Planet Linux-to-go

This (super) cool .NET developer and good friend came to me at the FOSDEM bar to tell me he was confused about why during the Tracker presentation I was asking people to replace F-Spot and Banshee.

I hope I didn’t say it like that, I would never intent to say that. But I’ll review the video of the presentation as soon as Rob publishes it.

Anyway, to ensure everybody understood correctly what I did wanted to say (whether or not I did, is another question):

The call was to inspire people to reimplement or to provide different implementations of F-Spot’s and Banshee’s data backends, so that they would use an RDF store like tracker-store instead of each app its own metadata database.

I think I also mentioned Rhythmbox in the same sentence because the last thing I would want is to turn this into a .NET vs. anti-.NET debate. It just happens to be that the best GNOME softwares for photo and music management are written in .NET (and that has a good reason).

People who know me also know that I think those anti-.NET people are disruptive ignorable people. I also actively and willingly ignore them (and they should know this). I’m actually a big fan of the Mono platform.

I’ll try to ensure that I don’t create this confusion during presentations anymore.

I hope a few people wondered why my blog looked a little bit neglected in the past few months. Well finally I can say that I have been busy with several larger projects I was not supposed to talk about.  For two projects I am involved in there are related press releases from our customers and business partners.

One project is the Linux port to the Höft & Wessel skeye.pos mobile – I really like the press release because it mentions the fact the supplied devices are running Linux and what the devices are used for. The filesystem on these devices is built with OpenEmbedded and is based on an older Angström release.

The other big project is closely related to both my job for kernel concepts and OpenEmbedded which is one of my favourite open source projects. The µCross distribution will support chip- and device vendors who are going to ship Linux-based solutions. The main idea is to combine the power OpenEmbedded and its large community with a good portion simplicity and a few additions. I do not want to mention too many boring details here so I will just introduce the basic concept: The idea is to offer customers binary packages matching their target architecture, matching toolchains and tools for assembling and configuring filesystem images for their devices.

There is not really an offical announcement yet but one of our business partners just announced a nice SBC module which will come with a µCross-based SDK. The TK71 is a QSeven format module powered by a Marvell 88F6281 SoC (Sheeva core based).

A third project that gained some love is the updated Linux port to the Toshiba Topas910 and TopasA900 boards. I am trying to maintain an upstream compatible and up to date Linux port to these devices here – for the people who do not want to use several year old kernels or this strange Aura stuff.  The latest achievement is that I got some patches to make NAND flash work which is vital for the TopasA900 because its small NOR flash can’t keep a decent filesystem image with GUI.

Ok now I’m done with showing off and I should return to do something useful… such as writing a short report about FOSDEM!

Just came back from FOSDEM 2010, which — after skipping the last incarnation — was a great inspiring and productive event. The Openmoko devroom we originally requested was declined, however thanks to the initiative of Serdar Dere, it turned out we could snatch a last minute 3 hours timeslot that was left open by the Xorg guys. Very shortly we prepared a schedule and managed to get a nice program which was very well received.

Due to the short notice, we could not manage to create a video recording infrastructure, so I’m afraid this year we can only provide the slides — which are a notoriously bad substitute for real talks though. We try to improve for next year — if we can get a devroom again.

The FOSDEM team did certainly improve its organization over the last years, I was very pleased to see some of my criticism being taken into account. Apart from the lack of good coffee in Brussels (which the FOSDEM team probably is unguilty for), I can’t complain about anything. Even WiFi worked tremendously well on saturday. I still think due to the size of the ever growing interest in this conference that the ULB as location should seriously be reconsidered though. The special service transport on sunday to the main station is a great idea, folks — thanks a lot! Funnily enough, half of the ICE that took me to/from Frankfurt/Main to Brussels Zuid was filled with hackers, btw.

I have met some interesting people working on mobile devices, such as dcordes, leviathan, GNUtoo, cr2, larsc, heinervdm, etc. It’s great to see there is still momentum in real mobile FOSS architectures (i.e. something besides the Android, Maemo, or WebOS systems). I’m glad to tell you that this year we will see an exciting breakthrough in freesmartphone.org middleware supporting new platforms, i.e. progress on the HTC Dream and the Palm Pre is looking _very_ well. Stay tuned for more details appearing here soon.

I wish every conference would be like that. The only slightly disappointing thing was the cross-buildsystem-session in the embedded room. Just when I was expecting the discussion about the problems and potential collaboration to start, the time for the session was over. Rather than wasting time watching Andy Green telling us that our projects will die soon and we should all start using Fedora/Embedded now, we could have had some progress… Oh well, perhaps next year.

Based on the interest and number of embedded modules currently available, it appears that the OMAP3 CPU from TI will be very popular in the general purpose embedded Linux market.  One of the OMAP3 modules available is the Overo from Gumstix.  As the company name suggests, this module looks about like a stick of gum, but smaller, as shown in the photo below.  The Gumstix module provides a lot of functionality in a very small package.  It is reasonably priced, and is an excellent way to quickly create a product that has advanced functionality such as a high powered CPU (OMAP3), high speed USB, DSP, 3-D graphics acceleration, etc.  For an example of the OMAP3 performance compared to previous generations of ARM processors, see this article.

The module contains all the core components, and can then be attached to a custom baseboard using the two high density connectors shown in the above photo.  There are 70 signals on each of the two connectors.  BEC provides a spreadsheet of the Overo signals to assist in designing a custom baseboard.

Due to the high level of component integration, the Overo has very few components on the module.  As shown in the below photo, there are really only 3 major visible components.  The flash and RAM is stacked on top of the CPU.  The PMIC contains all the required power managment circuitry, as well as Audio and USB interfacing functionality.

The Overo module must be used with a baseboard.  Gumstix provides several development baseboards.  For production, a custom baseboard is typically created.  The Gumstix baseboards are reasonable cost, so they could be used for prototyping or low volume production if they have the required functionality.  Below is a photo of the Summit baseboard that provides DVI video out, audio, USB host and OTG, and an expansion connector with a number of signals.

Below is the Palo baseboard from Gumstix that can be used to interface with a LCD display.  The Palo board contains a resistive touch screen controller, and circuitry required to interface with a LCD.

The Overo does not include an Ethernet controller, so you typically use a USB-Ethernet adapter for development.  Below shows a typical development setup.

One of the things about the OMAP3 that makes it very attractive for embedded development is the amount of software support, and the number of development and production solutions available.  The OMAP3 is very well supported by the OpenEmbedded project, and TI is very active in making contributions to various open source projects.  This greatly increases the quality and availability of advanced software functionality needed to support a complex system like the OMAP3.

There are many options for software development with the OMAP3 systems.  Below is a photo of a very simple Qt application.  GTK+ and Enlightenment are other popular GUI toolkits.  With 256MB of both flash and RAM, this is more than enough memory for most embedded applications, and provides plenty of headroom for adding features for future product revisions.  The Overo has the CPU processing capability to run advanced GUI applications with 3-D affects, as well as advanced web application frameworks like web2py that previous generations of ARM CPUs could not effectively run.

The Gumstix Overo provides an excellent value for developing advanced products.  Especially for low volume products, when you compare the effort and time required to develop a full custom OMAP3 solution versus a simple Overo baseboard, using a module can provide significant advantages in terms of time to market, and development cost.

Returning home now — sitting in the EasyJet plane somewhere over Germany and sipping coffee.

Tenth FOSDEM is past now. We had a stand as usual but this year it looked much better then ever: white sheet, less cables floating everywhere (one central power extender with 8 sockets helps), interesting devices on table… We had:

• EVBeagle (German Beagleboard clone with blue PCB)
• 2 BUGs showing different things (camera view on mine, dual screen X11 on Denis one)
• Ulf bring new Atmel AT91SAM9M10 board (more on it in next days as it is in my bag above my head), there was also raffle in which other one was a price
• Archos 7 media player
• Psion netbook (with ‘Prototype’ text on it)
• Openmoko Freerunner
• HTC Dream (running OpenEmbedded distro instead of Android)
• FriendlyARM with WVGA screen
• Toshiba topas
• Atmel NGW100 which uses AVR32 cpu
• and some more which I forgot about

For next year it would be great to have power supply which would provide several +5V and +12V cables so there would be less plugs in use. Someone wants to donate such one? We probably need to think about creating kind of ’standard stand stuff box’ which would be used on next events so no more grabbing power extenders, USB cables etc. This is a thing to discuss.

At stand there were many people asking different questions. Some thought that we are selling hardware, some known already what OE is.

But FOSDEM was not only OE stand. This year I decided that there are talks which I want to attend and did that. I saw (titles are not original ones):

• ‘20 minutes about Openmoko history’ by Mickeyl Lauer. I got there a bit late to check did he mentioned ’super secret project’ name
• ‘Freesmartphone.org — what it is and why it is cool’ also by Mickeyl. He shown few of his DBus related tools — I need to package them for Maemo5 as they should be useful. Talk was interesting and worth being there.
• ‘Cross building systems: who we are and what our plans are’ panel was set of presentations from Ptxdist, OpenWRT, Crosstool NG, Buildroot, OpenEmbedded, cegcc projects. Everybody said that we need to share patches and help people to fix their software.
• ‘Maemo Community Counsil: who, why, what for’ was nice talk by Dave Neary (sorry man, that we did not met for talk). MCC is between community and Nokia and they do good job.
• ‘How to be good upstream’ by Gentoo developer was interesting as they have similar problems that we have in OE.
• ‘MINIX 3: system which do not want to die’ was the best entertainment during whole trip. Author was blaming Linux for being terrible buggy while his ‘baby’ was nearly bug free. But maybe because of very small user base? Not that I have something against microkernel idea — I used AmigaOS which chosen that way and know how it works.

Met some people, some planned to but time was too short as usual… Some of new faces were nice surprise: Martin Guy (the only one who understand Cirrus Logic EP93xx FPU hardware bugs) or Bluelighting from OPIE project. Tias (author of XInput calibrator tool for making touchscreens work as they should) hunted me during whole event and finally we had occasion to discuss about changes which he did due to my suggestions or problems. I shown BUG with two screens for him and he understood why I need device parameter. And next year I need to catch one guy from staff and talk with him as this year again he told that he know me and I do not know him (something like that anyway).

There was one change when it comes to stands — this year we were not next to PostgreSQL because MariaDB was between. I hope that next year we will be still nearby as I got used to the youngest person in their team :)

Speaking about future: it was last year with Astrid for me. It is in nice location (direct bus to FOSDEM place, near to Delirium Cafe) but no free wifi available in XXI century starts to be an issue. And no more going to tourist area for dinner — it was too costly I think.

Now I am in a bus which is my last way of transport today. plan to be at home before midnight. Post has to wait for Monday.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz FOSDEM X was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. FOSDEM 2007
2. GUADEC continued
3. Free Your Phone

Year ago when I was going to FOSDEM I took my Nokia E66 phone preloaded with Belgium maps to not get lost in Brussels. It was working quite good. This year I took Nokia N900 as the only device to use (no laptop, no other phone) and BUG to show something.

