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Maemo @ GSoC 2010: Accepted Projects

2010-04-28T12:28:00.003-03:00

Last Monday, Google announced the list of accepted projects for the Summer of Code Program. Like last year, Maemo has got 10 slots. As Valério said in a previous post, we received about 90 submissions this year, which made the task of selecting the best proposals much more difficult. Many thanks to all people involved on the selection process. :)

Enough talk. Here is the list (in no particular order, just copied and pasted the contents of the wiki page):

Porting Canola to Maemo 5 and beyond
Student: Andrei Mirestean (andrei1089)
Mentor: Eduardo Lima (etrunko)

FaceBrick - a facebook client for Maemo / the N900
Student: Kamilla Bremeraunet (brik)
Mentor: Robin Burchell (w00t)

UPnP Remote Access
Student: Sunil Kumar Ghai
Mentor: Zeeshan Ali

The Tablet of Adventure: a location-based social adventure
Student: Susanna Huhtanen
Mentor: Henri Bergius (bergie)

Extending Shepherd
Student: Linus Wallgren (ecksun)
Mentor: Attila Csipa (achipa)

eBook reader for Maemo 5
Student: Juhana Jauhiainen
Mentor: Valerio Valerio (VDVsx)

Gtk+ Input Method for the Harmattan Input Method UI Framework
Student: Javier De San Pedro Martin
Mentor: Mohammad Dhani Anwari

Transifex mobile
Student: Lauri Vosandi (v6sa)
Mentor: Thomas Perl (Thp)

Optical Page Reader for the N900
Student: David Jordan
Mentor: Florian Boor (Florian)

MeeGo Cloud Storage Integration
Student: Eli Foley
Mentor: Yan Li

Congratulations to all accepted students! Some of them already had worked on projects related to Maemo on GSoC last year. In either case would be really cool to post a small introduction about yourself and the project you will work on during the next months. If you have a blog, request it to be syndicated on Planet Maemo.

For those whose projects were not accepted, and still think it is worth to work on it, you are be more than welcome. Although there won't be any assigned mentor, I am sure you can find help on the mailing lists.

Leaving INdT...

2010-03-10T16:00:00.001-03:00

I've been cooking this post for a couple of weeks, but due to many reasons, I was not able to publish it; until now.

Since Feb 19th, I have left my job at INdT. I remember as if it was yesterday. Almost 5 years ago, I was moving from the Central region of Brazil to the Northeast, 2.500 km away from home, in search of new challenges in my professional career and also in my personal life. I was leaving a very good job in the technical center of one of the biggest (if not the biggest) bank in Brazil to try something new and very exciting.

The proposal was to join a selected group of highly skilled people, whose task was to ramp up an arm of Nokia here in Brazil, focused on research and development, which I had never heard about before. That was how I met the Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia, or simply, INdT. The thing that really caught my attention was the possibility to work directly with FOSS, while getting very well paid for that. What could ever be possibly better than that? ;)

By the time, besides of being a Linux user at home and having programmed using Open Source Software since the college, I had never actually contributed any single piece of code, documentation, translation or whatever, to an upstream project. Mostly because I had not yet understood the actual dynamic of developing software in the open. I was simply afraid of what was waiting for me on that corner.

I think those were new seas for INdT as well. Some of the guys that joined by that time, already had prior experience on the area, but a big part of us didn't. For this, and many other reasons, every day at the office was a different, joyful and exciting learning experience about the FOSS universe. That is something I am very thankful for.

As it happens very often with any company, it is necessary to make important decisions and focus on given areas. Unfortunately, and important to say, in my very own point of view, I realized that my piece of contribution to INdT had already been given. I really hope that it was useful somehow.

Time has come to find new opportunities, motivations and challenges in both professional and personal life. I'd like to thank very much and wish all the best to everyone I had the opportunity to work with during all this time. See you around!

Canola on the N900

2009-09-02T10:06:00.005-03:00

Hey there. I've been extremely busy working on a very important project which is driving me and almost half of our crew mad. :P

Although it is true that the development of Canola is happening in a very slow pace, it doesn't mean that we have left the development behind. Actually many interesting things have happened lately, including of the closing of Google Summer of Code program. My very special thanks to all the people involved, students, mentors and administrators.

Coming back to the subject of this post, now that the new device is officially launched and all its features have been widely discussed all over the internet, I can share with you these pictures I've been holding for a while: Canola running on the N900.

It's still early work in progress and it is quite unstable, but I must say that it runs very smoothly, almost compared to Canola running on a regular computer. And it fits very well with the reduced size of the N900 screen.

It took me a lot of work to push all the dependencies to the extras-devel repository, always keeping in mind the backwards compatibility with Chinook and Diablo. We're still missing the proper package for Canola itself, because I wanted to make sure that it really worked before pushing it to the repositories. So, thanks to all the python goodness, it was just a matter of copying the source tree to the device and running it from the X Terminal. :D

Now back to work.

A Bunch of Updates

2009-06-18T14:56:00.002-03:00

Warning! Long long post ahead!

Well, I was supposed to post news here more often, but it's been quite impossible to do it due to the day to day work. Bullet point to the rescue!!!

Google Summer of Code

Thanks to Valério who arranged everything, Maemo has got 10 slots in this year edition of Google Summer of Code. We received very good proposals for projects, but I never expected as much interest in Canola as we got in the end: 5 out of 10 projects are related to Canola. We'll surely have great results by the end of the program in August.

Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend

The hackfest was really great. The idea of gathering together the main Firefox add-ons developers to get them ported to Fennec and the developers of Fremantle Stars at first seemed a bit weird in my point of view, but in the end it proved its worth. My travel was ok, but I felt really confused because of the jetlag. I only managed to get used to the timezone in Lisbon, during my trip back to Brazil.

The IT University is a wonderful place, and the architecture of the building is just stunning.

The opening party on Friday was a great opportunity to meet the already known and new faces. I could take part on some good discussions about Free Software, mobile devices, traveling, and many other things I can't remeber by now.

In the way back to the hotel we realized how fun can it be to get a train in Copenhagen after having drunk some beers.

It felt like we were traveling through time. Niels could express it better :D.

Saturday morning after a quick kick-off by Quim and William, we had a track with presentations related to Mozilla. Time for the Maemo guys, myself included, to start working on their projects. I managed to get together with 3 of the 5 students that are participating in this year edition of Google Summer of Code: Andrey Popelo (Remember the Milk plugin), Andrei Mirestean (Picasa plugin), Lauri Võsandi (Bittorrent plugin).

