While Maemo is sadly an officially “dead” OS, it may be given new life if the community can take over and run it. There are still lots of excellent and quite dedicated hackers and members in the community so I see no reason why this shouldn’t be a vibrant project. It can also share source code with other projects like MeeGo and Linaro and can potentially help Maemo keep pace with MeeGo. I do have some concerns with the OBS but there are other ways to build packages.

This is good news and I look forward to being more active again in a more open community.

26 1

Now that American Industry has seen that other nations can catch up, many companies are trying to change the rules to keep their advantage. One way they do this is through trying to force the US Trade Representative to ban trade with other countries because they have no use for crappy software from Microsoft. Now, they don’t mind if the country doesn’t pay for the software as long as they use it because they know at some point these foreign governments and companies will get caught out and be forced to pay Microsoft for some license or other. What these trade organizations, like the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), do not want to see is a choice in the marketplace. Choosing something other than a product from one of these organizations threatens the high paid lawyers and ex-CEOs who can’t find work from earning a handsome living making fools of themselves in the press.

Recently the IIPA, whose members include the BSA, RIAA, and MPAA, (litigious hobgoblins all), issued a report trying to strong arm the USTR into banning countries that use “Open Source” software. The report is conveniently available in pdf (a proprietary format of course) on their web site. A quick gander at that didactic screed brings us some useful nuggets, also highlighted by the Gaurdian. Of course the Guardian, like any good news organization, got it’s news from a blogger, who deserves the real credit.

I point out the Guardian article because they have a useful quote from the report so you don’t have to go through the whole thing:

“The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.

Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.

As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.

There is a distinct and glaring lack in these paragraphs from the report. In fact I would say there is a complete absence of truth. Let’s help the author(s) with some corrections shall we?

The first paragraph goes off the rails early with the claim that recommending open source software weakens the software industry. Far from it – it strengthens the software industry, particularly the software industry in Indonesia. Because you are allowed to study and modify Free Software, you can learn about programming and become a better programmer. You can create innovative products and sell them. Perhaps even to the United States? It follows that the long-term competitiveness of the industry would be furthered by the use of Free Software in Indonesia, at least the Indonesian software industry. And call me crazy but I believe sovereign nations have a right to their own software industry.

What the heck is an artificial preference they refer to in the first paragraph? Is that the opposite of the “natural preference” of Microsoft software? Somebody better run and tell the busiest web sites in the world, along with two-thirds of the rest of the web, to stop using the apache web server – it just ain’t natural. They follow that odd statement up with claiming legitimate companies will lose access to the government market. Here is where the arrogance that borders on pathological rears its pointy head. Closing a market by allowing only proprietary software denies access and competition – in short free trade – not the other way around. Their statement is transparent falsehood so contrived you’d have to be dense as a lead cupcake not to see through it.

Now in the second paragraph we begin to see the real incompetence that American jurisprudence has so sweetly bestowed upon the world. Rather than say, research their topic, they inform us of what it isn’t, setting up a straw man cum sock puppet. Fortunately this straw puppet is highly flammable – let’s set it alight; Free Software is built upon copyright.

Boy that was easy. Easy because it is so damn simple. Free Software relies on copyright law for its existence. You assign a copyright when you write software, often that copyright goes to a company if you are working for them, but sometimes it goes to individuals and organizations. They can license their software as they see fit if they possess the copyright. Many companies see a strategic advantage in using Free Software licenses like the GPL because it allows them to re-use high-quality software from other large companies, like Intel, IBM, Red Hat, Sun, Oracle, (stop me if this is boring you) Novell, Nokia, Microsoft, oh yes – even Microsoft has released Free Software. Presumably because it allows them to make money. But I’m just guessing here.

Clearly the IIPA lawyers either do not understand the law or they lie to protect their business. Free Software is directly built upon copyright law and to say “it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights” is to babble illogically. How can copyrighted works undermine copyright? How can you claim that following law does not respect the law? You can’t of course, these are logical impossibilities. You would think it would also be a bit illogical to rail against “open source” software and then go ahead and run your web site on that self-same open source, but this is precisely what the IIPA does; their ranting nonsense web site is hosted on a Solaris machine. Did I mention they were incompetent?