How did N900 worked as navigation device? Terrible! The problem started before travel. I installed whole set of map applications which were available:

• Ovi Maps
• Maemo Mapper
• Maep
• Mapbuddy
• Navit

Only first one had support to preloading map data (by using Nokia Map Loader under MS Windows). Maemo Mapper had such functionality in OS2008 but newer version has something totally broken. Navit required use of extra tool for conversion but after looking at UI I decided that will not even try. Maep and Mapbuddy always fetch from network so roaming costs would kill me.

So I used Ovi Maps as less bad then others. Lacks of offline POI support suxx, lack of adding own ones suxx even more as in Symbian version I just added few interesting places at home and used them during walking on streets of Brussels. Nokia needs to spend lot of money and developer time if they want to make it usable.

So software was more or less disaster but I managed to get to the ‘peeing boy’ so (after seeing’ peeing girl’ year ago) that part of tourist attractions is done. Would be nice to have some way of preloading AGPS data as without network connection it takes ages to get fix.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Maemo5 and (lack of) navigation was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Maemo mapper
2. Driving with Ovi Maps
3. Car navigation with N810

On Saturday there was a trip out organised, heading to Alston and I decided to tag along. I decided to ride to the first meeting point and set off into the fog at about 8am. Despite the visor being useless and my glasses becoming covered in water all too quickly, I made it there. Descripbing it as freezing fog was accurate as these photos of my gloves and jacket show:

Recently I’ve noticed that the front wheel on the bike was twisted and sat about 3″ to the left of the centreline of the back wheel. I’ve spent an age trying to find the source of this and found interesting things like tiny metal fatigue cracks in the headstock. They were not serious though, just a sign of the bikes age and the fact it will not last forever. The alignment problem turned out to be one fork leg 1″ longer than the other. This seems to have been due to an upsidedown spacer inside the forks and a service and fresh oil resulted in two forks of the same length. The only problem left is that my brain is now wired to ride a bike with its wheels out of line, not a straight one.

So I met up with three others and we continued on to the second meeting point via some lanes. On one of the lanes I managed to drop it, possibly due to the different handling. The GPS fell off but I noticed and collected it and there was no damage done. The green lanes weren’t too bad but you had to be careful the watch for the patches of ice. There was then some tarmac sections as we climbed the hillside and rose above the fog. This meant sheet ice on the untreated roads. The others were waiting for me to catch up having nearly slid on a nasty corner and someome was saying “I bet he manages to fall off on that” just as I came into view, lost my footing and put the bike on its side.

The mist returned causing visibility problems but the ice remained. Along a section of road I realised too late there was 2″ thick ice ahead and when I tried to avoid it, I picked the wrong patch to aim for hitting the edge of the block of ice instead of what I thought was tarmac. Apparently the mini tsumami I caused as I slid though the puddle next to the ice was impressive. I picked the bike up, got to the edge of the road and the bike promptly slid from vertical on the sheet ice again. Slippy? Just a little. No real damage apart from the now shredded waterproof trousers and the fact I was now soaked down one side. I put on the spare pair of gloves.

The others all disappeared, not daring to look back as at least one of them had nearly fallen off doing that. I eventually got the bike started and followed. A short while later I came around a bend to a steep give way junction totally covered in sheet ice. I wasn’t going quickly but there was no way I’d stop on that much ice so falling off again seemed like the safest option and I did stop short of the junction, albeit with the bike on its side. Again. On the plus side I was having trouble getting the bike going and was given a tip which really did help after it had been on its side.

The journey to the second meeting point continued, slowly and carefully and I made it there without any further incident. We suggested to the rest of the group that they might want to be careful although it was obvious they didn’t quite understand what we were talking about.

From this point on it turned out the worst of the ice was behind us as the sun was starting to make its mark. The way some of the rest of the group were riding, it can only have been a good thing. Personally, I was riding extremely slowly, determined not to come around bends to find sheet ice at an inappropriate speed, or follow anyone else too closely. The destination was Alston, the highest market town in England, a place known for its snow, ice, mist and general weather (as well as its nice tarmac roads for road bikes and its green ones which were the days objective).

The next few lanes were fine and eventually we were at the bottom of the trail up to Long Cross. This is an ascent I’ve mentioned before, steep, rocky and today, covered in snow and ice. I did make it about two thirds of the way up on the rocky route itself but after having the bike slip and slide a lot and with total sheet ice ahead, I joined the others and rode up the grass bank which was much easier. We found a gate buried in a deep snow drift next but this wasn’t much of a problem as you could just ride over it. After Long Cross we crossed the A686 the bike stalled and wouldn’t start. I bumped it down the rocky ice covered trail with little success. At the bottom I realised it was out of fuel so switched onto reserve at which point it started much to my relief. It was then into Alston for lunch. The usual Cafe was shut so we tried somewhere new and it seemed appropriate to have cumberland sausage .

Looking back at the top of the ascent, little ice/snow here – Click to zoom the picture – lovely view of the mist and sky!

After lunch, Tynehead. Steve was grinning at the thought. There are ski slopes just above that trail. Its a really tricky route, requiring crossing several streams with the odd waterfall and several steep drops and whilst it was slow tricky work, we managed to get a fair way along past several obstacles. There is a section which consists of a path with a drop off the edge into the South Tyne and the lead up to this bit is a stream crossing followed by a steep climb up a hill where I remember stalling the bike before causing myself a few problems. Today it was 2ft deep in “old” solid snow and the rest of the path along the “cliff” was equally covered. A couple of people did try and get bikes up it but it was hard work and it was unlikely the whole group would make it. In the end, we admitted defeat and got to the main road a different way. This was probably wise given what I know of the route further on from that point.

An example stream crossing. Note the steep drop and waterfall below the crossing and the snow just where you don’t want it. Sadly the photos of the hill we couldn’t make it up haven’t come out.

The ski slopes!

Crossing a snow drift to head to Coldberry End.

Riding along the A689, there was 3ft snow at the sides of the road. Coldberry end was next to cross from the Tees valley into Ireshopeburn in Weardale. The southern face of this was covered in deep snow and it took a bit of ploughing through but eventually we all made it up to the top where the going was easier. Watching where others struggle helps a lot. There was a gate which people were having problems getting through. I took a run at it, kept moderate power on and made it through with sheer will power and a little help from conservation of momentum.

There was much less snow down the other side and I was riding on the snow filling one of the ditches at the side of the main track since the track itself was covered in patchy ice. I slowed and was making a move to get off the ditch as the main track was clear when the front end of the bike fell into the snow stopping the bike dead. I did not stop and flew over the bars headfirst. Something from school PE lessons obviously kicked in as I turned it into a forward roll and flipped myself back onto my feet, standing in front of the bike. From a distance, Steve had just seen my legs in the air and had come back, worried.

Where’s the front wheel? (Fuzzy, not much light, sorry)

After this there was an interesting lane with deep ruts filled with snow or covered in thick ice with odd snow drifts thrown in. I did slow and steady apart from the bits where I saw people having problems where moderate momentum was once again order of the day. The problem now was the fact that it was late and getting dark rapidly. We planned tarmac back from here but my fears about ice returned. This is the first time I’ve used the bike in true darkness and the bikes headlight is useless and effectively lights up the mudguard. What followed was a slow trip back to civilization as the fog returned. I was pleased I went slowly as I found one sharp bend with ice on it, and a section of road covered in 2″ thick solid ice. I was at the back but caught the group up in blanchland. I was slow at setting off and they left me behind though meaning I didn’t know which way to turn at the next junction. I took a best guess but eventually it became obvious I’d lost them. I didn’t have a phone signal so continued on and joined the A68. Heading along there I found the group again as whilst we’d taken different routes, we’d ended up in the same place. The group split up with me leading a couple of others back into Swalwell, Newcastle and home.

Some really enjoyed the day, I did in some ways but had a few too many incidents to be entirely happy. Its certainly a day out I will remember for a long time to come and as always, it was a learning experience. Today, I ache all over and can barely move but it beats going to the gym!

In line with what I usually do at conferences, I lost my glasses at the GNOME Beer event this year. If somebody found it, and maybe even has it, please let me know. It’s kinda hard to see presentations without it.

I couldn't make it to fosdem for various reasons, so I missed this cool videowall:

This is to let Rob Taylor and David Schlesinger know that they better start organizing S.M.A.S.H.E.D.

Due to some lucky coincidences, we got a devroom at this year’s FOSDEM. I’ll be there, presenting a short overview about the history of the Openmoko project as well as a wrap-up of the latest work on the freesmartphone.org mobile devices middleware.

Hope to see you there!

I’m fed up with booting my Linux-based smartphones like desktop-systems. Two major developments will help me accomplish enormous improvements in boot speed:

• devtmpfs — kernel support for the /dev file system
• dbus system activation — on-demand launching of dbus-based services

I’m going to carry out the following two tasks in OE:

1. Writing fso-boot, a small executable written in C, which mounts the filesystems, brings up DBus and (optionally) launches X11
2. Setting fso-boot as new init process, that way you still have sysvinit and udev in your root file system, but they’re not active unless explicitly asked for

I’ll do that for the freesmartphone.org adaptation for the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1, Google ADP-1), which I’m running on 2.6.32 (necessary for devtmpfs) — stay tuned for the first benchmarks.

Long time no post. Just a quick one to say I'm all booked for FOSDEM 2010 next weekend. Seems like a lot of people are going, and the schedule looks pretty awesome.



Hope to see some of you there!

Sad to see that a lot of people are not getting it. The iPad is a revolutionary device — it is the manifestation of transit, the transit from the classical desktop paradigm over to the new wave of ubiquitous computing.

Applications like iWork for the iPad and the OmniGroup products are going to make a substantial difference. Software developers will now stop with overloading their apps with features (of which the typical user rarely uses more than 20%), but concentrate on streamlining the human computer interaction instead — hence improving productivity and… fun with computers!

We — the LaTe App-Developers — are embracing change and will create software for the iPad. Exciting times to live in!

Most of the things I know about Software and Hardware I have from reading books, looking at sourcecode but most importantly people willing to answer my questions on IRC and giving me a direction I could look for answers.

Now it seems to be my part to give back and help others to gain knowledge, but some things have changed. Free Software has made it to the mainstream, so besides hackers that want to understand things, we do have paid programmers that don't want to understand but still need to make it work.

So the other day I was finding me in a IRC query. His target board was a Freescale i.MX27 ADS and his mission was to make it boot from NAND. He was using the OpenEmbedded "mx27ads" machine and had successfully build a kernel and rootfs. Now the problem is that Freescale is not particulary liked in the Free and Open Source Software Community and that Freescale prefers to be on an isolated island. After about 8 hours of spending my time on this, i decided to get back to paid work and carry on.