In the afternoon it was time of the Maemo track. We had very interesting talks: The first one about the new version of the platform and device. Quim showed us a development prototype unit and it seems really promising. Can't wait to see the final product. After that, quick presentations about the Fremantle Stars and a presentation about Canola, where I made the announcement about the exception in the GPLv3 that we adopted targeting new opportunities of adoption of our software.

During my presentation I also demoed the new version of Canola, yet to be released, and the students working on the GSoC projects introduced themselves and their projects to the attendees. In the end of the talk, I presented some rough plans of the points we expect to work on for the near future.

After my talk, we had the last two presentations about the awesome Mer project. :)

On Sunday we were able to hack almost all day long. It was quite productive and I could help the students a bit and fix some nasty bugs in Canola and plugins. I also kicked off the work of porting the EFL packages to Fremantle, thanks to Jeremiah's valuable tips.

It was a great event, thanks to everyone who worked to make it happen and also to Nokia/Mozilla for sponsoring my travel and accommodation. I really hope to be able to attend the Maemo Summit later this year in Amsterdam. :)

FISL

That's what has keeping me busy lately. There are about 15 people from INdT going to Porto Alegre to attend the tenth edition of the Fórum Internacional de Software Livre (FISL). I'll give a talk about Canola and how it can be extended to bring new experiences to the users. Some guys from Qt Software are coming to FISL as well, and we're helping them to arrange everything with their booth.

We are also organizing a challenge where the winner will receive a N810 Internet Tablet, Nokia Bluetooth Speakers and one week stay in Recife for a training on the latest Qt technologies which we're helping to develop.

Canola

After the Mozilla/Maemo hackfest I started to work on the new release of Canola and consequently, EFL. At the moment we already have the core packages uploaded and working. Unfortunately I wasn't able to start working on the Python packages yet. Hope to start them on next week after we finish the arrangements for FISL. More to come soon. ;)

The N900 Internet Tablet?

2009-05-25T19:32:00.005-03:00

Again, some late news, but I thought it would be of interest of the readers of Planet Maemo. This post in MobileCrunch reveals a lot of details, including release dates, of the so expected next generation of Internet Tablets.

If I understood correctly, by reading the article you'll see the most unexpected and exciting news, which is of course, the cellular voice, which turns the N900 in the first phone by Nokia running Linux. How cool is that? Now the oFono.org launch makes perfect sense.

More links:

Engadget
Discussion thread on Talk

UPDATE: Boy Genius Report points to CellPassion which shows a lowres photo of the new tablet:

Maemo GSoC: Deadline for students applications approaching

2009-04-03T00:35:00.000-03:00

This is just to remember the students interested in participating in this year edition of Google Summer of Code that the deadline for submitting new proposals is today (Friday, April 3rd) at 19:00 UTC. If you want to develop a project related to the best software platform for mobile devices out there ;), becoming part of this exciting community and after all earn some money with it, this is your last chance. (At least until next edition of GSoc).

We have already received more than 30 project proposals, some of them very well written and complete. High quality stuff that may soon will be available for all Internet Tablet users.

Thanks to everyone involved in this effort, especially Valerio and all other guys that are willing to mentor the projects. Let's make Maemo rock this summer!

Looks familiar?

2009-04-01T17:40:00.005-03:00

As seen on Engadget Mobile:

This is the new phone by LG, named GD900, first presented in Barcelona during the Mobile World Congress in February. By the time, they only did not have pictures showing the UI, only the piece of hardware with that shiny transparent keyboard.

But let's take a closer look on the UI, especially the icons:

The UI is named S-Class, and it is kind of familiar to me. You still didn't get it?? Let me help.

Did we influence the design? Hard to say, but who cares? :) I prefer to think so. This is a sign of the wonderful work of our design team. Thanks so much Patrícia and Marcelo. She had a nice presentation about the disturbing relationship between designers and developers during Bossa Conference this year. She even gives some examples of how things were decided during the development of Canola. A must see.

By the way, this is how the Canola main menu looks like from now on. If you've already downloaded and installed the software you may have noticed it. In fact we want to know the opinion of the users, if they prefer this kind of approach, with one access to all plugins or the other one, with categories for the plugins. Please post it in the comments.

Thanks Marcelo for pointing this out (via twitter).

Canola is free!

2009-03-23T18:45:00.001-03:00

I'm pleased to announce that I've just closed bug #3881, which means that from now on Canola and all its components are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

The source code of the former closed-source packages, Atabake, Download Manager, Terra and Canola, has been uploaded to our gitorious server a few hours ago.

The canola-devel mailing list for developers is already set up and working on garage. Everyone is very welcome to join us in the development of the project. For documentation, such as installation instructions, build dependency, and so on, I'm setting up a wiki that should go online by the end of this week under the openbossa.org domain.

With all this, Canola officially leaves the beta status. The packages of for the final 2.0.0 version will be uploaded soon, together with brand new Maemo-EFL.

Last, I'd like to thank everyone for supporting the project even before the very first release and especially for providing feedback on the various releases we had since December 2007. If today we were able to release Canola as Free Software, consider yourself responsible for it as well.

Bossa '09 videos

2009-03-18T17:47:00.003-03:00

Another edition of Bossa Conference finished and it was great as usual. I must admit I was really tired by the end of the event mainly because I had to switch between recording the presentations and actually preparing my talk.

One great thing is that Glaubert prepared a presentation template using the new maemo.org logo/style and I was able to use it in the slides. I promissed to Andrew I would start a new page on maemo wiki and upload the images I used so we could have an unified template for anyone to use it. (Haven't had the proper time/mood to do it yet though. :P)

So, back to the subject of this post, we recorded all presentations given during the event. Actually some of them are already available at blip.tv in the openBossa show page. Many many thanks to the guys that helped me somehow on this tough task. You know who you are! It would not be possible to do it without your help.

I'm still working on importing/converting/editing the remaining videos but you can already watch some of them.

Don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed so you can get automatic updates in your favorite feed aggregator as soon as new videos become available.

Maemo @ Bossa '09

2009-03-03T15:10:00.003-03:00

A year has already passed since the last edition of Bossa Conference and this years edition will happen in only a few days from now. Woohooo! I just can't wait for it to start.

Following the tendency of the previous editions, this year agenda brings a mix of many different subjects around the development of FOSS for mobile devices, from the basic platform components to the bling brought by the modern application development frameworks. Highlights: Kernel, Connectivity, Python, Qt, Webkit, Security, Enlightenment, Licensing, UI Design and Maemo.

