Getting Started with Python

It's been a couple of weeks since I've started to work on a new project (which I wish I can talk about it soon). One of my tasks involves implementing a GTK+ based UI from scratch, but using Python. I agreed it was time to learn something different of C and C++, mainly because it is (almost) impossible to have RAD using these languages.

I thought it would be a bit more difficult to deal with Python at the first time, but I am really a lucky guy, as we have some python specialists here. These guys, specially osvaldo, have been helping me a lot since I started coding. One nice thing they pointed me was tepache. A really easy way to develop PyGTK applications with Glade.

Until now, my work basically has been design the UI in Glade and testing it inside the Maemo/scratchbox environment and also in the 770. One thing I really liked was the Python code being really platform independent. I created a few classes in the i386 target and just copied them directly to the 770 and the program just worked without any need of recompiling stuff.

I'm really enjoying this new adventure. I've also successfully built the bindings for gconf and gnomevfs as they're not available in the current python distributed with Maemo rootstraps. There's still some work to get the proper debian package built but I'll make them available as soon as they're working fine.

Canola has been released!

Yeah I know some other guys have already posted about this, but I was unable to do it as I was sleeping while people were working hard to ensure everything was working fine. They've found some issues in the installation process which were quickly solved. It works like a charm now.

Things about Canola I like a lot:

• Incredibly easy to use UI


• The wood theme


• Web configuration tool


• Canola Home Applet

So big congratulations (and sweet dreams) to the Canola Team (in no particular order): Marcelo, Gustavo, Chenca, Andrunko, Talita and Cidoca for this awesome software. Lets enjoy it!

Gstreamer Training

Last week Edward "Bilboed" Hervey from Fluendo was here in Recife to give us an advanced training in GStreamer.



We spend five intense days (about 8 hours per day) learning about everything of this fantastic framework, from how to use GStreamer in applications and writing simple plugins to its deep internals, like QoS, clocks, synchronization, segments and so on. We've also found some bugs while trying to implement reverse playback in dvdemux and dvdec. In the end it was a very productive week and on Friday we were exhausted, as you can see in the next picture, taken during the lunch we had celebrating the end of the training.



I ended the training with some ideas of an interesting application using GStreamer. I really hope I'll be able to start it really soon. :)

Spreading Maemo Platform (and INdT projects)

INdT crew is really working hard on spreading our commitment to the open source community by showing the projects we participate in various events that occured all around brazilian northearsten region. We gave talks related to our projects regarding Python, VoIP, Gstreamer and specially the Maemo platform. A small summary of some of the events we participated follows:

• V SEC: Marcio Macedo talked about Multimedia and Mobility in Free Software and my presentation was about the Maemo Platform. The audience (mostly students) was really impressed to see me switching the slides remotely using a Nokia 770 (which was running vncviewer).
  
  



• II EPSL: Marcio Macedo talked about Developing VoIP Applications, Osvaldo Santana presented the Maemo platform and Gustavo Barbieri talked about python language, his Eagle Library and some other examples in Maemo Platform.



• III FCSL: This time I gave two talks, the first one was the default Maemo platform presentation and the other was about my experience in porting some desktop applications to it. Eduardo Valentin from INdT Manaus office talked about the work he has done building ALSA support to Maemo. Daniel D'andrada, talked about Python in mobile devices such as cellphones and the Nokia 770 and also gave a mini course of python using the scratchbox environment and the Maemo platform. Ilias Biris, also from INdT Manaus gave a talk about testing the Linux Kernel in various platforms. Finally Edgard Lima talked about the gstreamer framework, which he is deeply involved.
  
  



• SEMANASOL: This time Osvaldo Santana gave two talks. The first one was the "default" Maemo Platform presentation and the second talking about Free Software Project Management.

It's kind of weird to talk about such an amazing development platform when we are not able to buy the only compatible device (770) here in Brazil. :(

Canola Release Date

It's been some days since Marcelo announced Canola release date, but I think it's never too late for it.

Canola will be available for download on november 29th

We just can't wait to get it released!

More action!

Marcelo has just uploaded another video to YouTube showing Canola in action, but this time accessing a huge shared playlist. You can also see my sharing there ;). The results are quite impressive. Great job guys!

Canola preview video

It's hosted on YouTube. Go for it.