If you are searching for support on mailinglists, irc channels and irc queries be prepared to think, giving Free Support means that you will be helped to understand the problem and have to pick a solution yourself. If you don't like that, don't want to think, don't have the time to think, you should consider getting someone from the irc channel as consultant.

So here is a list of things that work when paying a consultant but not when you are paid to do your job and you need someone else to do it for you:

1. Pasting your log somewhere and then ask what is wrong with it. In case of compile failures with GNU make you have to search for '***' in the error log, in case of an early failure of a bitbake run it tells you what software to install, in case of configure failures read the config.log, in case of other failures search the log for 'Error', 'rror', 'Failure', 'ailure'. And most importantly think before you post it.
   
   At OpenEmbedded we check for Software being installed on the system. This includes checking for GIT, CVS, SVN and other projects needed to bootstrap. If you don't have it installed OpenEmbedded will tell you "Error... you don't have installed:" and the output will be finished by "You will have to install....". If you paste such an error and ask what the problem is you are really embarassing yourself, your parents, your teachers and your country. The Error message tells you which binaries it searched for and couldn't find, and it points you to common package names for them. I don't think it can be any easier for a Software Engineer.
   



2. Knowing your hardware. Remember, you have the hardware in front of you, you have it connected somewhere, you have something compiled on your system. So if you are asked about the system specification you will have to point to a PDF, website that names the SoC, the used flash chip (NAND, NOR, erase size, name of it), the SDRAM used and whatever else is used on the system. If you paste a FAQ of something like Buildroot you have clearly failed. Know the stuff that is on your desk, if you don't nobody can help you.
   



3. Pasting unrelated information. When you are asked to paste the output of something. Do not just write that oneline by hand. In many cases we humans apply interpretation to things. When you are asking for help it is an indication that you are not able to interpret the result in a way that lead to a result. Paste the full log, it is saving everyone a lot of time.
   



4. Listen/Read to what people tell you. If you have a kernel without NAND support, but want to boot from NAND. You will have to enable NAND and the MXC NAND driver in your kernel. You will have to compile the kernel again, and you will need to boot that kernel. Now we are all humans and have done mistakes before.
   
   One of the most common mistakes is to not change the config, or not to boot the kernel you have built.
   
   For the config, check .config after you have built if it is the one you expected it to be, in case of OpenEmbedded copy the .config back to the defconfig (recipes/linux/${PN}-${PV}/${MACHINE}/defconfig). You should copy it back to have a backup in the case you are rebuilding the kernel or such.
   
   For the second thing it is rather easy. The kernel does contain the TIME it was built and it contains the number of times you have built it from the same directory. So if you rebuild the kernel the TIME and the NUMBER will go up. The kernel does print this information at bootup. If you are asked to check that, don't paste the log, but check it for yourself. Last but not least, if the NUMBER did not go up or the TIME did not change you have either not rebuilt it, or not from the same directory... And if you didn't rebuild from the same directory then you are likely to not use the right config...
   
   
5. Don't do crazy things while people spend their time to help you. Do not remove your build directories and just start over. No, even after your next rebuild the kernel will lack NAND support. That is because it is not enabled in the defconfig for your machine, and the build process is deterministic... You have someone on the other side that decided he wants to help you, if you are not focused, why should he?
   

And for all of you, that have read until the end. If you decide to seek help in an open forum. First do your homework by having some idea about the problem, have information ready (hardware spec, build logs, whatever), be prepared to think, formulate a hypothesis and try it.

With Free Software you are in the fortunate situation that you can talk to the guys who build the stuff you are using, all you need to do is to be focused on receiving help and be prepared to think.

• Kaspersky rescue disk download
  Kaspersky rescue disk is livecd (gentoo based) which runs Kaspersky virus scanner. Updated virus databases are fetched automatically.

Not all discussions are easy. If discussions were to be easy, the bar wouldn’t be high enough for your bullshit filter to be effective here.

During dark hours of discussions the nineties syndrome of wanting immediate results plays its role among spectators: It’s not a popular job to be a dissident. It’s not popular to be critical about a (the leader of a) popular idea. This is illustrated by the intellectually absurd criticisms David Schlesinger receives.

Yet is the critic who monitors the organs of a society key to that organ either producing for its stakeholders, or failing and dragging the entire society it serves down with it.

In Western Europe we traded Kings and Popes for a government that is held accountable by an opposition. Many countries and cultures adopted this system of governance. That’s because it undeniably works. If you have a better system in mind, that can be put to the test, please come forward.

It is good that the GNOME foundation board has decided to increase the amount of surveys. But I have one request which I didn’t succeed in raising before the end of last year:

Although I accept the decisive role a group of leadership has to take, I want foundation board members and employees to be held accountable for the decisions they make. Especially the ones where they go against the results of such a survey.

But this is not up to me.

*edit* They are showing an old episode of Married with Children on TV, I’ll be back in half an hour!

I started out today with a simple goal; "Let's build OpenJDK for OMAP this morning." I said to myself.  So I begin with a fresh build tree, pulling in the build recipes bit by bit.  I start to see unresolved depencency issues.  "No problem, I know where to get that." I mutter under my breath.  Then I hit another, and another.  "Rhino?  Really?!" I mutter as my mood darkens.  "SNOBOL-native?!"* In fact over an hour later and I'm still in this dependency hell.  Since it's not the most interesting work, my brain had time to wonder why this problem exists.  "It's because Java is one big monolithic bowl of jello."  my internal voice spoke up.  I don't even like jello.  Yes, of course this is why there are so many dependencies.  The dark side of having so much functionality in the run-time is so much complexity and tight coupling in the build-time.  "What could possibly be the solution?" I wondered again...

"Java Modularity!" Of course, it's so simple!  If the JDK was broken up into semantic chunks, the build-time complexity could be greatly reduced if you only have to build what you need.  "But does a simple Java build really matter?" I pondered.  After all, only a select unlucky few ever have to actually build the damn thing.  Most of us just install binary packages and get on with it.  Well, I have no metrics, and cannot be sure, but it seems to me that a big cost of build complexity is adoption and inclusion of Java in other open source projects.  If I am a distro maintainer (or a machine maintainer), or I have a project that depends on JDK, and the build is difficult or breaks often, I may move on to greener pastures.  Complexity is risk and cost.  So, a simple, sane, and universal Java build system would put more jvms on more machines, distros, and platforms.  This is a worthy goal! I really hope the latest push for Java modularity makes some traction in OpenJDK sources soon!

 

* Haha, I kid!

This is the kind of stuff that needs a forward on the planets:

From: Roberto -MadBob- Guido

This is just an update about tracker-miner-rss effort, already mentioned in this list some time ago.

Website, SVN, Last release (0.3)

Since 0.2 we (Michele and me) have just dropped dependency from rss-glib due some limitation found, and created our own Glib-oriented feeds handling library, libgrss, starting from the code of Liferea and adding nice stuffs such as a PubSub subscriber implementation. At the moment it is shipped with tracker-miner-rss itself, in the future may be splitted so to easy usage by other developers.

Next will come integration with libchamplain to describe geographic points found in geo-rss enabled feeds, integration with libedataserver to better handle “person” rappresentation (suggestions for a better PIM-like shared library with useful objects?), and perhaps a first full-featured feed reader using Tracker as backend.

Enjoy :-)

Roberto is doing a demo on FSter at FOSDEM during our presentation. My role in the presentation will be light this year. I decided to give most of the talk away to Rob Taylor and Roberto. I will probably demo Debarshi Ray’s Solang and if time permits his work on the Nautilus integration. Regretfully Debarshi can’t come and so he asked me to do the demo.

Thanks to Marcin's tireless efforts the Ångström distribution is now running on BUG:

.-------. | | .-. | | |-----.-----.-----.| | .----..-----.-----. | | | __ | ---'| '--.| .-'| | | | | | | | |--- || --'| | | ' | | | | '---'---'--'--'--. |-----''----''--' '-----'-'-'-' -' | '---' The Angstrom Distribution bug ttymxc4 Angstrom 2009.X-stable bug ttymxc4

This is important because it allows us to merge the Java and Web Service goodness we have developed on Poky Linux with the state-of-the-art OpenJDK work provided in OpenEmbedded and Jalimo communities.  I imagine a day coming soon when we will not have to implenent our own string splitting functions!  Stay tuned for more exciting developments...

It is winter now — even here in Szczecin, Poland. Normally it is quite warm here — about 0°C but this year is different. Today we had -19°C at 8:00 in the morning, yesterday it was -13°C and few other days had similar temperatures.

Ok, I am spending most of time at home but my wife has to visit few places so each day gives me extra work for the morning: starting car. We have Citroën C3 with 1.4 HDI engine and as most Diesel cars it is fragile to low temperatures. Before Xmas I exchanged battery from 44Ah one to 60Ah (which should be there from start) so at least one problem less (carrying battery to home is extreme — I do not want to think how much force is needed to get it from car as it is very tightly mounted).

So each morning I go down, remove snow from car (if it was snowing during night) and do what is needed to get car running. There was just one day when it did not wanted to start, but we got it solved by using cables and second car ;D

But even due to this ‘problem’ I like this car. Uses about 5.5 l/100km of oil and drives nicely. Ok, maybe it’s 68PS is a bit too low for highway (as 130km/h is basically top of comfort driving with 150km/h being maximum usable) but we nearly do not have such roads here…

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Diesel engine and winter do not match was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Online map services and routing
2. Bought car
3. Car navigation with N810

• Hades Blag: Git Is Your Friend not a Foe Vol. 1: Distributed
  Recently, I’ve been preaching Git to everyone that use the inferior version control software (like SVN or, pardon me, CVS). But somewhy the main obstacle I see in these people is that they are so used to SVN workflow that they don’t see the magnificence and flexibility Git offers.
• Hades Blag: Git Is Your Friend not a Foe Vol. 2: Branches
  So if you worked with some version control systems for a bit, you’ve probably heard of a concept called branches. It is quite a simple concept: you can perform several development processes in parallel without them interfering with each other. Most projects use branches for experimental features that could set hell loose and for backporting bugfixes to older releases. Subversion and CVS people usually dislike branches, because they involve lots of uninteresting and painful work that they don’t want to do. That is easily explained by the way branches are implemented there.

Thank you for trying to forbid the burka. I hope my country will also forbid it. We need to protect (but not overprotect) the women of Muslim cultures, cultures who are massively migrating to Western Europe at this moment, against the oppressive anti-woman and religious nature of the burka.

I don’t believe, at all, that the burka is an expression of free speech. I believe it’s an instrument to oppress woman, and that this is its only purpose. There is no place for that in Western European culture. None. And we must be assertive about it.