Regarding Maemo, we'll have three presentations about it. Kate Alhola will give us a glimpse of the features of Freemantle with some live demos. Raul Herbster will talk about development for Maemo using the ESBox and Pluthon plugins for Eclipse. Definitely cool stuff. And finally, myself, for the first time presenting in Bossa Conference.

I will be wearing my hat as a member of the Maemo Community Council and my talk will focus on the Maemo Community, answering some questions such as: Who forms the community? What is it for? Why do we need the community? How to get involved? This is also the first time I'm presenting something on a non-technical subject and I hope to do it well.

I'm also trying to get some colleagues involved in the organization this year so we can get the presentations recorded on video and hopefully uploaded to the openBossa channel on youtube. Rock on!

VMWare for Mobile

2009-02-26T16:42:00.005-03:00

Just in case you haven't seen it yet, I'll post the video here so it get aggregated in Planet Maemo. Yesterday at VMworld conference, VMware's CTO demoed the mobile virtualisation platform, using a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. The video shows it running Windows CE and Android virtual machines at the same time with impressive performance. Check it out:

If you can't see the video, just click here.

More information in ITPro (here and here), also in Gizmodo and WindowsForDevices.

New Releases

2009-02-12T22:07:00.005-03:00

If you've been following the updates in extras-devel repository you might have already noticed that we've been working on the new releases of the Maemo EFL stack together with Canola and Carman. Important to say, now that we have more applications (FTW!) depending on the core Enlightenment libraries we need to ensure that the upgrade won't break anything.

Anyway, it's unbelievable what Raster and the guys from E can do in order to optimize things. They are real freaks (in the good way)! Each and every new version released we have noticeable improvements in our user interfaces. And this time it wasn't different. You'll find the animations in Canola in Carman a lot snappier.

So, what's new in Canola?

Updated to latest revision of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

Videocasts support

Allow user to reset database

New configuration options added

Entire albums or directories can now be added to the OnTheGo playlist

New simple grid available for the Photos screen

Load images asynchronously, r

User can choose to scan for new media on startup

Fixed album cover discovery

Indicator of which music is being played in the list view

Improvements in Ogg and FLAC scanners

Improved feedback while scanning media, fetching album covers and generating video thumbnails

Bug fixes and optimizations

Pretty names in application manager

Canola theme maker. This is something that certainly deserves an exclusive post.

Yet to be released:

Home applet, where you can launch Canola and scan for new media, just like the good ol' Canola1. The code is ready, it's just a matter of providing the packages for it.

Source code!!! Yay!! Can't wait to close maemo bug #3881.

What about Carman??

Another topic for an exclusive post. Must sleep now. :)

Contacts on Ovi Released (Also for Maemo)

2009-01-27T12:20:00.001-03:00

I've just read on the Nokia Betalabs blog that the formerly known Nokia Chat application has been renamed to Contacts on Ovi. What really surprised me is to know that there is a version available for the Internet Tablets since last October. I have not been able to test it yet, but it seems that it is simply a plugin for the Accounts program which enables the user to register his Ovi account and start chatting.

In the FAQ page it is also noticeable that you can register your Ovi account as a standard Jabber/XMPP account in other instant messaging clients such as Pidgin and Adium.

To download the package, just point the browser of your tablet to this address or download it directly form here.

Show me the code!

2009-01-26T01:11:00.006-03:00

As part of my job at INdT, I was responsible for providing a unified solution for hosting the source code for our open source projects, such as QEdje, Carman and the yet to become free, Canola, amongst others.

There was only one major requirement: Git as our VCS. Of course we could simply provide a server with access for writing restricted for a few selected users and running gitweb for anyone interested in following the development of the projects.

We had already tried this approach with our projects internally, but it had proven to become visually a mess as the number of projects and users grow along time. Also, the amount of time spent with the server administration was really bothering many of us.

Enter Gitorious

Back in September, when some of our colleagues came back from a trip to Oslo, Norway, where they worked for a couple in collaboration with Qt Software guys, they brought with them lots of fresh and great ideas on how to improve our own processes.

One of these ideas was to make use of Gitorious as a tool for managing our git repositories. I had already used gitorious before, during the 2008 edition of Google Summer of Code, when I co-mentored a student in the implementation of bluez-python. One thing I didn't know though is that Gitorious itself is a Free Software project and its source code is available in the very own website.

Artur and Caio worked hard to setup an instance of Gitorious running on our internal server. We started using it for a few selected projects experimentally, and in a couple of months all of them had been moved to the brand new host. In time, this is just one the countless advantages of Git (and maybe others DVCS) over a centralized VCS. It was just a matter of adding a new remote and pushing the repository to it.

With Gitorious I was able to have contact with a completely new world in the Computer Science universe (at least for me): Web development. It is written in Ruby over the Rails Framework. At a first glance, everything looked awfully weird, from the language syntax to the Rails ways of doing things. It took me considerable time to get used to them, but I could successfully adapt the code to our needs.

You can see the final result in http://code.openbossa.org. As it can be easily noticed, we have created just a few projects there, but the idea, as already stated, is to move all of our Free and Open Source Software projects to this new server as soon as possible. Notice that the site is not meant for openBossa/INdT employees exclusively. If you want to contribute to one of the existing projects over there, it is just a matter of getting in contact with the owner of the project and try to convince him you deserve an account. Even better, if you have a developed something related to one of our own projects, such as a Canola plugin, we are more than happy to host it. :)

Ogg Support on Canola2

2008-05-20T23:00:00.003-03:00

With Canola2 beta9 finally out, people have asked about the ogg support for Canola. Well, let me first try to clarify things a bit: ogg support actually has not much to do with Canola itself, but more with lightmediascanner.

In our architecture, the component responsible for scanning the media, amongst other things, is canola deamon (canolad for short). Canola daemon is Free software, released under the GPL license since its very first version. You can get the source with a simple apt-get source command.

When the user marks a folder as "scannable" on the "Media Folder" section in canola settings, it will call canola daemon to add that folder to the list of folders it will have to scan. Canolad then invokes ligthmediascanner (lms for short) which will scan for media on those folders.

LMS makes use of a very clever plugin architecture implementation, where each plugin is responsible for gathering metadata from that specific type of file it was developed for. So far there are implementations for asf, flac, id3, jpeg, m3u, mp4, ogg, pls, png and rm files. Dummy implementations for audio and video files will index files of given file extensions.

