Imagine a big aquarium and inside it computer programmers, challenges and prizes instead of fishes. This is how the FISL Programming Arena looks like.

The Arena main objective is promoting a meeting between members in technology community for a contest based in technical skills considering individuals and groups. Is occurs before in remote phases and during the FISL 9.0. The location is a aquarium-room with restricted access in the middle of event center. Free software projects are chosen and used as a case of study for Arena.

So, this year INdT is helping to organize this contest and Nokia will give N95 and N800 as prizes for the winners.

Reference: http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/9.0/www/arena_en

The official announcement in Portuguese-br:

Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia promove desafios em parceria

com Forum Nokia na Arena de Programação do FISL 2008

Vencedores serão premiados com dispositivos Nokia N95 e Nokia N800. Forum Nokia fará palestra para orientar desenvolvedores que queiram contribuir com projetos da empresa

São Paulo, 10 de abril de 2008 - O Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia (INdT) participará, pela primeira vez, do Festival Internacional de Software Livre (fisl), que terá sua nona edição entre 17 e 19 de abril, em Porto Alegre. O instituto, em parceria com o Forum Nokia, comunidade on-line com mais de três milhões de desenvolvedores cadastrados, promoverá desafios na Arena de Programação do evento e premiará os vencedores com aparelhos Nokia N95 e Internet Tablets Nokia N800.

Os desafios consistem em disputas que levam em conta habilidades técnicas de programação e desenvolvimento. As competições, realizadas individualmente e em grupo, serão vinculadas a projetos open source para plataformas móveis.

Serão duas fases: qualifying e insanifying. No qualifying, tarefas mais simples ajudam os times a se familiarizarem com a linguagem Python para o sistema operacional Symbian S60 e com a API (Interface de Programação de Aplicativos) da plataforma. Aqueles com os melhores resultados passam para a etapa seguinte, quando usarão parte do conhecimento adquirido durante o qualifying. O resultado será uma contribuição para um projeto de software livre com o qual os participantes poderão continuar colaborando mesmo após o fisl.

Daniel Rocha, gerente do Forum Nokia no Brasil, apresentará, durante o fisl, a palestra “Nokia - iniciativas e projetos open source para smartphones”. Ele irá mostrar as últimas iniciativas da Nokia no mundo open source, como Python for S60, Open C, Maemo, Mobile Web Server e outros projetos em andamento. A intenção é orientar os desenvolvedores sobre como participar destes projetos, portar código open source para os smartphones S60 e como contribuir com os projetos de código aberto da empresa.

Além de participar da arena, o INdT estará no evento também com o objetivo de identificar potenciais candidatos a trabalhar no instituto. “Sabemos que o fisl reúne os melhores profissionais da área de software livre, foco das pesquisas de nossa unidade em Recife. A atmosfera de competição é uma oportunidade de avaliarmos a capacidade dos participantes para possíveis vagas que se abram no INdT”, afirma Vanessa Nalesso, gerente de RH do INdT.

Vanessa explica que a idéia principal é formar um banco de currículos o que não significa que haverá contratações imediatas. “Na área de open source, o INdT oferece a melhor estrutura para que o pesquisador alcance o máximo de desempenho, desde máquinas, softwares e treinamentos, até a participação em congressos relacionados aos temas com os quais trabalhamos”, completa ela.

Sobre o INdT

Fundado em 2002, o INdT é uma instituição independente e sem fins lucrativos comprometida com a realização de pesquisa e desenvolvimento de tecnologias em comunicação móvel no Brasil. Além do

desenvolvimento de aplicações inovadoras, está entre os objetivos do instituto promover as oportunidades que a mobilidade tem a oferecer para os desenvolvedores.

O Instituto possui centros de pesquisa estabelecidos em Manaus, Brasília e Recife, e executa projetos em áreas de conhecimento distintas: Software Livre e Código Aberto, Desenvolvimento de Soluções Futuras em software, multimídia e telecomunicações,  processos de manufatura, pesquisa de propriedades mecânicas e componentes eletrônicos de dispositivos móveis.

Sobre o Forum Nokia

O Forum Nokia é uma comunidade on-line global voltada para desenvolvedores de aplicativos móveis, que fornece ampla variedade de ferramentas para criação, informações técnicas e documentos de suporte. Criado em 1995, o Fórum Nokia tem atualmente mais de 3 milhões de desenvolvedores cadastrados. O endereço do Fórum Nokia na web é http://forum.nokia.com. Para os brasileiros uma novidade é o Forum Nokia Wiki em português - http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Portal:_Portuguese. Neste espaço colaborativo os cadastrados podem incluir desde artigos sobre programação até dúvidas (e suas soluções).

Informações para Imprensa

LVBA Comunicação - www.lvba.com.br - 11 3039.0660

Théo Filipe - theo.filipe@lvba.com.br - 11 8714.0669

Comunicação INdT

Beto Campainha  - beto.campainha@indt.org.br - 92 8114.1299

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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.

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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.

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This video shows the screen rotation on a Nokia N800. We have here an Enlightenment running on Mamona distro where each navigation button is associated with an xrandr command, e.g. LEFT: xrandr -o left.

I’ve implemented the xrandr support to Xomap (1.3.99) and the LCD controller rotation support on Linux-omap kernel. It is a very fast rotation since its made directly by the Epson LCD controller. The X is responsible to deal with mouse events and to change the resolution.

Lauro and Aloisio helped me with the Linux-omap patch that was already accept and applied to linux omap git tree.

Download patches:

• Linux-omap ( <  2.6.24-omap1 ) patch
• Xomap patch applied on xorg-server_1.3.99.0~git20070321-0osso20074202.tar.gz

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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.

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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

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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:

• Nokia N800
• Nokia N810

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.

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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.

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• 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…

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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.

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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…

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• 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…

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Birunko saw I typing this command and asked me: “Are you crazy?”

I believe that the best answer for that question is: “not yet”, because in a single day I used:

• gcc to compile gcc
• wget to donwload the wget (source package)
• find to find the findutils package
• tar to unzip the tar package

(hmm it remembered me that another day I used apt-get to reinstall apt package that was corrupted)

So, what is the problem about to use the ‘cd’ command to “change” my current directory to my current directory?

ok, let me try to explain that. I was using 2 terminals. In the first one I had OpenEmbedded building Mamona packages and in the second one I was seeing the files generated on work directory. During the build my directory was deleted and recreated by OpenEmbedded, but my second terminal couldn’t know about that. The ‘pwd’ command still returns the full link correctly, but ‘ls’ and other commands tries to access something in memory that doesn’t exist anymore, so ‘cd `pwd`’ command takes me to the right current directory in memory.

But, if you thought that my strange day had a happy end you were wrong, I finished my day finding a bug on a bug tracker.

So the current question that is driving me crazy is: “how can I report a bug tracker bug in a bug tracker that has a blocker bug?

I couldn’t have a better end, could you?

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