I’d also like to ask Muslim countries to stay out of the debate: we decide about Western European values, you don’t. Equality between men and woman is a Western European value. If you don’t like that, sorry, it’s not negotiable.

This article is to detail the typical workflow I use when I am adding a new application recipe to OpenEmbedded from scratch. In this case it will be the gobject dbus binding called eggdbus.

During this article reference to the OE wiki especially the styleguide for new recipes is highly recommended.

• Styleguide
• Commit Policy
• Versioning Policy

The first step is to locate the software we are going to add and the version number of that software. In this case it the software is called eggdbus and it is version 0.6. Also at this stage check the license of the software in this case GPLv2.

Create a directory in the metadata to hold the new software.

mkdir recipes/eggdbus

Use an editor to create the recipe file for the new application. The general form of the filename is application_version.bb so in this case edit.

vi recipes/eggdbus/eggdbus_0.6.bb

Fill the beginning of the recipe with the informational fields.

DESCRIPTION = "gobject dbus binding"
HOMEPAGE = "http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/eggdbus"
LICENSE = "GPLv2"


The next step is to locate the download URL for the new recipe. In this case eggdbus is hosted in a sourceforge project so the download URL is.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/eggdbus/snapshot/eggdbus-0.6.tar.bz2

OpenEmbedded creates a variable ${PV} from the filename of the recipe. It is recommended to use this in the SRC_URI as it saves typing when later upgrading to later versions of the software. It also creates a ${PN} variable from the package name.

SRC_URI = "http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/${PN}/snapshot/${PN}-${PV}.tar.bz2"

At this stage there is enough recipe to attempt a download and check that there are no mistakes so far.

bitbake eggdbus

This build is expected to fail as the OE metadata does not yet have the MD5/SHA256 checksums for the download yet.

NOTE: Missing checksum
ERROR: eggdbus-0.6: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/eggdbus/snapshot/eggdbus-0.6.tar.bz2 has no checksum defined, cannot check archive integrity
ERROR: Error in executing: /home/dp/openembedded/org.openembedded.dev/recipes/eggdbus/eggdbus_0.6.bb
ERROR: Exception: Message:1
ERROR: Printing the environment of the function
ERROR: Error in executing: /home/dp/openembedded/org.openembedded.dev/recipes/eggdbus/eggdbus_0.6.bb
ERROR: Exception: Message:1
ERROR: Printing the environment of the function
ERROR: Build of /home/dp/openembedded/org.openembedded.dev/recipes/eggdbus/eggdbus_0.6.bb do_fetch failed


OE helpfully generates the checksums it expected to see so these can be added to the meta data easilly. The cat just appends the new checksum to the end of the file. The next python command then calls a script to sort the checksums into the recommended format.

cat tmp/checksums.ini >>~/oe/org.openembedded.dev/conf/checksums.ini
python contrib/source-checker/oe-checksums-sorter.py -i conf/checksums.ini


To check this worked then re-issue the bitbake command.

bitbake eggdbus

In this case the command will succeed but builds no useful package. Depending on the application it will probably fail. This is not a problem at this stage as it is still work in progress and debugging these failures is what gives the information for the rest of the recipe.

At this stage the contents of the tarball file can be checked. The eggdbus tarball unpacks to a directory which is called eggdbus-0.6 which is what OE has already selected by default so we dont need to overide the default ${S} setting.

Eggdbus is an autotools using library so we tell OE to use its built in autotools support. If it is a well written autoconf then OE generates configure/compile/install tasks which work without modification.

inherit autotools

We can now try a build again to see if it will just build(tm).

In this case it doesnt because of gtk-doc.make. We currently dont really support this in OE anyway so we shall attempt to patch out this part.

cd tmp/work/armv7a-angstrom-linux-gnueabi/eggdbus-0.6-r0/eggdbus-0.6/
quilt new gtk-doc.patch
quilt add docs/eggdbus/Makefile.am docs/tests/Makefile.am


Edit the two Makefile.am and remove the reference to gtk-doc.make. Then generate the patch.

quilt refresh

The patches/gtk-doc.patch is now our patch. We need to copy it into our OE repo and add it to the SRC_URI.

mkdir recipes/eggdbus/files/
mv patches/gtk-doc.patch recipes/eggdbus/files/


And edit the eggdbus_0.6.bb to add the new patch to the SRC_URI.


SRC_URI = "http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/${PN}/snapshot/${PN}-${PV}.tar.bz2 \
file://gtk-doc.patch;patch=1 \
"


Now we attempt to build again.


bitbake eggdbus -c clean
bitbake eggdbus


This time the build fails inside the code stage, if the error is examined it will show that the build is trying to run a built program on the host. This obvously won’t work in cross compile situations so the program needs to be compiled for host.

This means a native version of the package is created. This used to mean a seperate .bb file but thanks to BBCLASSEXTEND it can be done in one file. This also means SRC_URI must be altered to use ${BPN} (Base Package Name) which is a version with -native/-sdk stipped from the end if present. So the following is changed/added to .bb file.


SRC_URI = "http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/${BPN}/snapshot/${BPN}-${PV}.tar.bz2 \
file://gtk-doc.patch;patch=1 \
"



BBCLASSEXTEND = "native"


On attempting to build this new native file it failed because it tries to use docbook to generate man pages. We dont really need them so disable them.


EXTRA_OECONF = " --disable-man-pages --disable-gtk-doc-html "


Now a rebuilt of eggdbus-native succeeds and host versions of the tools needed are available in the staging directory. Now some more changes are needed to the source. In the Makefile.am the programs we just built are referenced using the source directory but the ones in staging should be used so another patch to the Makefile.am files is produced. This patch should apply to the native version so more changes to recipe are needed.


BASE_SRC_URI = "http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/${BPN}/snapshot/${BPN}-${PV}.tar.bz2 \
file://gtk-doc.patch;patch=1 \
"

SRC_URI = "${BASE_SRC_URI} \
file://marshal.patch;patch=1 \
"

SRC_URI_virtclass-native = "${BASE_SRC_URI}"


Now the eggdbus recipe is built.


bitbake eggdbus -c clean
bitbake eggdbus


This time the build succeeds, but one thing that isnt done yet is to tell OE what this recipe depends on. The trick used to do this is to examine the control file in the .ipk and see what is depended on.

For this recipe it is quite clear and dependencies on dbus glib. So a final change to the recipe to add dependencies.


DEPENDS = "dbus glib-2.0"


All these steps give up a complete recipe that reads as follows.


DESCRIPTION = "gobject dbus binding"
HOMEPAGE = "http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/eggdbus"
LICENSE = "GPLv2"

DEPENDS = "dbus glib-2.0"

BASE_SRC_URI = "http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/${BPN}/snapshot/${BPN}-${PV}.tar.bz2 \
file://gtk-doc.patch;patch=1 \
"

SRC_URI = "${BASE_SRC_URI} \
file://marshal.patch;patch=1 \
"

SRC_URI_virtclass-native = "${BASE_SRC_URI}"

inherit autotools

EXTRA_OECONF = " --disable-man-pages --disable-gtk-doc-html "

BBCLASSEXTEND = "native"


• Poor Man's Multi-Touch: using multiple mice with Xorg | en bug | ao2.it
  Since Jan. 13th, 2010 Xorg version 7.5 has landed to Debian unstable; one of the most notable additions to it was the XInput2 system, which incorporates the MPX efforts. So I hooked up a second USB mouse to my machine and started playing with it.

I've been busy with my daily/paid job, and i have not be able to put any update to this blog.
We start a new year and it's time to post some updates of whats going on from my part ;)

First, i'm moving to Brazil. This give me a lot of headaches, as i need to do a lot of paperwork. I'm almost finishing this issue, as i'm going to travel in 9 days!!

I would like to say thank you to my TuxBrain coleages (we get fun together and we work nicely together); i could not forget IdaSystems (that always believe in my hard work); news projects evolving like Genesi-USA (they finally sent me the EfikaMX board!! :D), Qi-hardware, Harald Welte & other hackers that are giving some GSM freedom :D; all OpenEmbedded hackers, that give me one of the better development tools that i never tested; all SHR & Openmoko comunity (they persist on this device and give us some usable software in that piece of hardware - and maybe a little bit more); and all the FOSS developers/hackers & communities that i'm involved :D (i don't have enough space to put all of them here).

I don't know if i'm going to post anything before i move, but.. this is my first 2010 post & i'm really happy with my future plans.

See you soon (from the south hemisphere) :D

Today I got informed that Palm has released the source code of the DSP bridge on the Palm Pre. This kernel module is used for communication with the DSP on the OMAP3 the Pre is based on.

It was written by TI and is available under the GPL elsewhere, but we heard that Palm did a lot modifications we would a) like to know about and b) having them available when recompiling the module to keep the original userspace working.

The only outstanding issue now from the kernel side is the wifi driver. The module itself states that it is licenced under the GPL, but Palm claims that they licenced it from Marvel under a proprietary licence and will change the module licence accordingly. If the module will still work then has to be seen. (Hint, it will not if the driver uses any EXPORTSYMBOLGPL() symbols).

Anyway, its nice to see that at least one part is done now. Greg KH, Simon Busch, Harald Welte and myself have been in contact with Palm for this quite some time already for this issue.

For the last few weeks has Debarshi Ray contributed to Tracker’s Nautilus plugin and worked on Solang, a photo manager that will start using Tracker’s SPARQL capability to get a language to query for metadata about the photos and the photos themselves.

Debarshi explains it all very well himself on his own blog.

We’ll probably do a lightening demo during our Tracker presentation at FOSDEM about how Solang did this integration. We’re also planning to demo the code of a few other applications that are working on integrating with Tracker’s store.

Somebody should port Solang to the next version of Maemo!

Two posts ago I wrote that something like The Real news is quite unique in the U.S.’s completely broken media.

Today I found an interesting double interview on AlJazeeraEnglish by Riz Khan titled Has the mainstream media in the US replaced serious coverage with “junk news” and tabloidism?

Took me less time that I thought — Maemo5 updates repository is on-line.

How to use it? Instruction in few simple steps:

• Fetch GnuPG key which I used to sign repository.
• Add it to APT on Nokia N900: “apt-key add apt-key.asc“
• Add my repository to APT sources by storing following line in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/system-updates.list file:

 deb http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/download/maemo/repos/system-updates/2009.51/ ./
 

• Run “apt-get update” or use Hildon Application Manager (H-A-M) refresh function.
• Run “apt-get upgrade” or check did H-A-M listed some upgrades and tell him to install them.

So far my repository contains Modest with fix for bug #6541 and “Maemo 5″ metapackage altered to allow system updates to be installed. Sources of all packages are provided of course.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz System updates repository online was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. System updates repository for Maemo5?
2. Localizing Maemo
3. Polish locale for OS2008

My Nokia N900 uses Maemo5 in latest version: 2009.51.1 which still have many bugs open. Some (like 6541) were fixed already but users have to wait for next firmware drop from nokia Maemo team to get them. Of course date of such “gift” is unknown (it can even never happen) so how to solve problem now?