The ogg plugin was making use of libvorbis, which provides the reference implementation for the standard, but it was not being installed by Tuomas' packages. At this moment I sent him an email asking if it would be possible to have the package installed on the device. He then said it was perfectly feasible, but not advisable, as the implementation makes heavily use of floating point operations. Everybody knows how floating point operations perform on our target platform. And it doesn't really fit our purposes.

Tuomas suggested that LMS ogg plugin should make use of libvorbisidec, also known as Tremor, which was specially implemented taking into account those performance problems of floating point operations on embedded devices. It provides a fixed-point implementation for the Vorbis decoder.

At first glance, I thought it would be a really trivial task. With a few modifications in the configure.ac file, the ogg plugin would link against libvorbisidec and everything should just work! And of course I was so very wrong... I first spotted some severe bugs in the lms ogg plugin which were causing segfaults. Having those fixed was the easiest part.

The most difficult thing was to find out after some time digging that libvorbis and libvorbisidec implementations are not compatible at all. Only after that I could be able to end up with the final solution for the problem. You can now build lightmediascanner with ogg support using either the regular vorbis or tremor implementations.

With LMS now being able to scan and index ogg files, I came back to Tuomas and provided the patch that creates ogg-support-lightmediascanner meta package, which will install both ogg-support and lms ogg plugin as dependencies.

No change in the canola side was needed, since the whole work of decoding and playing ogg files was already being done by ogg-support packages provided by Tuomas. Big kudos to Tuomas and his hard work and as well to Gustavo for reviewing and pushing my patches for LMS to mainstream.

Install it now and enjoy!

Canola2 Youtube Plugin Updated

2008-04-24T15:29:00.003-03:00

Yesterday I uploaded a new version of the Canola2 Youtube plugin to maemo extras repository. Youtube has changed the way it references the .flv file, breaking the way we were dealing with it. Kudos to Adriano who's been doing an excelent job maintaining the plugin.

As usual, the source code is available in the Canola2 website and in the Maemo extras repository as well.

Please update your installation by clicking on "Check for updates" button in the Application manager. Big thanks to everyone who reported the issue on our tracker.

Android Running on N810

2008-04-07T16:35:00.002-03:00

Really exciting news!! This wiki page on eLinux.org describes with details the instructions for running Google's Android on OMAP based platforms, such as the Nokia Internet Tablets. There are also threads on Android Internals and Linux OMAP mailing lists.

Some pictures taken from the wiki page:

Long time no post

2008-03-25T14:30:00.002-03:00

It's been quite a long time with not even a update in my blog. Shame on me!!! Since last December, lots of things happened and if I tried to tell everything, you would be surely bored to death. So here goes some highlights of the last 3 1/2 months:

Canola2

We're now on the version 7 of the beta series and we're working really hard to release the final version, which should come really soon. Besides the name "beta" it is pretty much stable and in each new version released it becomes better and better. Many thanks to the users who provided useful feedback (specially on ITT forums) and to Marcelo, who is being patient enough to provide the answers to almost all users questions.

I have been maintaining the packages for both Canola2 and the Maemo port of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries for each and every one of the Nokia Internet Tabled devices and ITOS releases, not including ITOS2005 here. It has been a very time consuming task and I have not been able to code much since then.

We've opened the gates for 3rd part plugins releasing the youtube plugin for Canola2. It's only in its very first version and users seems to like it a lot. The source code is availabe under the GPLv3 and can be used as base for development on new plugins. The next one in the line is the last.fm plugin.

New themes were released and the source code for them are going to be released as well.

Toys

Found a 1GB iPod shuffle *inside* an ice cream. Literally.

Sold my old car, a Fiat Palio (1998 year) and bough a Peugeot 307 (2002 year), previously owned by Renato Filho. All I can say is it was a great acquisition. I'm very happy with it. By the way, Renato bought a newer Fiat Palio (2004 year) but I'm not pretty sure if Renato can tell the same though. :)

Got a Nokia N95 phone and gave my N73 to my girlfirend. Another huge improvement here. How could I live until now with a phone without WiFi and GPS integrated?

Bought my Nokia N810 with the discount code I got back in November. Many thanks to Hallyson and Tapani who brought me the device from Finland straight to Brazil.

Bossa Conference '08

It was a really great conference this year. If last year was good, this one was even better! We had some high level talks and lots of free time to meet and talk to the guys about problems of using new technologies in mobile devices and possible solutions for them. I really enjoyed Clutter, Webkit and PulseAudio talks among others. Congratulations to the organization crew who worked hard to make it happen.

I took some pictures with my N95 and uploaded them to my flickr account. The photos are basically from the after hours parties and can be seen on this set.

Google Summer of Code 2008

I'm willing to help the BlueZ and Enlightenment guys by mentoring projects in this edition of GSoC. More details on this subject later.

Geeks!

2007-12-11T11:12:00.001-03:00

56 geeks poster complete
Originally uploaded by ExtraLife

View the complete set.

Packaging Madness

2007-12-10T13:24:00.000-03:00

We're running against the clock to get the Canola 2 release ready by the 12th. It has been a week since I'm working on providing the proper debian packages for all the dependencies, so the installation process can be as smooth as possible. After having coded a ~~monster~~ script that automatically builds and signs the Maemo-EFL packages (including sources) for Gregale, Bora and Chinook on both x86 and armel targets, I started to upload the packages to the extras-devel repository.

If you follow the maemo-efl-devel mailing list, you may have noticed an unusual traffic on the past few days. If you don't follow that list, I strongly discourage you to do it. Things will only get worse until Wednesday, when the final packages will be uploaded to the extras repository.

But it is not just building the packages. We also need to test them to ensure they're working on the devices. As you can see in the picture above, packages for Bora and Chinook are OK, but the Gregale ones aren't. Time to go back to work and figure out what I'm doing wrong...

Canola 2.0 running on Nokia 770

2007-11-29T16:50:00.000-03:00

A while ago we were curious about how would be the performance of the new version of Canola running on a Nokia 770 device. After a whole day building packages and compiling stuff, our mate Renato Chencarek was finally able to make it run on the device. We thought it also deserved a video, just like others we posted.

It's a Nokia 770 device running OS2006 (gregale) and you can see it performs surprisingly well! Actually, it feels like the performance is better than on N800/N810. As we don't have that damn tearing effect, you can see the UI elements just move smoothly. Unfortunately, the screen is not as sensitive as the N800 or N810, so some tasks like dragging and panning will demand more effort than in the other devices.