Some discussion can be found in Marcelo's blog.

Nokia 770 as a portable media center?

We've been thinking a lot about turning the Nokia 770 device into a pocket-sized media center. What about enjoying all your music, videos and photos anywhere? Well, I can say this is really near to become true. A little bit of its taste can be found in Marcelo's blog. Check it out:

Rhythmbox is near

I'm almost done with Rhythmbox for Nokia 770. I expect to have something by the end of the next week or so. I'm facing some problems specially with mp3 streams over the internet at this moment but it is already usable. Music sharing via DAAP is supported as you can see in the following screenshots:

Yet another bug

This time the bug was in the xournal package. There was availability of "Annotate PDF" but it was not working at all. The problem is xournal uses /tmp to create a temporary directory where it stores a copy of the chosen pdf and calls pdftoppm to convert each page of the document before loading them as background. Taking a quick look at the device partition table:

Nokia770-26:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mtdblock4            2.0M      2.0M         0 100% /mnt/initfs
none                    512.0k     28.0k    484.0k   5% /mnt/initfs/tmp
/dev/mtdblock4          123.5M     87.0M     36.5M  70% /
none                    512.0k     28.0k    484.0k   5% /tmp
none                      1.0M     44.0k    980.0k   4% /dev
/dev/mmcblk0p1           60.9M     32.1M     28.8M  53% /media/mmc1

So, I realised that 484 KB in /tmp were not enough for our needs. Just changed the directory to /home/user/.xournal/ and got another issue fixed. Please upgrade your xournal package by refreshing the package list and clicking on "Check for Updates" button in the application manager main window.

Gnumeric Excel Import Bug Fixed

I've finally managed to fix the annoying bug in Gnumeric Excel importer in Nokia 770. Actually I don't know if it was really a bug. Anyway, special thanks to Morten Wellinder for the precious tip.

Users, please try to refresh the package list and then click on "Check for updates" button in Application Manager main window. If this does not work, try uninstalling and installing gnumeric again.

One Bug Leads To Another

I was trying to figure out why Gnumeric excel importer is broken in Nokia 770 version, but then I discovered it is not possible to save in other formats than Gnumeric XML. With a couple of lines, now the save dialog includes a combo box to let user choose which file type he/she wants to save:



So, with this bug fixed, lets keep searching the reason for that former bug. I just whish it would be as easy to fix as the save dialog one.

LeafPad - A Simple Text Editor

I decided to follow the competence test Eero proposed in maemo-developers list, and here is the final result:





Want to try it? Add the following to your application entry catalog:

Web Address: http://www.maemo.org.br/platform/apt
Distribution: mistral
Components: user

Now I want to know if I passed the test :).

Time to have some fun

I spent some time helping my colleagues of INdT game team to port our games packages to Maemo 2.0. Now you can enjoy all these funny games:



Just add the following entry to your application catalog:

Web Address: http://marceloeduardo.com/apt
Distribution: mistral
Components: games

You will also need maemo.org repository:

Web Address: http://repository.maemo.org
Distribution: mistral
Components: free non-free

These packages substitute those ones Marcelo had annouced previously. Feedbacks are very welcome. Have fun!

Updated Evince package

I have just uploaded a new version of the Evince package fixing a crash people were complaining. So please refresh your package list and click on the "Check for updates" button in Application Manager main screen. The new version is 0.5.2-indt5. Many thanks to everybody who reported the bug.

Evince now with DJVU support

Some people asked me about adding DJVU support in Evince. Now it is done! Again, follow the instructions in my previous post if you do not have it installed yet. Otherwise, just refresh your package list and click on "Check for updates" button in application manager main screen.



Could somebody point me an interesting reading??

Reading Comic Books With Evince

I have just uploaded some new packages to my repository and now we can enjoy reading comic books with our 770! Just add the entries as described in my previous post. If you already have installed Evince, refresh the package list and click on the "Check for updates" button in the application manager main screen.

Evince package for IT2006

Yay! Just finished another port. It's Evince, the GNOME Document Viewer. This version only supports viewing PDF, TIFF and image files.

If you got interested, add the following entry to your application catalog:

Web Address: http://bgran.net/etrunko/apt
Distribution: mistral
Components: user

The package also needs libglade, which can be found in maemo oficial repository:

Web Address: http://repository.maemo.org
Distribution: mistral
Components: free non-free

Screenshots:




P.S.: I could not upload the packages to maemo.org.br repository. Maybe the service is down. I'll try to do it tomorrow.