I spent some time digging in Modest git tree to gather changes which will fix #6541 bug. Result works fine on my device, patch is quite small (less then 2KB) but system components updates are not allowed to be pushed into Extras repositories on maemo.org website.

So how to share such useful update? I think that will create repository for such system updates. Maybe will add some other packages there (for sure my version of “mp-fremantle-generic-pr” will be present so updates will be installable without breaking firmware upgrades).

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz System updates repository for Maemo5? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. System updates repository online
2. Are Maemo5 developer tools obsolete?
3. Nokia N800 emulation

uim has had some compile-time issue lately and the other CJKV input methods in Openembedded are for Opie.  Today I committed a working recipe for the latest scim release allowing people who use Xorg to write Asian languages again.  I haven’t yet tested this on a device myself so cannot provide any screenshots.  scim will also most likely not work without a keyboard.  I hope to push a recipe for scim-tegaki, soon.  That should allow hand-writing recognition.  CJKV in OE is back there making progress.

Brzezinski

In the third segment of The Real News‘ interview with Dr. Brzezinski, Paul Jay asks him about Israel’s threat to bomb Iranian Nuclear facilities and the American strategy towards Iran.

Brzezinski talks about how this might force the U.S. out of the region in the short term, how it would affect the price of oil, how the U.S. would be militarily involved and how the U.S. would be alone in this. And what the fundamental consequences for Israel would be.

You can find all three parts of the interview and their transcripts here:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Politics, skimming facebook

It’s Sunday so I skim Facebook a bit. I came across Lefty’s link to a 100 quotes every geek should know blog. Artwork like humor often represents a philosophy. I think this first quote on that blog is a very good meme, also for foundation boards:

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
— Dennis the Peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

• The case of the 500-mile email

I’ve been watching The Real News for some time now. It claims to be “the real news” but the reality is that it’s fairly left-wing pro-unions most of the times. Most of their documentaries and interviews are very interesting, though. Nor do they make it difficult to filter out their own bias. It’s quite unique in the U.S.’s completely broken media to have something like The Real News.

This week they are interviewing Brzezinski. People who know Brzezinski, know that that’s a huge interview for them. Watch part one of the interview. Knowing The Real News, part two will probably be released in a week.

Youtube video

• Jaffa's Projects - Catorise: auto-organise N900 applications
  Catorise organises the application menu to have top-levels corresponding to the sections in Application Manager. Features: * Uses the section icons from the current theme, falling back to the default theme if none available. * Determines an application's section from the same information the packager used when uploading it to Extras. * Keeps track of application installs/uninstalls. * Entirely non-destructive: remove the package and everything goes back to how it was before. * "All" and "Other" sections, just as in the App Manager, to provide additional access routes. So, with Catorise the section you find an application's icon is the same you used to install it!

Using BeagleBoard as development platform means lot of cables as I need:

• serial cable
• power cable for BeagleBoard
• USB hub
• power cable for USB hub
• USB Ethernet dongle
• Ethernet cable

So by default my BB setup looks like this (here with B7 version so OTG used instead of EHCI):

I decided that I need to do something with it. The idea was to make simple expansion board which will just gather all components on board connected to BeagleBoard. First sketch was this (without keeping aspect etc — just elements):

I presented it to few people with better electronic experience then mine and got few nice suggestions.

After few days of collecting elements and soldering/glueing I got first version working:

USB Ethernet dongle is glued to PCB, USB Hub needs mounting and it’s power cable has to be replaced by better solution. But the good thing is that I have power, serial, Ethernet connectors on one side without any special cables:

When BeagleBoard is placed on top all what is needed to get it working is connecting 3 cables: power, serial and EHCI:

Audio, S-Video and HDMI connectors are on same way as rest so all cables are in one side:

The problem appears when reversed BeagleBoard has to be mounted on top… I have such one with BeagleBUG extension. Extra distances helps but cables are not so nice then:

Notice that SD card in this config is harder to reach.

Serial cable is twisted but still do job.

Audio and video connectors are easy to reach but on other side of board ;(

Yes… that hub needs replacing — note ugly way of attaching power to it.

Anyway this works and allows me to have all cables in one place instead of jungle of them.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz My expansion board for BeagleBoard was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. BeagleBoard in a box
2. I have got BeagleBoard C3
3. TI: please fix your USB

• IEEE Spectrum: 25 Microchips That Shook the World
  In microchip design, as in life, small things sometimes add up to big things. Dream up a clever microcircuit, get it sculpted in a sliver of silicon, and your little creation may unleash a technological revolution.

Since last week its snowed heavily. Logic dictated we should therefore
go out on the bikes again.

The sign says “Unsuitable for motor vehicles” – Rubbish!

As last time, the camera phone did well and there are pictures on flickr.

This time I decided to ride from home to the meeting/starting point which is 20 miles of tarmac. This turned out to be fine and I arrived on time for the meetup. The bike coped with the icy roads very well.

Eventually we set off being four in number at this point. We followed the same route as last weekend off up a trail that climbs the hillside. One of us, a relatively new TRF member struggled a lot on this section with him and his bike overheating and being difficult to start and it having no traction. It being 525cc and a MX bike variant by no means helped. I ended up going on ahead to tell the others what was going on, we U turned and took him back down. We then tried a simpler lane but he kept stalling due to the cold and in the end he decided to head home as he wasn’t enjoying it. A good call as if he struggled then, he’d have hated the rest of the day.

We continued on ending up at another residence and picking up two more riders, then we were five.

Upon departing Stocksfield on approach to a paved ford someone binned it due to ice on the road and nearly got soaked. He seemed to be enjoying himself though. Riding on a little further Steve pointed down a lane and suggested I go on ahead. Nobody overtook me which was unusual and I arrived at the next tarmac junction and waited. And waited. Eventually they turned up, apparently someone had to push his bike up some hill as there wasn’t enough traction to ride it. I must have rode up it but it didn’t register and I have no recollection of it. This was when the group photo was taken.

Moving onwards we now needed to cross a field thick with untouched snow. I had my doubts about it but as always, if someone can show me its possible, I’ll try. I found bringing up the rear at this point quite tricky as it meant following some elses deep rut in the snow. Creating them is hard on the bike, following them is hard on the rider as you end up bouncing foot to foot. In this case the back wheel did lots of spinning and the bike didn’t do much moving forwards. The bike temperature warning light came on, it made suitable hissing noises and generally was not happy. I let it cool off.

Things didn’t seem to be working as everyone was making much better progress than me through this field. Why? Good question. I stopped and let some air out the rear tyre in case it would give me some better traction. It might have marginally but this was not the problem. I’d been trying smooth engine revs, I tried pulsing throttle as an experiment. This is something I need to play with more and no doubt has its uses but didn’t do much here. I suddenly realised I was never leaving 1st gear. Trying to get some (any) speed up, and balance the bike long enough to change gear whilst riding along a twisted rut in deep snow isn’t as easy as it sounds but it didn’t half make a difference in this case. I’ve hence learnt a new way to torture the bike. Pulling away in higher gears actually worked reasonably well too.

Ahead, the others had been having fun whilst having a break with Nick demonstrating how to run in an engine. The fountains of snow were impressive, especially as he seemed the most nervous on the icy roads.

We moved onto Slaley forest itself. The first part of the route we’d taken last time where I got stuck in the bog wasn’t accessible as the gate was frozen into ice several inches thick so we bypassed that bit and onto the forest proper. I was at the back so I stopped and watched, making a note of where people were getting stuck. I then made sure I had more momentum and less mechanical sympathy for those bits .

The bike continued to get hot and require rests which was fine with the rider. This whole section was badly rutted, you never knew what you were going to hit under the snow and hence feet down bouncing from foot to foot to keep it upright was order of the day. This zaps energy and tortures muscles, the strain was showing on us all at the back, two of whom are a bit older than me. After various breaks, they were struggling and it got to the point where it was hard work following them so I overtook. It also meant the rut I was following wasn’t as churned up.

I was pleased that I did manage to find bits where I could start to keep my feet on the pegs around this time too.

We’d covered no where near the distance we had last weekend but time was getting on and everyone’s energy was expended so we decided to head homeward. Lots of icy tarmac country backroads followed but the bike behaved itself well. In the forest the wheels had filled the spokes area with snow and every now and again bits would break off, fire out the mudguard into the air and hit the rider. This left the wheel unbalanced and at one point it was actually oscillating the front suspension which was a weird feeling.

With only a few miles back to the start point I noticed a whirring from the front end. Handling and brakes seemed unaffected so I assumed it was the current road surface. The bike then stuttered and died, distracting me to the more urgent lack of fuel. Switching it to reserve dealt with that but I didn’t want to lose the others so pressed on, thinking the noise was in my mind. The others returned home, I headed off to the village fuel station where I noticed the front tyre was now totally flat. I rode it up to Steve and tried to pump it up which failed. From here it was 20 miles of tarmac through the centre of Newcastle to get home. I therefore wimped out and summoned a van. I could have attempted to fix it but in the freezing cold it wouldn’t have been fun.

It was all good fun, albeit very hard work at times and very draining on energy. I’ve learnt some new stuff about riding on snow and ice, its amazing whats possible.

I was surprised to realise that I never fell off which has to be a record. Also, I only ever had to get off the bike once to resolve an issue (to shove the front end down a hole to join the rear in a different rut). Makes a change!

Over the holidays there was plenty of snow here both on and before New Years Day and there were weather warnings in place in Northumberland and North Tyneside with people being advised not to travel unless essential. Obviously when invited out in the snow on the CRM on Saturday (2nd January), I therefore said yes!

The camera phone did well with the photos for a change and there are some pictures of the day on flickr.

Setting off at 7:30am the roads weren’t too good but were passable, particularly once onto major ones. I was taking the bike to a meeting place in the Tyne valley in the van and was pleased I’d loaded it the night before. I put the many layers of clothing on and then tried to get the bike going which it refused to do. I was at the top of a steep hill and it took most of the length of it to bump start it but it did fire up at the bottom, thankfully and I met up with three other riders, two of them who’d travelled from Yorkshire.

200m of road and then onto the first lane which didn’t seem too bad. You couldn’t tell what you were riding on but the bike can cope with most things so it wasn’t a problem. Suddenly crashing through ice into a rut was an interesting experience.

Short bits of tarmac and more lanes followed gradually climbing out the Tyne valley and the higher you got, the deeper the snow. It was interesting to be riding through villages where people could barely stand on the pavements/roads – some gave us rather funny looks. We made it to one of the TRF members residences and then there were five.

