From the website - ASSEMBLY is a four day computer festival, in which thousands of people and their computers spend the whole weekend by meeting friends, playing games, surfing on the net, talking on IRC and enjoying the great productions from the demoscene.

Nokia is a sponsor and is getting involved in various ways. Elina Ollila will present on Playtesting mobile games.

There will be some Maemo guys in the party as well. We’ll bring some N810s for people to try out, and some to give away as competition prizes. At least Jaakko, Jakub, Kuisma and myself will show up.

Maemo is hiring. For the Application Framework team we’re looking for skilled developers passionate about two particular technology areas. If you are excited about either, got the skills and are coming to the party let’s meet up.

Artwork by TigerT with Wordle

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As generated by Wordle from the maemo.org intro

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The hacker edition is not a end-user ready release. It’s a tool to allow developers to continue working on the 770 moving on to the OS 2007 software platform, bridging the gap between 770 and N800.

This latest version updates the software to the level of the latest feature upgrade release for the N800 to the extent possible. Joni Valtanen is still working on improving it but he has already done a great job covering the basics.

Unfortunately it was not possible for us to provide in the Hacker Edition these new developments coming from third parties:

• Skype client support
• Adobe Flash 9 browser plugin

This is due to licensing and hardware constraints.
In the case of the Flash plugin the Hacker Edition is shipping without any version of it.

We’re still using the OS2006 initfs so the kernel and device drivers are the old ones.
There is no support for larger memory cards.

On the up side, all the user space libraries have been updated as well as all the applications, so we expect application portability across N800 OS2007 and the 770 hacker edition as long as code is not compiled specifically for OMAP2.

Here are the main things that are still broken or not available:

• Internet call has problems
• Boot process might not work every time
• Bluetooth keyboard and file storage connectivity

These things have improved since the latest Hacker Edition release:

• Filemanager can handle files properly
• Certificates work with browser
• Working Media player, though still with some bugs
• SDL sound
• Correct device information
• Device locking and starting with or without powersupply

We’re continuing to work on the hacker edition. New releases will follow in the coming days.
These are our current goals:

• Update to Chinook release
• Further bug fixes

Over the next days we will populate the bug tracker in the OS 2007 Garage Project with the bugs carried from OS 2006 (many of them now fixed).
Problems with the hacker edition should be reported there.

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A couple of positions are open in the Desktop team. We are focused on the development of User Interface and Data Management building blocks and frameworks.
The GNOME Mobile platform and the Hildon Application Framework are the most visible parts of what we work on.

To check out these positions or apply follow the links:

Technical Project Manager - Address Book, Search, Backup,…
Error Manager / Q.A - Lead the way in bug squashing (fixed term August 2007 to April 2008)

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We’ve got some ideas why but we’d rather hear from you. This is important for the future of Maemo.
If that’s important to you please take one minute to answer this really short survey.

A Garage account is required but the survey is anonymous.
I will summarize and post the results here and in the maemo-developers list.

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These were two fairly uneventful (but very much needed) weeks off spent with the family and then a week out to attend ELC 2007.

The inevitable pile of email, unresolved problems and high priority issues was as expected waiting for me

But also many things have been moving along nicely. One good example is the number of presentations around Maemo, the Internet Tablets and mobile/embedded that have been accepted for this year’s GUADEC.

Going to ELC

On my way to ELC, I had planned to stay one day in London visiting Matthew Allum.
I was set to arrive at 09:00 and fully enjoy an extraordinarily warm and sunny Saturday.

I suppose that couldn’t happen just like that. And it didn’t. My flight got delayed 5 hours due to a failure in the plane’s hydraulic system. So with nearly perfect weather in both Helsinki and London I ended up spending half of the day in the airport .

Somehow when I end up stranded in airports I tend to meet interesting people. This time it was a gentleman from the UK returning from a trip to sell his Internet PR company - an interesting concept - and an Australian executive with a paint company recently acquired by a bigger Finnish firm. The latter claimed extensive previous experience in the travel industry and assured me that despite the best efforts of the engineers a plane just repaired would be significantly more likely to malfunction

I did make it safe and sound to London eventually, in time to still enjoy a few hours of light in London, a pleasant walk in the woods and a nice dinner at the Allums’.

ELC

It was my first time at ELC. There were good and interesting talks even if the overall activity and energy level in the conference is not quite the same in a GUADEC or FOSDEM.
Many presentations can be found here already.

Thomas Gleixner’s keynote (Embedded Linux - An Increasing Nightmare) painted a picture of missed opportunities and disconnectedness in the use of the Linux Kernel in embedded devices. When it comes to working with upstream, the Maemo and Internet Tablets efforts are in comparatively quite good shape. I’m quite in tune with one of the comments to the article in LWN that points to the tension between short-term drawbacks and long-term benefits and the need for management buy-in.
Looking back two years ago when we revealed Maemo and the Nokia 770 I can contrast the initial overriding short-term focus on getting the first product out that resulted among other things in a rather large patch to Gtk+ with what followed - a longer term investment on connecting our development better to upstream, and folding back our patches. It really pays off if you can expect to continue making products with the same code base and release software updates.