Free Software is a material product which lends itself to capital markets. It is an efficient use of capital and brings with it huge return on investment. Companies large and small use Free Software daily to help them grow and prosper, that is a fact that IIPA fails to mention and one cannot help but wonder why.

7 4

Why would Intel and Nokia bundle up some of their most crucial “intelectual property” and give it away to the Linux Foundation? Why else would they let in fierce competitors? Why else would they let in applications and frameworks and not keep complete control? The reason is that these companies feel they can compete with their competitors on a level playing field and win. They may in fact be right.

There are some losers in the whole switch from Moblin and Maemo, specifically those who have a lot at stake with keeping things as they are. As someone who’s worked with Maemo technology, the move from a debian environment to a rpm environment is a big move. I’ve worked with rpm previously however and have been working with the Moblin toolchain for a couple months now so I don’t feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me. Community and governance issues will be big though – there is an established Maemo community that just does not exist in Moblin. Moblin is software mostly, designed to run on Intel’s Atom chipset, there are not many devices that have inspired a loyal following like the Maemo devices have. It remains to be seen if Intel, the Linux Foundation, and Nokia can handle this community transition. I suspect they are not so interested in the community per se, as long as they can attract developers who in turn attract hardware buyers.

I am impressed to see a lot of the Maemo community joining in MeeGo immediately, they have sort of swamped the MeeGo infrastructure, but what role the Maemo council and the Maemo paid staff, such as myself, will play is going to be interesting to see. I think our role will be greatly diminished because I think the focus of the MeeGo project is going to be much more technical. I think sites like talk.maemo.org will live on but separate from the more developer-centric MeeGo.

13 1

MADDE is designed to make cross compiling and generally building applications easier, and it appears to be doing just that. Installation went smoothly and the documentation is concise and clear. MADDE even provides a debian directory, which is my particular interest at the moment, so let’s take a closer look there to see how MADDE can help you build debs.

The first thing you notice when using MADDE is that when you create a project with it, it creates not just project files, but debian files for you as well. In that debian directory you’ll see a bunch of example files – things you can use if you are going to create a debian README file, man pages and the like. For Maemo, we don’t use man pages, so you can simply remove any file that ends in .ex that you don’t want or need.

There are of course a variety of details of packaging you can go into, but what is very interesting with MADDE is that the package building is included. This means that you can call ‘mad dpkg-buildpackage’ and MADDE knows what to do and goes ahead and does it. You don’t need to fiddle with your environment, unless of course you want to, MADDE saves you a great deal of time by including all the needed tools for packaging.

I will discuss the implications of MADDE and packaging further, and I also hope to dive into some of the source code. (Dear Nokia, please consider releasing your perl modules to CPAN.) But my first impression of MADDE is that it is a huge time saver, and a great maemo development environment – try it out!

23 0

The first: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Python is from the Ubuntu wiki which is a really good source for all things Ubuntu. The wiki entries tend to be clearly written and easy to read which is a blessing. This particular wiki entry takes one through packaging a python app from beginning to end in a straight forward manner – nothing really complex here. It should cover about 90% of the packaging requirements of python Maemo apps.

The second: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/336 is from the site Debian Administration which is a great site. The site has an active community and some experienced admins post there so you’ll definitely find advanced topics like chroots, MTA configuration, etc. The article I pointed out is a fairly thorough discussion on packaging with some theory at the beginning.

The downside of the first article is that it describes using CDBS which requires more editing of files and is not as widely used as debhelper. The second article is a little older and doesn’t take advantage of the changes to debhelper that have come along in later versions. But between them I am sure you’ll find something useful and they are a great way to get started.

11 0

The repo is not yet public. It is currently set up on the new hardware that Nokia has generously provided us. I am looking for brave testers and for packages that might be suitable to put in our community repo. The discussion that was held at the Maemo summit in Amsterdam spoke only about SSU updates and that is all I think is really appropriate at this time, regular packages should of course end up in the usual place: extras. This does not mean that we should limit ourselves to just SSUs, but let’s start there and see what else needs to be added.

I thought I would set up a thread on Talk -> Development where we can co-ordinate our work.

Hope to see you there!