The tarmac roads were as interesting as some of the lanes being covered in ice and snow in varying proportions. We decided going too far wasn’t sensible so headed for Slaley forest. At some point I managed to fall off in a field but nothing serious. Coming up to the forest I managed to sink the CRM into a rather unfrozen wet soggy bog and had to pull it out with some help some of the routes were variations I’ve not used before too.

When the leader stops and invites someone else to do the next bit you know its going to be interesting. Thankfully the skilled volunteer found a safe line through a rather badly rutted section. I took the lead for a bit and found it was actually easier riding the fresh snow that following the rut left by someone else.

We had wondered about going onto the exposed moorland beyond the forest and tried to do so where we thought the turning might be but the snow was too deep for our small number to plough through and be fun. It was also near lunch time and it started snowing at this point quite heavily.

The next long climb uphill was by far my worst part of the day as the bike would not go in a straight line and required feet down, bouncing from leg to leg the whole way up, zapping my energy. The following fire road was straight and level and proved interesting as the bike would not follow the rut in the snow left by someone else but would go along it with the rear wheel if (and only if) the front was left to run over the edge of the rut by an inch or two in fresh snow on the left side. I mentioned this to others and it was dismissed as the camber of the road but more on that in another post.

By this point vision was the main problem as the visor was covered in water/ice/snow and useless after about 5 seconds of riding. I left it half raised but this meant driving snow going into my face with my eyes only protected by my glasses.

Thankfully lunch followed (gammon, egg and chips) whilst it continued to snow and the bikes had snow on them upon exiting the pub. Given the time, the weather and the distance some people had to get home it was decided that we’d had enough fun for the day and it was time to make it homeward. The backroads we used to get back were the ever changing mix of snow, ice of varying compaction but the CRM seemed to take it in its stride.

All in all, quite an enjoyable day!

As one of the things I do is evaluate new technologies for embedded systems, the Go language from Google is an interesting development.  I have been looking for a better “system” language for some time.  What I mean by a better system language is one that is nearly as efficient as C, does not require a large runtime, has a fast start-up time, and yet supports modern language features.  It is interesting that the constraints for very high performance server applications are often similar to those found in embedded systems in that applications must make very efficient use of memory and CPU cycles.  This is why C++ is still used a lot by Google and is also popular in embedded systems, but is not as common in applications where CPU power is plentiful compared to the resources to implement the application such as business applications.  One area of divergence is the focus on multi-core for high end server applications, but in the next few years, multi-core CPU’s such as the Atom and ARM Cortex-A9 will likely be common in low power embedded systems.

There are other options.  Vala is very nice to use, is efficient, offers advanced language features, and extensive language bindings.  Vala is being used to implement some of the http://freesmartphone.org software stack.  C/C++ are the old standby languages, but are rather tedious to program in compared to some of the newer languages in that source and header files are separate, and memory management is manual.

My interest in Go at this time is for ARM systems, so I ran a few experiments.  From what I can tell, there does exist an ARM Go compiler that is able to produce ARM code, but it currently lacks support for EABI soft floating point.  The lack of floating point support is pretty much a show stopper for now, but it is at least a start.  The following is an example:

export GOARCH=arm
cd $GOROOT/src/
./make-arm.bash

cd
(create the following source file: hello.go)

==================
package main
import "fmt"

func main() {
        fmt.Printf("Hello, world\n");
}
=================

5g hello.go   (5g is the ARM compiler)
5l hello.5
scp 5.out root@n900:  (copy to ARM system)
ssh root@n900
?:~# ./5.out
Hello, world

(modify with floating point code)

==================
package main
import "fmt"

func main() {
        var f = 1.5;
        fmt.Printf("Hello, world\n");
        fmt.Printf("float f = %f\n", f);
}

=================

(now run on ARM system)
?:~# ./5.out
Segmentation fault

As, you can see, floating point does not work as expected.  I’m not sure yet if gogcc can be configured to compile ARM binaries.  The other area where Go appears to need a lot of work is bindings to various libraries.  Though it does not appear to be ready for embedded ARM systems at this time, Go will be an interesting language to watch over the next few years.

• Nokia N900 Commented Hardware specs
  This page lists the details of the various hardware components of the N900 and provides additional information about how it is supported by the Linux kernel, open and closed-source binaries provided in Maemo 5 distribution.

As it can be read in many places Maemo is based on Debian. The problem arrives when someone asks “which version of Debian?”…

The answer is “oldstable” (etch) + parts from “stable” (lenny) + some updates from “testing” (squeeze). But what does it mean for developer?

1. If you maintain Debian packages and want them to build for Maemo5 prepare to refresh your memory for (officially deprecated) Debhelper v5 (Debian uses v7 since Lenny).
2. If you use Debconf then you are out of luck rather — 1.4.70 is not even from Etch…
3. If you use Subversion then do not even try to touch repositories which you will checkout under scratchbox — 1.4.3 from Etch is too old for working with repos fetched with today’s 1.6.x versions.

For me it looks like they just refreshed Maemo from OS2007 times again and again and again without considering rebasing on newer release. But why?

On #maemo-devel channel I got answer that this was probably due to sticking with crap^Wscratchbox which has that old stuff. But moment…. Maemo is product made by Nokia, big company with big money, so why no one got paid to update it to at least Lenny?

Good that Mer people use quite recent Ubuntu as a base for their distribution which should make development for it easier (ignore fact that there is very small user base). But this project needs lot of love still.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Are Maemo5 developer tools obsolete? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. System updates repository for Maemo5?
2. Maemo5 and (lack of) navigation
3. System updates repository online

The end of 2009 is ended. Was it good year? For me it is hard to tell…

January

• got Atmel AT91SAM9263-EK — my first own developer board. I used it to test most of my images during 2009.
• moved Zaurus to drawer — no need for it anymore as I have better platform to test stuff on (ok, VGA > QVGA but on-board ethernet is nicer then wifi)

February

• FOSDEM — this year I was there and as always it was worth to be there.
• got own branches on Poky Linux git server to get easier way to contribute
• Koala Nano PC joined my devices and started discussion “is hdparm good for testing devices”. Now I know that it was not good choice. Maybe one day I will run better set of benchmarks.
• offered serial cables for BUG device for free — sent few during year. Now new BUGbase uses iPod connector so Handylink cables are useful only for JTAG.
• played a bit with syncing mobile devices and failed. OpenSync really needs new stable release.

March

• celebrated 5 years of working with OpenEmbedded — quite long time since Zaurus SL-5500…
• new interesting devices appeared on a market. I was considering buying TouchBook but after playing with 8.9″ netbooks decided against — I need bigger keys.

April

This was month of getting new toys:

• bought Citroën C3 car. Small one this time.
• BeagleBoard B7 arrived and got small case. I never finished it because I have 3 BB now.
• AVR32 powered Atmel NGW100 was next.
• then I found Cirrus Logic EDB9301 covered by dust in my friend’s office. Crappy board but it gave me possibility to hack on toolchain a bit when I was merging EP93xx changes from Martin Guy. And due to that I got Sim.One board few months later.

And they forced me to do some hardware updates:

• replaced my multi I/O card with other one — lost parallel port, gained 4 additional serials.
• bought and adapted 200W ATX PSU to power all those devices

May

• sheevaplug arrived — now it is my BitTorrent, IRC, Samba, NFS server. And of course it runs Ångström not Ubuntu (which was preinstalled). Friend recently shown me his industrial adaptation of sheeva — amazing stuff.
• wrote my (rather negative) opinion on Nokia N900 — did not know that they will offer me discount.

June

• LinuxTAG — this year I won BeagleBoard from Texas Instruments.
• Palm Pre SDK has leaked and I took a look at it under Linux (by copying from MS Windows environment). Some time later they released newer version which worked better under Linux.
• played a bit with netbooks/laptops and tried to write some kind of summary of things which define good laptop. Still use my Dell D400 anyway.
• merged EP93xx toolchain updates into OE — prefer to not having to do toolchain adaptations

July

• got offer from ST-Ericsson company to give a talk during their workshop
• wrote summary of my thoughts about Contacts application — Maemo5 has is quite nicely done but still many things from my post are not there.
• updated my Atmel board to 2.6.30 kernel and got everything (except CAN bus) working. It was nice improvement.
• hacked Connman UI for QVGA as we use it on a BUG and original version was not usable. Whole work done by changing GTK+ application when I never spent time on learning how it works.

August

• NHK-15 board arrived from ST-Ericsson. It is nice board with interesting features. Too bad that there is no kernels newer then 2.6.20 for it (to make full use of it).
• T-Com W500V arrived — I bought it to have VoIP functionality with normal analog phone. Need to move it to my room probably as it is too unstable to be used over WiFi :(

September

• Finally we found time for some vacations and visited my parents. It was nicely spent time.
• new BUGbase available worldwide — this one has WiFi, Bluetooth inside so not need for BUGwifi module. And no more HandyLink as iPod connector took it place. Too bad that BUGdock is not possible to buy (FCC not certified etc).
• got third BeagleBoard — this time from Texas Instruments Germany. I think that I won it during LinuxTag.

October

• I am officially OpenEmbedded e.V. member now
• Embedded Linux Conference Europe took place in Grenoble, France. I was invited by ST-Ericsson company as their guest. Had a talk about “Hacking with OpenEmbedded” which had good audience and discussion.
• ST-Ericsson Community Workshop was one day before ELC-E. I had a long talk about Poky Linux and OpenEmbedded in relation to NHK-15 board.
• on last evening in Grenoble I got email from Quim Gil about Nokia N900 discount. Too bad that it was not day before as I met few people with this device during ELC-E.
• wrote small note about using packages on embedded systems — it is really easy and takes lot of things from todo lists.
• changed theme on blog to Carrington one

November

• OEDEM 2009 took place is Cambridge, UK. We had OpenEmbedded e.V. meeting, discussed many things and this time we sent summaries of it quite fast.
• Richard Purdie released new version of Poky ‘pinky’ which included all changes done by BugLabs company. Most of them were written by me or cherry-picked from development version of Poky or OpenEmbedded.
• Got new client and as they are using Poky I am back on Poky Linux development again.
• After 8 years of no new apps development I started Protracker module player using Qt. One source works on my desktop and under Maemo5 SDK. Still need to finish it and create new UI for tablet devices as normal one is not usable.
• Got Sim.One board — EDB9301 moved to deprecated.
• Ordered Nokia N900 from DDP — got it after 4 weeks.
• Played a bit with Maemo5 SDK to check how Maemo5 look and how people are supposed to develop for it. Scratchbox sucks totally.2

December

• Nokia N900 arrived and I have to admit that it is quite nice device. Software is not so nice — already filled some bug reports.
• After few days of playing I sent N900 back to DDP — there were bad pixels on screen.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz 2009 Timeline was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. 2007 Timeline
2. 2008 Timeline
3. 2006 Timeline

In the last week I was hacking on OpenBSC to make GSM 12.21 Software Load usable for the ip.access nanoBTS. The difficulta was not within GSM 12.21 as Harald had it implemented for the Siemens BS11 BTS. The difficulty was that some messages need to contain paramaters and these come directly from the firmware file which ultimately means that one needs to understand the firmware file format to extract these. okteta came to rescue me and it was extremely good at doing this.