Reinteract News

2007-11-15T00:10:00.000-03:00

It seems lots of people got interested in Reinteract. Owen Taylor has started a new project page and integrated the patches people sent him. Guess what? The maemo patch was integrated to the branch master as well. It was slightly different from the first patch I provided in my previous post since I had forgotten to add support for hildon file chooser dialogs. We also agreed provide a way for the user to select which UI to run, the standard or the hildon one.

I was able to run Reinteract in a N800 device and it performs really well. In a small talk I had with Osvaldo and Luciano, they showed interest to provide packages for Reinteract in next PyMaemo releases. Great news!

By the way, I have to say: Python rocks! Git rocks even more!

Reinteract on Maemo

2007-11-11T14:37:00.000-03:00

I followed a couple of posts today in Planet Gnome and read about Reinteract. This project is freaking awesome!!! Watch the screencast. It worths every minute. Reinteract is something that fits like a glove in Maemo. I've started playing with it a bit and a few minutes later I got something really interesting:

Wooohooo!!! The patch is really small, about 60 lines. I have not tested it a real device, but it should perform well. Any one would like to try??

Ubuntu Cola

2007-11-11T11:55:00.000-03:00

It seems the OS wars has been reaching new levels. After Windows Vista soft drink, we have also Ubuntu Cola.

More pictures on Flickr.

Maemo Chinook SDK Final Released

2007-11-09T14:41:00.000-03:00

I've just read in the Maemo site news The final Chinook SDK has been released, what means the N810 device is shopping in the next weeks. I haven't noticed it in the moment I received the email about the N810 discount program. Great news!!! I have already downloaded and installed the rootstraps which can be found here.

Personally, I prefer a manual installation, so it's just a matter of creating and setting up new targets, downloading the i386 and armel rootstraps, run a couple of simple apt-get commands and you're done.

We already have the new version of Canola running on Chinook. It is unbelievable how beautiful and delightful the new UI feels, thanks to our design team, which has been doing an excellent job. I can say it brings a totally new concept and you'll certainly enjoy it *A LOT*. We'll bring other hot news about Canola really soon!

Meanwhile, I encourage everybody to try to learn how to develop applications using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, specially Evas and Edje.

N810 maemo submission accepted

2007-11-09T13:57:00.000-03:00

N810 maemo submission accepted

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device
program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the
device is available in your selected shop (soon).

Thanks Nokia!!! I can't wait to receive the discount code!

Maemo - code in your hands

2007-11-06T16:54:00.001-03:00

Maemo - code in your hands
Originally uploaded by Setanta!

Trying Chinook

2007-10-24T19:49:00.000-03:00

We can't have one of those cool N810 yet, but we're already able start developing/porting applications to the new API. Renato kicked off the ball and updated the Abiword patch to make it compatible and also removed the code which used so long deprecated HildonApp and HildonAppView API. Some days ago I set up the Chinook SDK environment and decided to start with something simple or, in other words, Leafpad.

Packages coming soon.

Linux is everywhere

2007-09-20T16:16:00.000-03:00

Linux chair on sale for R$ 169,00. I wonder if it includes the source code. :P

QoTD: Michael Mace

2007-09-12T09:49:00.000-03:00

Nokia's phones often appear as if their hardware and software were designed by completely different groups and slapped together at the last minute (because, in many cases, that's exactly what happened).

Advised by Marcelo, I've just read Michael Mace's post about the imminent "war" between Nokia and Apple. It's really worth reading.

Gnome-Mobile

2007-09-03T16:26:00.000-03:00

Daniel sent us the following image of a product he found in Amazon:

Link for the IMDB entry.

Capoeira Videos

2007-08-24T11:00:00.000-03:00

I recorded these videos yesterday at the gym using the camera of my N73. They had the baptism and belt change ceremony, which is, for those of you who don't know about capoeira, the equivalent to graduation exams in any other martial art.

New stuffs

2007-08-22T16:59:00.000-03:00

Here it goes another post with various topics and bullet lists. I realized I really appreciate this style of writing.

Project

As Kenneth already posted, I've joined the Canola team since last week. I'll be working mainly in the infra structure code, dealing with ETK. It's API is quite similar to GTK+ but it's far far away in terms of maturity. I'm still getting used to it and I already have some ideas to improve it.

Cellphone

After two years, I decided it was time to replace my good ol' Nokia 6170 cellphone. Besides being a very good device, solid (and heavy) as a rock, it lacks of some features considered basic nowadays, such as bluetooth and expandable memory. So I bought myself a brand new Nokia N73 phone. I've not even got the chance to explore all its features yet, but the very first thing I got impressed is the quality of the pictures taken with this phone.
Plush penguins

During my trip to europe to attend GUADEC, I had the opportunity to buy another four penguins for my collection. One was a talking Pingu and the other one was that crazy Mexican penguin from the happy feet movie, called Ramon. The other two I bought at Lisbon Oceanarium shop. I'm now getting afraid there won't be room over my desk for the ones I may buy.

Hackergotchi

Thanks to Hub, I've got a new hackergotchi from the picture he took at a pub in Birminghan. After clicking that special "I'm feeling lucky" button in Picasa and some Gimp work here is the result:

300

2007-08-14T09:39:00.000-03:00

From this day on, I'll never play Wii Sports Bowling anymore.

Thanks Vivi for playing as my sparring. :)

Maemo related news

2007-08-13T22:17:00.000-03:00

There are guys at INdT who have been doing wonderful jobs but they still don't have their blogs syndicated in any planet. This way, I thought it was a good idea to have a post with some interesting news and links:

LLVM performance tests

Lauro has been working on the ARM backend of LLVM for quite some time. It's been a year since the backend was included in the project. After lots of improvements, tests and bug fixes, it's now possible to compile complex programs and libraries.

Lauro has just started his blog and has already published quite impressive results of tests comparing programs built with GCC and LLVM. I just can't wait for whole distro built with LLVM. :)

Hildon bindings for Vala

Marcelo Lira (aka setanta) introduced this brand new language called Vala for us some time ago. He's been posting about it since then, including the following diagrams illustrating the basic differences between Mono and Vala.

Mono

Vala

Vala bindings are growing really fast. One of the latest additions were the Hildon bindings Marcelo has provided. It's approaching the day we won't need to code GObjects in plain C anymore.

Maemo SDK Applicance

Marcelo Lira (again) has published a cool screencast of Maemo SDK appliance running. The video is on YouTube but I'd recommend you to download the Ogg/Theora Version available in Maemo garage project page.