Jonathan Corbet’s talks on the state of the Linux Kernel were good as well carrying important messages for an audience of industry embedded developers.

Robi Karp presented and demoed Fancy Pants. Very nicely done and a good example of what you can do with E17 stack though I can’t really get excited about proprietary UI building blocks.

Koen Kooi presented on Open Embedded. I haven’t followed OE too closely so an opportunity to contrast it with Maemo’s approach to development is always welcome and thought provoking.

Matt Mackall presented on System Wide Memory Profiling and demonstrated pagemap

There was a visit to the Tech Museum in San Jose which is definitely worth seeing. Among many other things there’s a bunch of robot demonstrators including one that will pick up and arrange blocks to form sentences and another that will sketch your picture based on a segmented black and white image.

And there was a demo session too. It was remarkable how many of the devices demonstrated where using Gtk+.

The GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative

That brings me to the GMAE initiative.

The announcement of the GNOME Mobile and Embedded initiative was for me the highlight of ELC and what brought Quim and me there in the first place.

Jeff Waugh did a great job with his presentation.

A discussion panel on GMAE followed in the afternoon with David Schlesinger (ACCESS), Jeff Waugh (GNOME), Matthew Allum (OpenedHand) and myself representing Nokia.

Bill Weinberg facilitated the discussion which turned out to be both stimulating and most enjoyable.

The online media picked up nicely on the announcement:

• Ars Technica
• Electronics Weekly
• InfoWorld
• Linux Devices
• Linux.com
• LWN
• Mad Penguin
• Mobile Linux Info
• Mobile Tech News
• Newsforge
• OSNews
• Softpedia
• UMPC Portal

Now it’s time to join the GMAE developers list.

There are good reasons to be excited about GMAE.

There’s an impressive list of organizations behind the initiative:

GNOME Foundation supporters ACCESS, Canonical, Debian, Igalia, Imendio, Intel, Nokia, OLPC, OpenedHand and Red Hat, and GMAE contributors CodeThink, Collabora, FIC, Fluendo, Kernel Concepts, Movial, Nomovok, Openismus, Vernier, Waugh Partners and Wolfson Microelectronics.

All of these have been active using and improving the GNOME platform for some time and working together in the context of the GNOME project.
What GMAE brings is the visibility to these efforts and the added emphasis on mobile and embedded devices - in the community and to other players considering GNOME for their devices.

I had not had the change to play with Vernier’s device before. It is really neat. I wish I had access to something like that when at high school

Also participating are Open Source projects such as Avahi, BlueZ, Cairo, GNOME, GPE, GStreamer, GTK+, Hildon, Maemo, Matchbox, OpenMoko, Telepathy and Tinymail; and industry organisations CELF, the Linux Foundation and LiPS.

These and other projects make up the GNOME Mobile Platform.

GMAE stack

Software stack in Internet Tablets

So much of the Maemo platform is covered in GMAE that it is now possible to draw a very simplified diagram of the software stack in Nokia’s Internet Tablets and to propose a (partial) definition for Maemo in terms of the software it covers.

Looking closer the picture is a bit more complex.

Intel, Mobile Internet devices and Hildon

While I was away, the news broke out at the Intel Developers Forum of Intel’s new reference platform for Mobile Internet Devices.
It is exciting to see Intel betting on Linux and GMAE for Internet-oriented mobile devices, in much the same way Nokia is.
Even more exciting, Intel is looking at the Hildon Application Framework for their reference platform.
We had the chance to meet Bob Spencer from Intel at ELC and to chat about the possibilities for collaboration on Hildon’s further development.
As Quim pointed out, this is an important step for Hildon.

OS 2007 / 770 hacker edition

Also while I was away, there has been renewed discussion in the mailing lists about the OS 2007 / 770 hacker edition.
I must confess I was slightly disappointed with the initial reaction to the first releases. There were words of support
and interest but (I thought) not too many active users. So the recent surge of interest and the total number of downloads
has somehow surprised me (and others).
The reports of people for whom the hacker edition works better than OS 2006 are very interesting as well.
Well, that should teach me not to correlate too strongly traffic in the mailing lists with real interest

Stay tuned, things will start moving again

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FOSDEM is this weekend. This year’s schedule is even better than usual. And this year I’m not missing it. . Tomorrow I’m flying to Brussels.

There’s a lot more going on than any single person could cover. I’m personally interested in X / UI / graphics, embedded, GNOME, metadata/search, and that’s far too much.

But it’s OK since there’s a bunch of other Nokia Maemo people going as well.

