Broken pipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. :)

CarMan

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:

This is a low level library responsible for the communication between the Maemo device (770 or N800) and the car's OBD system, doesn't matter if it's done by bluetooth or serial port.


• Gtk+/Hildon UI:

This user interface is meant for more precise diagnosis. With it we are able to acquire data from all sensors or just a reduced set, record and play the data, perform tests and read fault codes with detailed description.


• SDL (PyGame) UI:

We call this user interface "Rich View". It is mostly used for Gauges visualization and it is highly customizable via XML.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

1. 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.


2. 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.


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


4. 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

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

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.