That's all folks! (At least for now). ;)

Yet another post on "Kinetic" scrolling

2007-07-30T16:26:00.000-03:00

Renato Filho has just uploaded a video to youtube showing the MokoFingerScrool object, developed by Chris Lord, integrated with his Maemo Myth application running on the N800 device. Cool stuff.

Cleaning the dust

2007-07-26T10:15:00.000-03:00

Time for some update in this blog. I've been trying to do this for quite some time, but I've been too busy and lazy to do it.

Carman

Last month I spent most of my time fixing a bunch of those small and annoying bugs in Carman that sooner or later block us from implementing new features and releasing our software. We released some release candidates and thanks to the feedback received from our users, we could release the final 0.6 version. Check the home page for installation instructions and links.

This new version is a complete rewrite, at least in the Hildon/GTK+ UI, in which we dropped all the use of Glade. Glade is a great tool when you're developing static windows, which is not the case of Carman. The resulting code was an huge mess. We now implement (a sort of) the Model View Controller design pattern which make things a lot easier to maintain. Of course there are many other improvements in the current code, specially in the performance. I'll keep blogging about it as soon as I get interesting things done.
GUADEC

It was not only the development on Carman that was keeping me away. I also had to prepare everything for my trip to Birmingham, UK to attend GUADEC this year. It was the very first time I participated and I regret I had not been in any other edition before.

At first I felt a little bit unease as I didn't know almost anyone personally, except for some guys that attended the Bossa Conference earlier this year. I found myself many times trying to associate the hackergotchis to the person and the work in the GNOME project. I still think some people should update their so they can be identified easier in those cases. Big thanks to Lucas for introducing me to most of the guys there. The GNOME people really rock!

We had seven intense days, loads of great talks, meetings and discussions about what is GNOME now and paths to follow towards a 3.0/4.0/Online/whatever version. I won't talk about this here as there are already lots of blog posts about it in planet GNOME.

In a point of view more focused on the Maemo platform, the conference was very productive as well. Some great news were announced there such as the first alpha version of Chinook, the new version of the communication software with SIP support and improved UI and the mozilla engine for the web browser. We also had many interesting talks about Maemo development and discussions on the GMAE subject. I had great chats with Nokia guys, specially Lucas and Quim about what can be done to improve the platform and open it more to the community.

My talk was quite good. The audience was small but we had a very interesting discussion in the end. During those crazy hack sessions at Etap Hotel I was able to build some dependency packages for GNOME applications that are coming soon.

I think it's enough for one single post. That's what happen when you don't blog for a while... I still have more to talk about, but lets just leave this for other posts.

Broken pipe

2007-06-19T15:36:00.000-03:00

It's been a while since a faucet in one of the restrooms of our office is broken. The water won't stop flowing until you pull the button up. Someone has had the brilliant idea to warn people about it:

Maemo Screenshots

2007-06-19T10:45:00.000-03:00

I'm quite often asked for screen shots of applications running on maemo, specially that ones I ported. In most of the cases, my bosses want to use them in presentations, but I always lose those images somehow. So every time I'm asked for them, I lose time searching for the old screen shots until I realize I've lost them and even more time taking/sending the images to whoever asked.

Tired of losing so much time, I've decided to reactivate my flickr account and use it for something a little bit more useful, satisfying mine needs and also my bosses. I've organized all screen shots in this photo set. Now, the next time I'm asked, all I have to do is to send this link and everybody is happy ever after.

I've also joined the maemo group on flickr and uploaded the shots there. It also worth saying that setting image descriptions/applying tags/uploading was very much easier using Ross' Postr. Really nice piece of software.

Maemo SDK Qemu Appliance

2007-06-05T23:03:00.000-03:00

Following the previous post about the Maemo SDK VMWare appliance, Marcelo has successfully converted the vmware image to a Qemu image. The good news here is we save almost 2 GB with this new image. The bad news is you'll probably need to set up Kqemu to get an acceptable performance.

So, to convert the vmware image to a qemu one, just run the following command:

$ qemu-img convert -c -f vmdk maemo-sdk.vmdk -O qcow maemo-sdk-2.qcow

And finally run it with:

qemu -boot c -hda maemo-sdk.qcow -localtime

Maemo SDK VMWare Appliance

2007-06-04T19:08:00.001-03:00

After a couple weeks of hard work, Marcelo (aka setanta) has successfully set up a VMWare Appliance for Maemo SDK. It's based on Xubuntu 7.04 and ships only the Maemo 3.1 (bora) targets. Gregale version (2.2) was not included in order to save some disk space.

Marcelo has also submitted a project in maemo garage. While it is not approved, you can download it from here.

Update: The project has been approved in maemo garage. Go for it!

Hero of the day

2007-05-04T12:06:00.000-03:00

Ross is my hero! He's just commited a patch to Evince which makes the use of libgnome opitional and fixed a bug opened more than a year ago. It will help *A LOT* to build the Maemo packages from now on. He also posted a screenshot of Evince running in Poky Linux:

With almost the same ideas of Poky, we're working very hard to provide a solution to Maemo-based Internet tablets. It's called Mamona, which I'll blog about later.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

2007-05-02T16:41:00.000-03:00

This number in hexadecimal notation has become so famous I thought it might deserve a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame:

Evince now available in extras repositories

2007-04-30T21:23:00.000-03:00

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

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

2007-04-28T12:14:00.000-03:00

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

2007-04-28T11:13:00.000-03:00

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

2007-04-20T16:11:00.000-03:00

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!

2007-04-16T22:31:00.000-03:00

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

2007-04-11T20:34:00.000-03:00

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. :)

CarMan

2007-02-13T17:58:00.000-03:00

Now it is time to talk about that python project I've been working for some time. Carman is a system for accessing on-board diagnostics of any car compliant with the OBD-II standard.

The project is Open Source, LGPL licensed and almost 100% written in python. Basically, it consists in three elements:

OBDlib:

Gtk+/Hildon UI:

SDL (PyGame) UI:

I'm already working on a complete refactoring of the GTK UI. The code is not too bad for my first python project, but it really can be improved a lot. The project is hosted at maemo garage. So, join the mailing lists and report bugs at will. More information can be found in the project web page.

gconf-editor update

2007-02-13T15:45:00.000-03:00

Today i took some time to finish the port of gconf-editor to the Maemo platform. This port was mainly done to help the guys working on Canola to set up the application preferences in an easy and straightforward way.