Gnumeric Spreadsheet Packages Available

It is done! Hurry up and add the following repository to your application catalog:

Web Address: http://maemo.org.br/platform/apt
Distribution: mistral
Components: user

Alternatively, you can add following repository (this one will be deactivated soon):

Web Address: http://bgran.net/etrunko/apt
Distribution: mistral
Components: user

Mandatory Screenshot:

We're Almost there!

Pictures are worth more than 1000 words.

SIP with Tapioca

After the release of Tapioca for Nokia 770, there have been a lot of discussion, specially on #maemo, about the status of SIP on the UI and the interoperability with another clients. There is a page at Tapioca Wiki explaining the current state of this supoort in the framework. A small quotation:

The main issue that has yet to be solved for full interoperability with other SIP clients is Media traversal trough NAT environments. That means that you can connect (establish a session) to other clients, but you will not be able to make Voice Calls to anyone.

I am currently working on adding support to other kinds of accounts, including SIP, besides Google Talk ones. I hope to have it working along with SIP support on Tapioca.

Updated Xournal Package

After seeing Denis Auroux released a new version (0.3) of Xournal, I ran to update my patches and build the fresh packages for the Nokia 770. If you already have it installed, just refresh your list of packages and then click on the "Check for Updates" button. Otherwise, just follow the instructions of my previous post.

Check the changelog.

Tapioca VoIP UI Available for Nokia 770

In the last few weeks, I have been helping Tapioca guys to port the demonstration UI to Nokia 770. Now it is available! Some Screenshots:

Login Window

Buddy List

Chat Window

If you want to try an alternative to the built-in GTalk, add the following entry to your application catalogue list:

Web Address: http://maemo.org.br/VoIP/apt
Distribution: mistral
Components: main

Comming Up Next:

• Support to many kinds of accounts, not only GTalk ones.


• SIP Support


• Avatar Support


• Retrieve buddy information


• Edit your own information

Feedbacks are very welcome.

Xournal Package for IT2006

Restarting the port of applications to Maemo 2.0, I have decided to start from the easiest one in order to get contact with the new Hildon API. So I present you the Xournal package for IT2006.



To try it, add the following entry to your application manager:

• Web Address: http://bgran.net/etrunko/apt


• Distribution: mistral


• Components: user

The performance has improved a *lot* since the package built for the IT2005. As usual, building the debian package took longer than hacking the code itself. It still depends on libgnomeprintui which will be downloaded automatically from the same repository.

All source and -dev packages are also available in the repository. If you want to try hacking on the source code add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list inside the scratchbox (i386 and armel) environment:

deb http://bgran.net/etrunko/apt mistral user
deb-src http://bgran.net/etrunko/apt mistral user

Have Fun!

P.S.: I apologize for my awful handwriting ;).

UPDATE:
For those who are missing libglade dependency, please add the maemo repository entry to you application manager:

Web Address: http://repository.maemo.org
Distribution: mistral
Components: free non-free

Dates for Nokia 770

Chris Lord has just announced the first release of Dates, a calendar application.

Screenshot:


If you want to try it, add the following to your application catalog:

Web address: http://maemo.o-hand.com/packages
Distribution: mistral/ (Yes, the slash is needed!)
Components: (Leave it blank)

Happy Birthday!

Time goes really fast!!! It has been a year since the announcement of Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and Maemo platform. Congratulations to everyone who have contributed and worked hard to build the community and make the platform grow to what it is now. Although there were some detours, I think we are building our road in the right direction and there is a lot more to come :).

Also, I'd like to celebrate my first year in Recife. It has been a little bit more than a year since I have moved from Brasília looking for new challenges in my professional carreer. Before beeing hired to work at INdT I had been working for almost 4 years in a governmental institution, where I had the chance to develop various OS/2 and Linux applications. It was my first job and I must say that I had learned a LOT over there, thank very much to Jeovânio, Rômulo, Alessandro, Cezar, Marcio, Jorge and many others.