Okteta has not only the hex view one expects but also some useful utilities. Selecting a couple of bytes and the "Decoding Table" can tell you the different values in different endinanesses. So whenever I thought this is a file length, I would look into the "Decoding table", select bytes and see how many I selected and if it could make sense, it can calculate various checksums over a selection.

Thanks a lot for Okteta, it safed my day!

Ever since I have been sending out weekly change logs, I have been impressed by the consistent amount of development activity in the OpenEmbedded project.  Every week there are consistently over a dozen developers making changes.  Developers come and go, but the contribution level always seems healthy.  While this amount of development leads to some amount of churn and issues, this amount of development is also required to keep pace with all the new developments in the OSS space.  Not having to wait 2 years for the next big release is one of the big advantages of using Linux and OpenEmbedded.  Having access to the latest technology provides a competitive advantage for many products, and makes dealing with the occasional issues that come up an acceptable trade-off.  Coupled with a flexible and consistent build system, OpenEmbedded is the vehicle to build advanced products.  Yes, its hard.  Yes, you better budget for some system software development time.  Yes, you should get some help if you’re not an embedded Linux expert.  Yes, you can start with some canned vendor “BSP” that seems to work and is seemingly the low-cost way to go, but eventually you’ll hit a brick wall where you need some bit of functionality that is not there, and then you’ll start up the exponential curve of dumping lots of time into trying to make something work with little progress forward.  It is much better to count the cost up front, and do things right.

The second year as part time freelancer has passed.

Looking back the most significant things are:

• Signing the contribution agreement for gdb and glibc with the Free Software Foundation and trying to contribute to both projects. So picking future work will always have to be compatible with this.


• Hacked on OpenBSC. At first just simple stuff like a telnet interface, paging and later doing paid work for On Waves to add SCCP over IP, GSM 08.08 and other things for "toy" integration of OpenBSC into a real network.


• Mid this year I asked Nokia if they have work for me in Asia, later I started focusing on QtWebKit performance. Allowing me to improve QtWebKit and Qt (which will benefit a lot more users), but also to look into various tools like OProfile, memprof, memusagestat and just know netfilter queue's... more on this later.


• I have done my usual things on OpenEmbedded, working on landing patches through the patchwork queue, finally redoing the Bitbake parser and working on the Qt recipes.


• I didn't manage to make a Linux Kernel contribution. I wanted to write a i2c driver for a fm radio chip but I fried my hardware with a broken power supply, my MIPS patches are not yet done. So if you know of any Kernel work where stuff can be released/upstreamed please let me know!
  

I used to read books of Franz Kafka a lot, I loved his struggle with his father as I could relate to it. I loved the idea if writing letters in form of liberating myself. But in recent years as I got older and parents became less important.

So the last thing I will ever say about my "father" (and in case he reads it, as even old people can use computers...). I have no memory left of you, I have no picture left from my youth that displays you, I have no gift from you left in my posessings, I will get rid of your last name, You are a lonely old man. Good bye, I don't care for you.

The sprint is over for some time. You can see summaries of the different sessions and some slides in the wiki. Besides talking about QtWebKit and how to improve it (API, features, speed, make people aware that they can contribute, influence the release schedule, policies.. *hint*) the thing that has impressed me the most is unrelated to coding.

We all hear when someone from our Community is leaving the Qt department, and we always wonder how life will continue, who will fill the gap. In the last year a couple of new people got hired at Oslo and I'm really impressed how they find such capable people that are technically skilled and willing to move to Oslo! kudos!

Hello Astronomers

it is Solstice.

(this from Wiki)

Of the many ways in which solstice can be defined, one of the most common (and perhaps most easily understood) is by the astronomical phenomenon for which it is named, which is readily observable by anyone on Earth: a “sun-standing.” This modern scientific word descends from a Latin scientific word in use in the late Roman republic of the 1st century BC: solstitium. Pliny uses it a number of times in his Natural History with the same meaning that it has today. It contains two Latin-language segments, sol, “sun”, and -stitium, “stoppage.”^[2] The Romans used “standing” to refer to a component of the relative velocity of the Sun as it is observed in the sky. Relative velocity is the motion of an object from the point of view of an observer in a frame of reference. From a fixed position on the ground, the sun appears to orbit around the Earth.^[3]

To an observer in inertial space, the Earth is seen to rotate about an axis and revolve around the Sun in an elliptical path with the Sun at one focus. The Earth’s axis is tilted with respect to the plane of the Earth’s orbit and this axis maintains a position that changes little with respect to the background of stars. An observer on Earth therefore sees a solar path that is the result of both rotation and revolution.

The component of the Sun’s motion seen by an earthbound observer caused by the revolution of the tilted axis, which, keeping the same angle in space, is oriented toward or away from the Sun, is an observed diurnal increment (and lateral offset) of the elevation of the Sun at noon for approximately six months and observed daily decrement for the remaining six months. At maximum or minimum elevation the relative motion at 90° to the horizon stops and changes direction by 180°. The maximum is the summer solstice and the minimum is the winter solstice. The path of the Sun, or ecliptic, sweeps north and south between the northern and southern hemispheres. The days are longer around the summer solstice and shorter around the winter solstice. When the Sun’s path crosses the equator, the days and nights are of equal length; this is known as an equinox. There are two solstices and two equinoxes.^[4]

We used to observe and celebrate this event widely, the Romans moved the birth of Christ to Solstice to usurp it .

Now people celebrate fiction instead of fact ..unless your an Astronomer that is.

Praise the Laws and Happy Solstice.

– Ordono Mundi

ps. I think Solstice was yesterday, but oh well..

The discussion with Richard Stallman ended with requested silence.

I’d like to ask people to use the following meme for future such discussions:

La pensée ne doit jamais se soumettre, ni à un dogme, ni à un parti, ni à une passion, ni à un intérêt, ni à une idée préconçue, ni à quoi que ce soit, si ce n’est aux faits eux-mêmes, parce que, pour elle, se soumettre, ce serait cesser d’être.

– Henri Poincaré, University of Brussels (1909-11-19)

As for the conclusions. I believe this survey result and this analysis are conclusive.

What will next firmware release for N900 brings? That is common question asked by too many people. Some of them wants impossible things, some wants magic, some mention realistic things. But what really will be included? That’s other story…

I can write what I found in bugtracker (numbers at the end are internal build numbers):

• bug 3675: backup will loop nearly infinitely for directories containing pairs of symlinks that do not point to descendants because backup is following them — 2009.47-5
• bug 3728: Modest reports email username / password incorrect when it is correct — 2009.43
• bug 3762: Performance is unusable on IMAP accounts with a large number of messages in one or more folders (e.g. INBOX) — 2009.46-16
• bug 4851: libosso assumes that all ARM platforms has VFP instructions. — 2009.50-5
• bug 4917: wdgt_va_full_12h_time, wdgt_va_12h_hours should be replaced by wdgt_va_full_12h_time_am/wdgt_va_full_12h_time_pm and wdgt_va_12h_hours_am/
• bug 4976: Add option in modest to add/not add new contact when replying to mail — 2009.50-7
• bug 5161: Fix some compilation warnings in GNOME version — 2009.46-16
• bug 5309: Don’t show “Update All” if no updates are available — 2009.45-14
• bug 5314: Easy to enter ~ ^ ‘ ` ” symbols with 3rd row of special character view — 2009.44-5
• bug 5315: 3 Mobile SIM card rejected — 2009.47-20
• bug 5341: Can’t disable email notification – makes notification unusable if you receive lots of mail — 2009.50-7
• bug 5343: “More…” applications launcher does’t allow scrolling — 2009.44
• bug 5347: address book cannot import vcards from benq/siemens phones properly — 2009.47-17
• bug 5384: Confusing empty window shown after deleting unavailable catalogue — 2009.45-14
• bug 5388: Allow keyboard input to jump to an entry in a list (“type ahead”) — 2009.51-8
• bug 5413: microb doesn’t trigger onchange — 2009.46-2
• bug 5415: Contact widgets move to active desktop after merge — 2009.45-8
• bug 5493: When ISO sensitivity is set to automatic, ISO EXIF value in resulting image is 0 — 2009.47-17
• bug 5505: DTMF tones are not sent through SIP — 2009.43-2
• bug 5518: Bluetooth DBUS UI dialogs – wrong args in the example code — 2009.47-5
• bug 5523: High latency between UI and SIP events being sent — 2009.45-7
• bug 5527: Page is not rerendered when JavaScript actions increase page length — 2009.46-9
• bug 5545: Artifacts (visual noise) when tapping screen in Screen Calibration — 2009.46-16
• bug 5597: First Synchronization between N900 and Exchange 2003 Server always fails — 2009.49-5
• bug 5601: libsdl: Task switcher area can be a dead area — 009.47-17
• bug 5602: IP address field in WiFi advanced settings partially hidden (“Recuperar automáticamente direccíon IP” string too long) — 2009.44-5
• bug 5603: Vertical photos from other devices should fill more space when shown in portrait. — 2009.43-2
• bug 5605: “Already at minimum / maximum font size.” not translated — 2009.44-5
• bug 5607: Call forwarding settings not being saved — 2009.46-5
• bug 5626: Button style in Bluetooth file receive applet is wrong — 2009.47-5
• bug 5633: No hint that it is impossible to paste an strings containing non-numeric characters into a phone number field — 2009.44-5
• bug 5676: Audio does not sync with video (and is ultimately unsyncable) — 2009-44.4
• bug 5687: “Update” progress bar pane misaligned — 2009.45-14
• bug 5688: Improve zooming — 2009.46-9
• bug 5694: Application Manager moves to background after start when quickly clicking — 2009.46-5
• bug 5725: docpurge is not aware of /opt — 2009.46-7
• bug 5744: Volume slider doesn’t notice when you plug in headphones — 2009.45-7
• bug 5761: Bluetooth GPS reconnect dialog refuses to go away after clicking “No” — 2009.47-5
• bug 5768: Inconsistent layout on similar Sharing/VOIP applets — 2009.45-7
• bug 5857: Inconsistent keyboard behaviour when configuring a static ip address — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 5868: Games do not respect master volume (“sound effects” enabled though) — 2009.51-5
• bug 5870: Long emails can’t be read – distorted output on screen after scrolling — 2009.50-7
• bug 5879: Media player track search only matches the beginning of title/artist — 2009.42-9 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 5911: Shaking device switches between landscape and portrait modes — 2009.47-9
• bug 5945: URL proposals in browser disappear after some hours — 2009.50-7
• bug 5948: N900 needs to be rebooted if media player fails to play video (h264dec) — 2009.45-7
• bug 5972: Race condition with hardware shift key — 2009.46-7
• bug 5993: Home view blurs on triple-tapping the launcher grid icon — 2009.47-17
• bug 5998: Skype does not allow entering DTMF tones — 2009.44-2
• bug 6004: N900 sometimes ignores USB data cable — 2009.46-16
• bug 6017: Clicking the dashboard icon highlights it but does not open the dashboard — 2009.51-8
• bug 6039: Hanging application menu requires system reboot — 2009.46-5
• bug 6060: Application manager finishing an installation in background blocks keyboard input — 2009.51-8
• bug 6100: The menu item “copy” in the browser menu does not work — 2009.46-2
• bug 6107: Background image settings not restored — 2009.43-9
• bug 6138: Skype Support>Report problem leads to an error page — 2009.47-17
• bug 6139: skype: Call does not support DTMF tones — 2009.47-17
• bug 6203: Rotation in 42-11 is not as smooth as in 41-10 for some third party apps — 2009.47-23
• bug 6261: Delete dialog text missing a space — 2009.42-5 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 6268: The required #include directives are not documented for Hildon — 2009.51-8
• bug 6269: Can’t reuse the name of a bookmark that has been deleted — 2009.50-7
• bug 6349: New email notification leads to blank email instead of email itself — 2009.47-23
• bug 6361: ‘base’ and ‘more’ applications are visible sametime (messed) — 2009.51-8
• bug 6470: Charger not recognized when plugged in when in Touch & Key lock — 2009.42-2 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 6530: Drops WLAN connection to Linksys WRT610N after 10-15 minutes — 2009.48-5
• bug 6544: USA localization displays distance in kilometers — 2009.49-2
• bug 6570: Double-tapping “Inbox” sometimes opens ‘empty’ Inbox — 2009.46-16
• bug 6612: File manager fails to show folder sizes beyond 999,9 MB — 2009.45-14
• bug 6622: nokia messaging doesn’t synchronize selected imap folders — 2009.45-7
• bug 6669: Browser window checkerboards and repaints when navigated to from multi-task view — 2009.47-5 probably fixed it
• bug 6675: after failed pairing to bluetooth car kit bluetooth can’t be turned on — 2009.51-0
• bug 6752: Low power/battery beep does not sound if you’re on a call — 2009.46-5
• bug 6770: Can’t delete route waypoints in Map application — 2009.47-1
• bug 6771: Currently active connection should be first in Connections list — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 6792: FM radio transmitter does not play while USB cord is connected — 2009.51-5
• bug 6807: Wrong default region in E-mail accounts dialog — 2009.48
• bug 6811: Incorrect entries in the Birthday Smart Calendar — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 6877: Pin / lock code entry dialog reveals digits on backspace — 2009.43-9
• bug 7027: Changing to next week is very slow — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 7067: gtk-icon-theme-name unset — 2009.43-5
• bug 7073: Changing password on Exchange 2007 makes MfE go crazy — 2009.42-5 (not included in 42-11)