26 0

There is some data to go on, though a lot is anecdotal. Firstly, I think we have seen increased traffic on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #maemo) with lots of new users of various backgrounds. That is an easy thing to do, to show up on IRC and ask some questions, but there are other signs of increased developer interest. Firstly, we are seeing lots of new apps come into garage, Maemo’s development platform. That is a positive thing. Not only new applications, but applications that have been around for a while are returning as well. People are fixing bugs, uploading new packages, and generally getting their software ready to put on the devices.

Another significant measure is the traffic on the developer’s list. Already through the first two weeks of September, there has been more email to the list than any other month this year except for May. In May we had 430 emails to the developer list for the entire month; sin September we have had 381 emails to the list and the month is only half over.

So taking these little data points into account, I am willing to predict the platform is going to be a big success, maybe bigger than we imagined.

15 1

What catchse my eye is vala-terminal since vala is something I would like to learn more about. Clicking on the vala-link in the debian packages web interface shows another interesting link to some web site called freesmartphone.org. I click there to find that the same people behind the freesmartphone.org site have created a commercial entity that used to be funded by OpenMoko. So its good to see that the OpenMoko stuff has found its way into the community and that these tools are making there way into debian which is upstream for Maemo.

Things move so quickly nowadays, it’s just amazing to watch the ecosystem for free software expand.

14 0

I don’t want to place the differences between the two projects in a negative light since the goals are so different. Debian aims to be an easy to use operating system whereas Maemo is a device. Maemo developers often want the device to do cool things, for them packaging is an after-thought. This is why there is a maemo.org debmaster of course; to help developers with packaging and integrate into the operating system so they can focus on cool features and libraries.

Having a debian background I am constantly thinking about the overall system, trying to assure that packages install well, that things “just work” for users. This sometimes makes me wonder if I am doing everything I can for maemo developers and what is the most effective way to encourage best practices and assure quality. While I am excited by the work Niels has done with package promotion and the potential that maemian has, I feel there is more that one can do. While I am sure it is boring to many developers, packaging policy is critical for building the kind of tools that Niels has built. You need to know that the developer has submitted the right email address, declared the correct dependencies, etc. Policy truly is your friend.

I hope to get the chance to speak about packaging at the Maemo Summit, I have submitted a talk anyway, we’ll see if it gets accepted. I also would like to encourage developers who target the Maemo platform to think more about making life easier for their users – after all, it will bring you more users if you can easily install and use your application. I would also like to know more specifically where the pain is, what sucks about the QA process, what sucks about packaging (aside from having to do it at all. :P) Let’s make packaging policy a tool to make everyone’s life easier.

11 0

The hard work is compiling, determining dependencies, and building for the chip architecture of your software. All this stuff is quite esoteric to the average user – they just want to know: how do I install? Does it work with my tablet? With packaging we can answer in the affirmative the latter question and we can make install painless. That makes users of your software happy and more likely to use it.

Debian has as part of its mission the goal of putting users first, this makes Nokia’s choices of debian as an operating system fortuitous. Debian has worked really hard at making software easy to install and their success has made it one of the most popular linux distros out there. Debian’s user-centric focus created the APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) system, with apt-get and aptitude, which Maemo has inherited. This means that maemo packages can take advantage of all the well tested debian tools and the infrastructure which debian has built.

Building packages correctly allows you to insert software onto a variety of architectures, Maemo supports two and Debian supports at least eight.

Packaging has some fringe benefits as well, it forces a certain amount of discipline upon the developer and alerts them to the needs of their users. This is unfortunately something that we as programmers forget to do – to put the user at the center of the experience. Software should be written with users and usability in mind, otherwise no matter how good it is, no one will use it. Packaging helps to enforce best practices which make the installation and upgrade of software standardized. By standardizing distribution of software we are realizing the spirit of the GPL and bringing some pretty amazing technology to everyone, not just the alpha geeks who know their way around a C compiler.

Quick recap: Packaging allow us to

• Build software for numerous architectures
• Make software easy to install
• Follow best practices in the development and distribution of software

So that is the point of packaging; to make software easy to install. It’s good to remember this when you are jumping through the hoops of dpkg and its various tools.