Gconf-editor is an extremely useful application, but it is not recommended to users that don't know what it is all about. So be careful while changing the configuration values. You've been warned. :)

So thanks to Andrunko for the initial debian package and Osvaldo who uploaded the packages to the extras repository. I'll create the entries in the new maemo application catalog page, but if you can't wait for it, the links for the .install files are the following:

For 770

For N800

The version is 2.16.0, and I still have to spend some more time on it to polish the patch and submit it to the main tree. But anyway, the source packages are also in the repository.

Finally, there go the screenshots:

Running on 770

Running on N800

Bossa Conference

2007-01-17T10:49:00.000-03:00

Last year, INdT started the effort of arranging and sponsoring a conference here in Brazil where would be possible to discuss and find ways to improve the many areas of Open Source Software targeting mobile systems and embedded devices. The idea was to cover as many areas as possible, from the kernel to the User Interface.

So finally the initial idea has turned into reality. The Bossa Conference will be held in Recife from the 12th to the 14th of March. People of many areas, such as bluetooth, VoIP and multimedia have already confirmed their participation in the event.

We are working really hard to make this first edition a huge success. If you got interested, please visit the Bossa Conference web site or drop an email to contact@bossaconference.org. I'm looking forward to meeting you here.

Python 2.5 for Maemo has been Released

2007-01-16T16:31:00.000-03:00

The INdT team has just announced the latest release of the Python language and bindings for the Maemo Platform. My colleagues have been worked really hard for quite some time to make the packages available and working for both Nokia 770 (Maemo 2.1 "Scirocco") and N800 (Maemo 3.0 "Bora") devices. The main features include:

Updated to Python 2.5 version of the core language

Updated bindings

Added bindings to new Hildon widgets (Maemo GTK+ extension widgets)

Improved bindings to OSSO library (access to Maemo-specific services)

Visit the project page at garage and the release notes page for instructions on how to install, convert the existing applications to use the new version and further information.

gconf-editor

2007-01-16T16:27:00.000-03:00

Yesterday I took some time to help the guys here porting a really useful application for 770/N800 devices. Hope to be able to release it soon. Scrennshot follows:

Applications on Nokia 770 and N800 Internet Tablets

2007-01-16T15:05:00.000-03:00

Now that the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is officially out, I took some time to test the applications I ported to the 770 on the new device. Some of them worked, some didn't and others didn't even install. Here is the list:

Gnumeric Spreadsheet: As far as I could see installed and worked fine. The gnumeric-plugins-extra package won't install due to the missing dependency of python2.4.

Evince: Didn't installed. The application manager couldn't some dependency package.

Xournal: Installed fine but didn't work at all. I have to check what is going on.

Leafpad: Installed and worked fine.

Games: All were installed and worked fine.

I have been receiving lots of e-mails and comments in my previous posts about new features in all these applications. So, I'd like to tell everyone that I'm reading and taking note of all requests you've done. Please apologize me for not answering all messages. It's been a really busy moment for me. Also, I would be glad to help anybody who want to implement those features.

So what are my plans?

Keep on releasing latest versions of each of the applications I've already ported and try to make them available for both Nokia 770 and N800 devices. This will be a really big challenge, as every day the dependency list of each application gets bigger and bigger. For example, cairo is not an optional dependency for Gnumeric anymore. So we have to be sure that there will not be too much impact in the performance.

Implement click-to-open functionality for the file types not recognized by the device. For example, open .xoj files automatically in Xournal just by clicking on it in the file manager. The same for other applications, like Gnumeric and Evince.

Help finishing Abiword port. Actually we're almost there. Tomas has already done most of the work but there is some weird crash happening.

Finish Rhythmbox port.

It would be really really great to get a Nokia N800 device for particular use. We do have some of them at our office, but they're shared between everybody here and meant to be used for work purposes only. As others have already requested, I and many others would like to see these devices available for purchase in other places than Europe and North America.

2006 Holidays and Vacation

2007-01-16T14:08:00.000-03:00

Last December, I took a two-week vacation near Christmas and traveled about 2500 km to my home city to visit my family and some old friends. It was raining *a lot* over there, so I could spend great moments with them and also take some rest (I really needed it). I hope I can come back there earlier this year.

Already missing my girlfriend, I was back to Recife for the new year party. So we took a 300 km trip by car to Pipa, in Rio Grande do Norte State. Great Time! Party all day and night long during three days...

New Year Party at Pipa Beach

Ok. That was enough for my vacation period. Next posts will be about my work, Maemo Platform and the brand new N800 device.

Getting Started with Python

2006-12-13T19:50:00.000-03:00

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!

2006-11-30T10:51:00.000-03:00

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

2006-11-23T11:47:00.000-03:00

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)

2006-11-22T15:28:00.000-03:00

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

2006-11-16T16:45:00.000-03:00

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!

2006-11-09T11:38:00.000-03:00

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

2006-11-03T20:31:00.000-03:00

It's hosted on YouTube. Go for it.

Some discussion can be found in Marcelo's blog.

Nokia 770 as a portable media center?

2006-11-01T18:25:00.000-03:00

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

2006-09-15T20:02:00.000-03:00

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

2006-09-11T12:56:00.000-03:00

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

2006-09-08T18:32:00.000-03:00

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

2006-09-08T14:38:00.000-03:00

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

2006-08-31T09:39:00.000-03:00

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

2006-08-24T18:02:00.000-03:00

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

2006-08-21T10:44:00.000-03:00

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

2006-08-18T11:45:00.000-03:00

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

2006-08-17T11:16:00.000-03:00

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

2006-08-16T21:20:00.000-03:00

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

2006-08-07T17:10:00.000-03:00

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!

2006-08-03T11:04:00.000-03:00

Pictures are worth more than 1000 words.

SIP with Tapioca

2006-07-28T15:32:00.000-03:00

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

2006-07-27T18:41:00.000-03:00

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

2006-07-21T18:29:00.000-03:00

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:

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

2006-07-19T16:24:00.000-03:00

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

2006-07-17T17:49:00.000-03:00

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!

2006-05-25T11:40:00.000-03:00

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

2006-03-24T14:47:00.000-03:00

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!

2006-03-20T19:46:00.000-03:00

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

About Tapioca

linphone

Tapioca Wiki

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?

Google Talk

libjingle

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

Coming up next....

2006-03-17T14:50:00.000-03:00

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

2006-03-13T13:43:00.000-03:00

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.

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$

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.

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$

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] >

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.