Impressive list isn’t it? I have to admit that this shows me one thing — integration of Maemo5 in OpenEmbedded will be done sooner then later. Why? Because I want to get such stuff as fast as possible without waiting for official firmware releases.

Will all those bug fixes end in next firmware? No idea as this is not granted:

(Note: 2009 is the year, and the number after is the week.)

A future public update released with the year/week later than this internal build version will include the fix. (This is not always already the next public update.)

Please verify that this new version fixes the bug by marking this bug report as VERIFIED after the public update has been released and if you have some time.

To answer popular followup questions:

• Nokia does not announce release dates of public updates in advance.
• There is currently no access to these internal, non-public build versions.

And one more thing — xulrunner 1.9.2 (version used by Firefox 3.6-pre) was tested on N900 and may land in one of next releases (rather not first one).

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz What will next firmware release for N900 brings? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. N900 arrived
2. Discounted Devices Program: N900
3. Things to check with Nokia N900

  BUG Software Release 1.4.3 is now publicly available.  The RC1.4.3.7

was approved as a production release.  Binary images are available at http://www.buglabs.net/download.  Sources are available at

svn://svn.buglabs.net/bug/tags/releases/R1.4.3.  Javadoc is available at http://bugcommunity.com/development/javadoc/r1.4.3/bug/.  And release notes are available at http://bugcommunity.com/wiki/index.php/R1.4.3_Release_notes. Some open source projects we've used in this release: - JNotify (http://jnotify.sourceforge.net) - JmDNS (http://jmdns.sourceforge.net/) - FM-Classic (http://fm-classic.sourceforge.net/) - avetanabt (http://www.avetana-gmbh.de/avetana-gmbh/produkte/jsr82.eng.xml) Thanks to everyone internal and external that helped make this release happen!

 

I just released sources of my Protracker module player. What this application is and what it can do you can read in one of my older posts: I wrote module player in Qt.

What are features:

• UI created with Qt Designer (so it is easy to change if you want)
• separate UI for desktop and other for Maemo5 (automatically selectable during build)
• Maemo5 uses 3 stacked windows just like UI Style Guide requires
• uses Phonon to play (with GStreamer modplug plugin underneath)
• fetching modules from modland archive
• author/song selection
• playing next song on song end (with looping on author)
• seeking (works only in desktop version — bug reported for Maemo5 version)

Things to do:

• error handling (especially fetching related)
• moving of download progressbar to QDialog
• playing counters
• favorites
• playlists

Everything licensed under LGPL v2.1 — same license as Qt uses. That because I used many Qt examples as base for my application.

How to get it? I made repository on Gitorius server — go there, fetch, try, comment, share improvements.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Released sources of my Protracker module player was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. I wrote module player in Qt
2. System updates repository online
3. Very small test of Maemo media players

So what have I been upto recently as I haven’t posted a non work blog for a while.

I have unexpectedly become an OpenEmbedded board member, wasn’t really expecting that as due to exhaustion I decided I needed to rest and recover instead of attending the GA. Its a pity I missed the GA but I wouldn’t have been much good there anyway. Anyway managed to preside over the first election using the online voting policy and that was a success. Second election for TSC is still in progress.

I have spent a week in Utah doing some work for Elphel, basically some training on OpenEmbedded and the first parts of doing a machine for one of their cameras in OE metadata. Interesting company and I have brought back to Scotland one of their cameras to play with. My brother is already considering the possibilities of using it to film badgers in the wild.

When I read about Utah on wikipedia I was expecting it so be really dull. But it seems Mormons aren’t the only inhabitants. The guys at Elphel took me out a few times and I had fun. Also shopping on the last day I found the rock/goth shop and bought some colours of nail varnish I had wanted but hadnt found in the UK. Also in Barnes and Nobles I found some lego sets I had never seen before, from the lego architecture range.

Last night I was at the Marilyn Manson gig at the O2 academy. It was the first time I had driven over to Glasgow. M8 was fun at rush hour, but I survived that to enter the Glasgow one way system from hell. In which some streets have changed direction since my GPS devices map was done. Anyway found the O2 academy and found the station carpark after a bit of a circle. Must say Strathclyde Transport make it nice and easy and even supply car park attendents to make escaping quick at the end of the gig. The gig itselt was awesome, and even the support band were ace. Was good to see Marilyn and Twiggy back together. All the goth/burlesque/emo stuff was gone and they played all the loud noisy stuff from the past. The stuff that most of the fans love. I did see a few confused looking youngsters who obviously never heard the early albums. There was the normal group of Christians protesting on the corner, but at least this time unlike Braehead they werent being violent and needing to be held back by the police.

Over a year ago I wrote a mail to LKML asking about Linux support for the turbo memory controller. All I got was silence.

It really should not be more then a NAND flash controller with the flash attached to it. I wonder what the problem is here. Neither the really active kernel hackers form the Intel Open Source Labs are giving any comment on it nor is any kind of documentation available for it. At least none that I was able to find.

I'm well aware that it is marketed as Windows Vista, and now Windows 7, only, but to be frank, its hardware. There is no technical limitation to write a driver for it.

Given that I heard once that Intel has a great rule in place that there needs to be a good reason if no GPL driver is available for Intel hardware I wonder what is the blocker here. If it is no technical reason it must be something else. A completely wild guess would be that Microsoft is paying for the exclusive rights and active harm of other systems. I thought we were behind such things. Anyone knows more and wants to enlighten me?

I would like to dedicate this moment to this version of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters.

Jono, our Metal fan, probably agrees with me that even the toughest person in the world of Metal can be brought to his knees, crying.

It’s a moment of reconciliation. What is it that we want?

I think more than ever, we do understand each other.

I don’t know.

As I have my Nokia N900 from DDP I have just one week to test does everything works properly — after that I am on my own.

So far I checked:

• microphone by doing some GSM calls. This also shown that GSM modem works for voice.
• GPRS data connections — from EDGE to HSDPA (did not checked speed)
• WiFi connections
• Bluetooth connections — synced PIM data from my Nokia E66 phone, used headset for calls
• FM transmitter — played some children songs today during driving with my daughter
• FM receiver — “FM Radio” application from repository works and plays (app still need work)
• TV-Out — playing movies on CRT and LCD television sets
• screen — to bad that I found bad pixels… but good that they are now not later
• headphones — just included ones
• USB charging and storage access modes
• normal charging (included charger and standard Nokia one)
• keyboard — works, things could be better
• SIM slot — my card works but slot itself feels cheap and reminds me one from Openmoko phones. I hope that they will get rid of it in next devices — my E66 has better one.
• microSD slot — works with 8GB card but mechanically it is disaster. Prefer to not use it too often as it can break.
• main camera — nice photos
• front camera — complete disaster… Now I know why there is no video calls. hint: install “Mirror” application
• internal storage

My feelings after first days? Hardware is nice and (as usual) there is a space for improvements:

• SIM slot should be changed to sliding one — current one can break too easily
• microSD slot also should be sliding one — look at Nokia E66 for example
• give fullscreen button back
• battery cover should be thicker so device will not bounce on camera when left on table
• move microusb to right and headphones to left side of device
• move lock slider to left side (so it will be top when one hand operated)

I hope that I did not missed anything on list of things to check. I excluded Irda from it because I do not know is it supported at all.

UPDATE: Eugene Antimirov posted that his N900 from DDP has a problem with playing videos — bug 6823.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Things to check with Nokia N900 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Video calls are important feature of today phone
2. Sending N900 back to Nokia
3. N900 arrived

Tomorrow I will send my Nokia N900 back to Nokia.

But I am not abandoning that platform. It is just because my N900 has few dead pixels on screen. They are grouped in area of “task switcher” button so were harder to notice.

Are those bad pixels or just dust? No difference for me as in both situations they are visible.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Sending N900 back to Nokia was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. DDP — does it has any sense?
2. Things to check with Nokia N900
3. Nokia N900 discount