14 0

The first resource is a link to the debian wiki entry for the Python Modules Team;
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/PythonModulesTeam

These folks package a lot of python modules for debian, so their documentation will be pretty authoritative and looking at their packages will probably teach you a lot.

The next link is to the Python policy. Boring I know, but you will be directed there for answers to various questions, so you might as well have a handy link to it.
http://python-modules.alioth.debian.org/python-modules-policy.html

Here is an interesting and pretty darn good screencast and tutorial showing how to package a simple python application as a deb on Ubuntu!
http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=linuxJensMakingDeb

Ubuntu also has a Packaging guide which might be useful, I haven’t read all of it and it is more general than just python programming.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide

Hopefully that is enough to get started. I hope for follow up with more info on packaging python apps for maemo and for debian.

12 0

I have managed to move forward a bit with the synergy package. I installed it on my N810, including its dependecies on libxinerama1 and libxinerama-dev, enable the cursor, and shared the keyboard and mouse between my N810 and OS X. Here is a short video demonstration;

N810 and OS X sharing keyboard and mouse with Synergy from jeremiah foster on Vimeo.

I am going to upload these packages to Extras-Devel and try and make some documentation so that this is easy to install. Thanks again qwerty for the script that enables the cursor on the N810, I have hacked on it a little.

13 0

I’ll have a longer post on how to set it up once I have uploaded the packages and tested. I hope this will be useful, I know I will use it a lot and have used synergy for a while – it is a great tool.

12 0

When I pulled it out of its packaging I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the device and how much is included. What looked like plastic to my eye in pictures of the N810 turns out to be brushed aluminum. The back plate is carefully manufactured, more reminiscent of Japanese design than American or Taiwanese, the parts are finely machined and very detailed. It has heft which might make people think it is too heavy, but I like its weight. It comes with a case which the iPhone I received did not. It comes with a stylus and charger, again, the iPhone had neither. There is also included a mounting bracket and a USB cable that connects directly to the device.

All in all it feels as if I can do what I want to do right out of the box with my tablet, with the iPhone there are still hoops I haven’t jumped through; I need to pwn it to change the carrier, the GPS does not work until that is done, I need to port my phone number, etc. None of that is required with my tablet. Plus there are no additional hoops to jump through for development, I don’t need to get official approval from Nokia like I would with the iPhone, I can just send my ssh key to maemo and get started developing right away. Apple is a bit fascistic about their platform because they like to have complete control over the user experience and their partners leaned on them to limit the device to specific networks. But this type of control has been already easily bypassed and Apple is having trouble with developer accounts too apparently. Rogue iPhone apps are popping up on the internet, something that is the bane of any software distributor who wants to completely control the user experience. I am not convinced that the closed Apple model is sustainable, time will tell.

So take my review with a grain of salt, but I think this tablet is far superior to the iPhone and already the experience has been better than my expectations.

1 0

I have done a little security work however and I understand how difficult it is, especially when you have a complex system. One of the mantras that I hear is “security is a process.” I think this is true, security is a process, not just an add-on or a patch. Security has to be thought of from the beginning through development to deployment – not just when the end user has it in their hands and is started to hack on it.

I would like to tap into the views and expertise of the community and try to establish a discussion around security in Maemo and in its ecosystem. Since Maemo is built upon a foundation (Debian) known for stability and technical quality, Maemo inherits some of Debian’s infrastructure regarding security. But what more could be done? Furthermore, what should be done?

I hope that we can bring forth the ‘best practices’ and innovations that the community around Maemo has, develop methods to protect users, maybe even hammer out policy. But all of this has to be done in the open I feel, it has to be driven by the community.

So what do you think? Do you worry about exploits? Do you test your code for buffer overflows or run it through valgrind? What would a Maemo security team look like? How does one balance open access with system integrity?

I look forward to the discussion.

EDIT: More info on Maemo security policy here.

16 0

“Hi,

This year the Maemo community will try to join the Google Summer of
code[1] 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.

I setup a wiki page[2] 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 also .

[1] – http://code.google.com/soc/
[2] – http://wiki.maemo.org/GSoC_2009/

Best regards,

–
Valério Valério

http://www.valeriovalerio.org“

4 0