So, I have left a lot of friends and family people in Brasília and decided to come to Recife by myself to focus my work on Free Software and Open Source World. Although living far far away from home (about 2.500 km) and missing the contact with my family closest friends, I don't regret my decision. I enjoy the life in Recife, which is a very good and beautiful city, besides being huge and having all the problems it has. I have met a lot of people including my beautiful and lovable girlfriend, Wanessa. It's been 10 months since we met, and thank to her I knew a lot of places and made new friendships too.

Finally, I'd like to thank very much my family that have always been supporting me, my old and new friends (specially Wanessa), my co-workers and finish with some words I have learnd from uncle Jack from Dallas: "Work hard, Play hard and Party hard". Lets celebrate!

Xournal package for 770

As promissed, last weekend I did a quick hack on xournal code and ported it to Maemo platform. I've been somewhat busy lately and I have found some time to build the package for 770 only yesterday.

Xournal is a great application, it fits perfectly on 770, but unfortunately its performance on the device is far from acceptable. Iván Frade has sent some emails to the author, Denis Auroux, and since yesterday the project is hosted by sourceforge. From now on we can help developping and improving xournal. If you want to help, don't hesitate to join the project.

Some screenshots taken from the 770:

Normal mode

Fullscreen mode

The package ready to install using the application installer and it is available here. Don't forget to install libgnomeprintui dependency. Have fun!

Want a GoogleTalk alternative for Linux? Try Tapioca VoIP!

INdT VoIP team is proud to announce the new release of the Tapioca VoIP solution.

• About Tapioca

Tapioca is not yet another SIP client, like linphone and many others. The framework is extensible and at this moment, SIP and Jabber (XMPP) protocols are supported. A description can be found at Tapioca Wiki main page:


Tapioca is a framework for Voice over IP (VoIP) and Instant Messaging (IM). Its main goal is to provide an easy way for developing and using VoIP and IM services in any kind of application. It was designed to be cross-platform, lightweight, thread-safe, having mobile devices and applications in mind.



• What's new?

With this new release, Tapioca has become the first free Linux client that includes full support to Google Talk voice and P2P interoperability library, the libjingle. All you have to do is to sign in with your Gmail username and password using tapiocaui client. It will automatically retrieve your contact list, and then you will be able to start a text/voice chat with any of your contacts.

Finally, if you want to try Tapioca, follow the installation instructions and enjoy a lot. Bug reports are very welcome.

Coming up next....

Well, i've got really excited by tigert previous post and started a quick hack on Xournal. I will work more on it this weekend and I hope to have some good news by Monday. The result will be something like this:

About libgnomeprint packages for Maemo

Well, it's been quite some time that people ask me about the sources of libgnomeprint for Maemo platform. I thought it would be a better idea if I wrote a post about it, like a HowTo. This way it can benefit everyone interested in porting applications, specially GNOME apps, that depends on this lib. With some few commands and we have the packages ready-to-install in Maemo platform. The packages were generated using Ubuntu Hoary.

1. Set up the environment
   First of all we need to create a new directory somewhere in our home to store the sources. For this example it was named 'projects'.
   

   edulima@dosmtc19:~$ mkdir projects
   edulima@dosmtc19:~$ cd projects
   edulima@dosmtc19:~/projects$



2. Find libgnomeprintui dependencies
   For this task we use the following command outside scratchbox:
   

   edulima@edulima:~/projects$ apt-cache depends libgnomeprintui2.2-0
   libgnomeprintui2.2-0
     Depends: libart-2.0-2
     Depends: libatk1.0-0
     Depends: libc6
     Depends: libglib2.0-0
     Depends: libgnomecanvas2-0
     Depends: libgnomeprint2.2-0
     Depends: libgnomeprintui2.2-common
     Depends: libgtk2.0-0
     Depends: libpango1.0-0
     Depends: libxml2
     Depends: zlib1g
   edulima@edulima:~/projects$

   
   The dependencies marked with a strike are the ones already installed in Maemo platform. One alternative to find out which are these packages is to execute some 'dpkg -S' commands inside scratchbox.