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

2006-03-03T09:20:00.000-03:00

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

2006-02-15T17:29:00.000-03:00

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

2006-02-10T08:57:00.000-03:00

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

2006-02-03T18:56:00.000-03:00

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

2006-02-01T20:15:00.000-03:00

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

2006-01-30T10:19:00.000-03:00

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...

2006-01-20T14:23:00.000-03:00

... 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!

Gnumeric Package for Nokia 770

2005-12-23T10:54:00.000-03:00

Hi folks,

I have just released the gnumeric package for Nokia 770, but unfortunately I can not say it is ready. I had a lot of trouble packing it and most of them were solved, but one (maybe the most) important issue is still pendent. The application does not appear in the task switcher. I tried many things to make it work, but my ideas are gone. I hope someone can help with this one. :) Another big deal is about the dialogs which are not ready either.

I will be traveling tomorrow on vacation for Christmas and New Year parties with my family. I will be back only in January 15th and probably no internet access during my vacation, but i will try to follow the news and answer all emails and comments about the packages.

Installation Instructions:

Download libgnomeprintui package here.

Download gnumeric package here.

Install libgnomeprintui first.

Finally, install Gnumeric.

Finally, I would like to thank very much Bo Granlund for the web space and wish everybody merry Christmas and a wonderful 2006. See you all next year!

P.S.: You can find evince package here.

New INdT Office in Recife

2005-12-13T10:52:00.000-03:00

Let's start where most of the novels start: The beginning. INdT office in Recife is less than one year old, we started to work in 2005 January at Porto Digital. For many reasons, specially infrastructure, we decided to move to another place and give time to people at Porto Digital fix the problems. So, since March, our office was being hosted by HQ. It is a very nice place, with big desks and the most comfortable chairs i have ever sit, but we were growing up in number and the space became more and more populated and in consequence, noisy. There was no physical space for anybody else but people did not stop to arrive. So early in September, we realized it was time to move on again.

For some reason our staff left the idea to come back to Porto Digital behind, and decided we should have our own space: a whole floor at the HQ neighbor building. Neat, it is much near my house (10 min walk) and physical space is huge. BUT, the place is still in reform. People are working hard to finish restrooms, meeting rooms, the main hall, there are several problems related to the network and various others.

I think we will be able to handle this little mess here, mostly because in two weeks we will be on a three weeks vacation and i hope to all these problems solved by the time we come back (January 16th). The only certain felling for sure is: "We all will miss those chairs."

New Version of Evince Package for Nokia 770

2005-12-07T21:36:00.000-03:00

After a long time trying to have a full functional, "all-in-one" (that includes all dependencies) and application installer ready Evince package for Maemo platform, i decided to change the plans.

Evince has by default two backends: One for PDF files, that uses libpoppler and the other one for PS files, using ghostscript. When the first package was released, i was not able to test the PS backend, and finally when i tested, it was not working at all.

So I started to study a way to have the PS backend working, an then i faced some important issues:

First: ghostscritpt depends on gsfonts package, and these fonts are registered in the system by defoma during the installation. Until now, everything was going fine, but then i figured out defoma scripts are not available in 770 software image, just in the SDK image. I thought i could use the scripts from the SDK image, but for some reason Nokia guys changed the script for a single line: "echo 'This script does nothing.'". But even with defoma scripts running, there is no way to do it automatically with the current application installer.

Second: Evince uses mime magic to recognize the file types but mime for PS files is not included in Maemo mime database by default. Again, there is no way to update the database automatically with the current application installer.

Finally, I left behind the idea of having ghostscript working on Maemo platform for a while and decided to fragment that huge package in 2 smaller packages:

libgnomeprintui: this package include libgnomeprintui and its dependencies (libgnomeprint, libgnomecanvas and libart). This library is needed for other applications, such as Gnumeric and Abiword, so i thought it was a good idea to have it as a separated package.

Evince: Now compiled without support to PS files, the package only includes Evince, libpoppler and libglade as dependencies.

The result is a smaller, but smaller package if compared to the first one. I suspect most people were afraid of the size of it. The debian file had almost 9 MB, and after installed, Evince and all its dependencies were using almost 20 MB of the available space. Now it uses less than 5 MB.

Installation Instructions:

Download libgnomeprintui and evince packages here.

Install libgnomeprintui first.

Finally, install Evince.

TODO: Create pixmaps for some actions, such as rotate right, rotate left, view fullscreen and view as presentation.

Please post comments with your feedback. Hope you all enjoy!

UPDATE: The link above for download the packages is not active anymore. Does anyone have a web space to host the files? Thanks in advance.

Preliminary Evince package for Nokia 770 available

2005-11-17T13:47:00.000-03:00

Finally it is done. You can download it here (I would be glad if someone could mirror it). Following there are some pictures of evince in action.

It was a hard work to make the package work with application installer, so i'd like to thank very much Marc Maurer (uwog) and Tomas Frydrych (tf) from Abiword community who helped me a lot.

Known Problems:
* The application does not respond to 770 special buttons, like Fullscreen, Zoom In and Zoom out.
* Find toolbar does not work.
* Include some pixmaps for actions like fullscreen and rotate right/left.

I hope to have these problems solved soon, and then we will have the final package available.

UPDATE 1: Emmanuel Pacuad has disponibilized a mirror for the package.

UPDATE 2: Another mirror for the package by Gustavo Barbieri.

Gnumeric Spreadsheet has Maemo support

2005-11-14T12:15:00.000-03:00

Last Friday, November 11th, i have opened a enhancement bug in gnome bugzilla with the patch containing all the modifications necessary to make Gnumeric run on Maemo platform. Today, Monday November 14th, i received the notification that the patch was accepted and now the code is part of Gnumeric mainstream (see the release notes). Thanks to all gnumeric community and Jody Goldberg that commited the patch and helped me a lot to solve the problems i have faced.

For now on, to compile Gnumeric on Maemo platform, just download the source code (at this moment, the last stable version is 1.6.1) and configure it with --enable-hildon option.

If everithing goes fine, by the end of this week we may have the debian packages available to install in the Nokia 770. w00t!

Now, some pics for screenshot lovers. ;)

To which Middle Earth Race do you Belong?

2005-11-14T09:35:00.000-03:00

Rohirrim

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?

Evince Patch to Maemo Platform

2005-11-01T14:07:00.000-03:00

Things are going quite good here. Today morning i have sent an email to evince mail list containing the patch and the instructions to make evince run on maemo platform. There are a couple of minor issues to be fixed, but i hope the code will be commited soon.