Sunday I’m participating in an open discussion about Company Involvement in Open Source Projects representing Nokia. I’m looking forward to that even though I will unfortunately miss a few cool presentations because of that.

Overall I expect to spend quite a bit of time in the GNOME and Embedded devrooms.

Hiring Maemo Core Developer

We are looking for a software engineer to join our Maemo / Internet Tablets development team.
This is a core developer position with a focus on Maemo platform development.

If you are interested and will be in FOSDEM drop me an email to carlos_AT_maemo.org or Jabber me on carlos.h.guerreiro_AT_gmail.com so we can arrange to meet.

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The main news is that sound is now working including media and system sounds.
Video works to some extent, though not the sample clip that comes with the image which is intended for the N800.
VOIP calls work too.

This time it’s a fiasco image. You can flash it in the same way as official releases.
This is described in Markku’s notes which are up-to-date with the latest developments.

There are still many glitches here and there, instability and performance problems, but with media capabilities this image is much more attractive.

Help is appreciated. Markku’s notes are open to contributions. Additions and corrections are welcome, including suggestions for addressing the remaining issues.

Problem reports specific to this release are welcome as well and should go to this Garage project. Not to the Maemo bugzilla and definitely not to any Nokia support. There is no official support for this.

Finally, patches are most welcome, preferably attached to the Garage project’s tracker.

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Similarly to official IT OS releases, the download is offered to product owners only.
You will need to enter your Nokia 770 product identification number to download.

But this is not an official release. It’s not a end-user ready release. It’s a tool to allow developers to continue working on the 770, moving on to the OS 2007 / Bora software platform, bridging the gap between 770 and N800. It’s less than alpha. No Q.A. was done on it and who knows what it might do. It should not brick your device but then again, we can’t be totally sure of that either. I’m running it on my 770 and so far it’s doing fine

Multimedia is still quite broken, but there’s still hope.

Have a look at Markku’s notes if you are interested in the gory details. You will also find there instructions for how to flash this release on your 770. Markku is updating these notes as he continues to work on this. Help is appreciated. The wiki page is open to contributions. Additions and corrections are welcome, including suggestions for addressing the remaining issues.

Problem reports specific to this release are welcome as well and should go to this Garage project. Not to the Maemo bugzilla and definitely not to any Nokia support. There is no official support for this.

Finally, patches are most welcome, preferably attached to the Garage project’s tracker.

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We have commissioned Markku Vire to have a go at making OS 2007 run on the Nokia 770. This is the engineering release Ari talked out.

It’s by necessity a hybrid of OS 2007 and OS 2006. Device drivers, firmware and some userland packages (notably the Opera browser engine) are those in OS 2006. However, most components - including the kernel - are the ones in OS 2007 where necessary rebuilt and/or configured differently.

As far as the software platform is concerned, this makes this OS 2007 / 770 hacker edition pretty close to the real thing. We expect most applications built with Maemo Bora for the N800 to install and work, within the limitations of the hardware and subject to some software gaps - more on that below. We also expect applications that do not work on the N800 - due to changed APIs - not to work here as well.

That’s great since it should make this release a viable tool for checking if your app will work on the N800 - before you have one.

But it’s not the real thing. It’s not a end-user ready release. It’s a tool to allow developers to continue working on the 770, moving on to the OS 2007 / Bora software platform, bridging the gap between 770 and N800. It’s less than alpha. No Q.A. was done on it and who knows what it might do. It should not brick your device but then again, we can’t be totally sure of that either. I’m running it on my 770 and so far it’s doing fine

TigerT took the nice photo you can see below.

Markku made a lot of progress. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

The DSP works at a very minimal level. Some audio media does play but there are no touchscreen sounds and no video at all . We are still trying to do something about that, Markku is getting help from our Multimedia guys. In any case, some of the codecs from OS 2007 are not shipped - again due to licensing restrictions.

Instant messaging works. VOIP didn’t last time I tried, which is hardly surprising given the DSP doesn’t work that much .

Have a look at Markku’s notes if you are interested in the gory details. He’ll be updating these notes as he continues to work on this.

An image will be available soon for download and flashing, to 770 users only.

After that, Maemo developers with a 770 and a bit of time on their hands are encouraged to check it out. Problem reports specific to this release should go to this Garage project. Not to the Maemo bugzilla and definitely not to any Nokia support. There is no official support for this.

We will work on this still for some time though it is hard to say how long. It will also depend on how this is received. It might be that we can get more of the DSP and Multimedia to work, or maybe not.

We can’t justify doing much work on this hybrid, our development focus is really on the N800. However, if we manage to make further progress we will release updated images. We’ll look at any patches that people in the Maemo community might turn up and consider applying them and releasing new images. We can’t promise we will do a good job there but let’s see what we can manage.

This is again, something new for us, and we hope to learn something in the process.

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