Evince now available in extras repositories

After digging for some remaining bugs and helped a lot by Nickolay Shmyrev, Evince maintainer, I was finally able to release the packages for N800 and 770. They are already available in both bora (N800) and gregale (770) extras repositories. Here are the direct links to the .install files:

• N800


• 770

In my opinion, Evince fits perfectly as replacement for the built-in PDF reader. Please report here any issues, specially about performance. We are now using libcairo as backend for rendering PDFs in libpoppler. Thanks to the great work done by cairo gurus we could replace the splash backend used in the previous versions of the package.

Enjoy it!!

My talk at GUADEC

Last tuesday morning, while checking my mail, I saw this message with the subject "GUADEC Proposal accepted":

Hi,

Congratulations -- your talk was accepted for the Core days at GUADEC.
To see the current schedule, go to http://www.guadec.org/schedule/core.

We look forward to seeing you at GUADEC!

Woot!! I wasn't expecting to get my proposal accepted in the core days. My talk will be about the experience of porting GNOME applications to the Maemo platform. I'm really looking forward to meeting the guys that make GNOME rock the world. Thanks to Ross and the GUADEC crew.

Check the GUADEC core days schedule and my proposal.

Evince 0.8.1

Earlier this week, I uploaded some very special packages to the maemo extras repository. After playing around a little bit more, I've come with this very special program running in my N800:



"Great!", you can say, but "Evince already runs on N800.". Yes, you're right. The news here are that libpoppler is using cairo backend and Evince version is 0.8.1, the latest stable released by Evince developers.



There are still some bugs to fix before it can be released, but I can say it performs really well in the N800. I haven't been able to test it in the 770, where performance is more critical.

Leafpad 0.8.10

After some failures in the upgrade process, I've finally got my laptop successfully running ubuntu feisty and scratchbox 1.0.7 with maemo rootstraps installed yesterday. At night I decided to do a real test in the environment building the latest version of Leafpad for the N800 device. It took me more time than I was expecting but in the end everything went just fine.

I've just uploaded the packages to the Maemo extras repository, both to N800 and 770. This way you can install it with a single click:

• N800 install file



• 770 install file

I was very pleased to see it's being somehow useful when Jean-Luc told me it is the default editor used by claws-mail.

My N800 has arrived!

Today morning Osvaldo arrived from FISL 8.0 bringing lots of news and a very special gift, my own Nokia N800 Internet Tablet which I've been trying to put my hands on since I received the email from the Maemo team telling me I was one of the lucky 500 people who got discount codes. For us living in Brazil is very very difficult and expensive to buy any of these gadgets like the N800. If it wasn't the code, I couldn't buy it so soon.

Huge thanks go to the Maemo crew, specially Quim Gil and Lucas Rocha who brought the device straight from Finland and also to John (J5) Palmieri for spending so much of his time trying to buy me the device.

I could not forget to thank INdT for sponsoring big part of the applications I've ported to the Nokia 770. Without that, I might never had the chanve of getting the discount code.

Until now, I've not played with it very much. I've just downloaded and installed the new firmware image, the plankton theme and some applications. I'll start to work again on the ports as soon as possible, always trying to get the latest upstream versions working.

Now I need to find out some space in my budget to buy a wireless router and at least one 4 GB (8 GB maybe?) SD card. Any suggestions?? :)

I'm Back Online

Wow, it's been almost two months since my last post... There have been many happenings in this period which I have written about but were not published. The posts were saved in my drafts just waiting to be blogged. What happened is since I moved to a new apartment, about 5 weeks ago, I had been fighting with my DSL provider trying to have my link working here. Now that it's finally up, I'll be able to publish those posts here:

• Status of CarMan code refactoring


• Moving to the new apartment


• Bossa Conference


• GUADEC presentation


• My own N800


• N800 ports

Lots of news coming. Stay tunned. :)