3. Download the sources
   Having the package dependency list, we use another 'apt' command:
   

   edulima@dosmtc19:~/projects$ apt-get source libgnomeprintui2.2-0 > libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomecanvas2-0 libart-2.0-2
   Reading package lists... Done
   Building dependency tree... Done
   ... (after some time)
   edulima@dosmtc19:~/projects$



4. Copy the 'projects' directory inside scratchbox
   An easy way to do this is to copy the directory to /tmp first, start scratchbox and then copy the directory from /tmp.
   

   edulima@dosmtc19:~/projects$ cd ..
   edulima@dosmtc19:~$ cp -r projects/ /tmp/
   edulima@dosmtc19:~$ scratchbox
   ...
   [sbox-1.1: ~] > cd projects
   [sbox-1.1: ~/projects] >



5. Build the packages
   We have to follow the dependency order here. For this example, is the order is libart-lgpl-2.3.17, libgnomecanvas-2.10.0, libgnomeprint-2.10.3 and finally libgnomeprintui-2.10.2. Following this order, we just cd to each one of these directories and then type a 'dpkg-buildpackage' command, for example:
   
   

   [sbox-1.1: ~/projects] > cd libart-lgpl-2.3.17
   [sbox-1.1: ~/projects/libart-lgpl-2.3.17] > dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc -D
   ...

   
   Each package will be created inside the 'projects' directory.



6. Finally, install the packages
   After generating all the packages you can install them using the old and well known dpkg command:
   

   [sbox-1.1: ~/projects] > fakeroot dpkg --install *.deb


That's it. If you are interested in gnomeprint packages but do not have much time to reproduce all the steps above, I have uploaded the packages I built for i386 and arm targets to my web space. Download them here.

Tetringo

Christian Hammond have released a package of his Tetringo game, which is a Second Life Tringo clone. I have not tried it yet, but he said "the game is fairly addicting" and there are plans to release a multiplayer version of the game. For now we have the chance to practice while we wait for the multiplayer version.



He had also updated the Application Catalog in Maemo wiki. Have Fun!

Fresh Evince Package Available

Hi everybody,

As promissed, I have just released a new version of evince package, and this one is the smallest package ever. First of all, as we don't need libgnomeprintui anymore, we save about 2794 KB. Second, I have generated only the dictionaries supported by the device. With this we saved about 885 KB. Total memory saved: 3679 KB. Cool!!! :D

But the most attractive and coolest feature in this version is that you are able to scroll the document using the stylus, just like you do when you use Browser and the default PDF reader.

So for these reasons I strongly recommend you to to download and install this new version. And don't forget to uninstall libgnomeprintui package, unless of course, you have gnumeric installed.

Evince With Optional Print Support

I was planning to write something about the enhancement bug I had opened yesterday at work before I went home, but I had no time to do it. When I opened my mail box today morning it was already done. The Evince maintainer, Nickolay Shmyrev, was faster than me and applied the patch I have attached to the bug. Sweet!

For now on, If you want to disable printing support in Evince, just need to run the configure scritp with --disable-gnome-print. As result we will have something like the following screenshots:





The good news about it is we are free of libgnomeprintui dependency, specially in Maemo Platform. Unfortunately, this weekend i will not have time to do it, but i will provide the new package as soon as possible.

Gnumeric Package Update

After some discussion in maemo-developers mail list, finally Wolfgang Karall found the solution to make Gnumeric icon appear in Maemo task switcher. As result, you should have something like this:



I'd like to thank Wolfgan very much and recommend you to download the new version of the package here.

New Rhythmbox Package Available

After some work to fix the DAAP sharing, my coworker Renato Araujo has released a new version of Rhythmbox for Nokia 770. Now you can share your MP3 files from your iTunes and listen them in your 770 properly.

Download Rhythmbox package here.

To have DAAP sharing working in your 770, follow the instructions.

Gnumeric 1.6.2 Released

As usual, with this new version, I have released the package for Nokia 770. Download it here. Don't forget to install libgnomeprintui too.

Unfortunately, I can not see a solution to show the application icon in Maemo task switcher. So please don't minimize Gnumeric window. If you do it you will have to kill Gnumeric explicitly using X Terminal or Load Applet.

This Gnumeric release "include numerous function fixes, fixes for a number of crashes and improved compatibility with Excel's functions, in particular for string functions." See the release notes.

Evince 0.5.0 is out...

... and so is the package for Nokia 770 :). Download it here. The package was built with pixbuf support. It means that now you can also see image files (png, jpg, etc) using Evince.

See the Evince Release Notes.

The patch with the necessary modifications to make evince run in maemo platform can be found at gnome bugzilla.

Enjoy!