew Jorgensen (Monologue):

The Map application for Nokia’s OS2008 (for N800 and N810) lets you download map data for a number of regions. The USA-West and USA-East regions are very large, though, and I have never been able to download them — it always fails about half way through. I know others have dealt with the same problem.

This morning I got a reply from Wayfinder Customer Support:

Dear Sir,
Thank you for contacting Wayfinder.

If the map download fails through the Internet Tablet, you can download the maps from this address: http://www.navicoretech.com/Consumer/Support/Downloads/tablet/en_GB/wfnavigator/

Best regards,
Annette
Customer Support
Wayfinder

Instructions for installing the map data are on that site. It’s still a slow download but at least you can use a download manager.

Maemo Team has just released a plugin for Maemo Eclipse integration. This tool allows developers to use Eclipse IDE to develop and test Maemo applications.

This release includes:

1. maemo PC Connectivity version 0.1 (Beta)
2. maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE version 1.3.6 (Beta)
3. maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE version 0.1.7 (Beta)

Maemo PC connectivity packages are tools and other components developer needs to install into his Internet Tablet to enable connectivity between developer PC and Internet Tablet.

Maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates maemo SDK Scratchbox based development environment to the Eclipse development environment. ESBox plugin supports application developers using C, C++ or Python programming language.
Developers are able to do all their development work inside Eclipse, from starting the project using template to packaging final application into maemo installation package.

Maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates Eclipse IDE development environment to the Internet Tablet so that maemo Python developers do not need to use maemo SDK and Scratchbox as development environment. Maemo Pluthon plugin fully supports application development process with Python where developer develops and tests his Python application directly with Internet Tablet.

You can find more informations on the official plugin websites:

ESbox: http://esbox.garage.maemo.org/
PluThon: http://pluthon.garage.maemo.org/

Reading the official WxWidget blog, I discovered that one of their developer was working to hildonize WxWidgets. I wanted to know if that was just a test or if this library could work in Maemo, so I followed his suggestion and I grabbed the latest SVN sources:

svn checkout http://svn.wxwidgets.org/svn/wx/wxWidgets/trunk wxWidgets

and I compiled it in this way:

cd wxWidgets
./configure --with-hildon
make
make install

then I grabbed a simple "HelloWorld" from the official documentation. You can find the complete source code here.

I compiled the source code in this way:

g++ hworld.cpp `wx-config --libs` `wx-config --cxxflags` -o hworld

then I ran it in the usual way:

run-standalone.sh ./hworld

The result? I think that a screenshoot is better than thousand words :)


N.b: I tested this inside Scratchbox, using CHINOOK_x86 target, so I think it will work fine on Os2008. This could be a good thing to help other developers porting some interesting applications (uhm... aMule for example ;) ) to Maemo.

For the joy of all italian people, the internet tablet Nokia N810 is available in the italian Nokia shop.

You can find it here. The price is 459 €.

N.b: the discount code doesn't work yet.

I was looking in the Italian Nokia official shop, and I noticed that the N800 price was decreased to 259 € instead of 289 € You can verify it on the official website.

Maybe the N810 is coming closer? Who knows ;)

Great news for all N770 users! Someone discovered that is possible to make Skype run on N770 with Os2007 HE.

All you have to do is follow these steps:

1. Install skype-ui through Application Manager

2. Download this package in your PC and extract the file named skyhost

3. Find a way to copy the file skyhost to your maemo device in /usr/bin

4. execute this from root on your device: chown user:users /usr/bin/skyhost

That's all! You can find more information on the original post.

Thanks to Mohammed Hassan now I know an alternative (alternative to the official howto) way to generate a .deb package for Maemo.

If the package already exist in the Debian repositories, you can get the .dsc file (for example in an ftp like this: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/s/spim/ ) and execute the following commands:

dget -x DSC_FILE_URL

It will download the package and will unpack it in the current folder. You have to enter in the created folder and edit the debian/* files to personalize settings, mantainer data, add deps ecc...

When you're done, you can generate the package with the usual command:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot