Then we had another Linaro Connect (in Cambourne) and nothing happened. But in previous week I got an email that there will be interview with me in Orlando and that I should choose time slot for it. So I did and here is the result:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajNSrQfFcPA

What we were talking about? Check it yourself. And please comment did you enjoyed.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I got interviewed during Linaro Connect was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Sunday

Travel, travel, travel… Usual way — bus from home to Berlin airport (SXF this time) where I met with Henning ‘woglinde’ Heinold to donate my old Linksys WRT54 which I got donated few years ago to be able to use my Zauruses wireless. Router had to be in use on OpenEmbedded stand at LinuxTag, Berlin — go there and visit them at booth 7.2b 112.

Again flight was with Easyjet. It is cheap airline but with speedy boarding it is good enough to go with. Bad side is that it lands at old terminal 1 in Budapest so I had to go to hotel by my own.

Evening was Canonical only meeting where there was a presentation of some things which will go into 11.10 Ubuntu release (nearly same to next day keynote). After food, discussions and finally sleep ;D

Monday

Sessions started — I attended few:

• Ubuntu LEB documentation
• cross toolchain user stories — my own session where most of time Micheal Hope was telling us about requests which Toolchain WG got
• user stories for nano image
• DMB regular meeting — I became Ubuntu developer during it!

During evening was ‘Meet & Greet’ social event sponsored by Openstack and Freescale. Nice way to catch with people. Especially when you meet old friends which you never met in person ;D I met Marek Szyprowski which whom I was writing to Polish Amiga paper magazine named ‘eXec’ (but website with similar name does not have nothing in common now). We talked for quite long time about misc things. Also met some other folks, refreshed faces memory etc.

Tuesday

Sessions:

• cross toolchain user stories (again) — we discussed notes from previous day, decided on some details and created work items so I can start working on it
• Ubuntu LEB documentation (also again)
• Linaro Ubuntu LEB process for 11.11
• GDB as cross debugger

As you see LEB was topic of a day. And it was not everything — next day was another session.

Evening was taken by The Linaro Technical Showcase sponsored by IBM. What was there? Many interesting things:

• Arnd Bergmann was talking why class4 SD card can be much better then class10 one
• Freescale Landing Team was presenting i.mx53 Quick Start boards
• Ash Charles from Gumstix was presenting their new miniboards with DM37xx cpus and few carrier boards
• Paweł Moll from ARM was presenting Cortex A15 running from two biggest FPGA chips. It had just 11MHz clock but it was enough to show Doom game running on connected monitor.
• Oxlab guys shown their work on Android and how you can hibernate BeagleBoard
• ST-Ericsson guys presented Snowball boards — we had a talk on some hardware details
• Konstantinos Margaritis shown what kind of difference can be between armel and armhf ports on same hardware
• Angus Ainslie presented Samsung developer board and we had interesting discussion about it

I do not remember all presentations — those ones interested me most. ARM one was amazing — huge FPGAs which were able to emulate A15, A5, A9 just by booting with different MicroSD card… And it is not related only to CPU emulation cause there were two expansion slots on mainboard so FPGAs can became graphics card with Mali core flashed into. Second board was ‘simple’ A9 with Mali and some OpenGL(ES) demo was running there.

And again — new faces to join with names. Talked with Ash Charles about discussions in past when I helped Gumstix developers with OpenEmbedded, Angus Ainslie from ST-Ericsson was working for Openmoko at time when we had cooperation and so on…

Wednesday

Woke up early… What to do after 6:10? Go swimming! So I went to Royal SPA and spent some time in swimming pool and sauna so day started nicely.

Sessions:

• automated cross-buildd system/service
• Ubuntu LEB Star Rating documentation — my session again on how we want to rate level of support of member boards
• ARM Linus interface 3 — attended just to check how kernel developers are discussing how to improve arch/arm/ situation

Met Mark Brown with whom I was working in OpenEmbedded project and after lunch I went to do some sight seeing with Paweł Moll. Budapest is nice city and I have to came back here one day.

Team dinner somewhere in the city was quite good. We had a fun going back to hotel when ~half of us used phones to navigate though city ;D

Thursday

Sessions:

• arm and other archs certification program — Canonical has certification program of machines which came with Ubuntu pre-installed. I have to check at their tools.
• ALIP mini-distro and build system user/developer stories — interesting discussion
• cross-toolchains for the ARM hard-float ABI — will have to provide them for Ubuntu and other but it is doable
• next steps with multiarch in Ubuntu — where do we go and how

Evening was sight seeing with local guides. We saw parlament building, chain bridge, castle area and ended in interesting pub.

Friday

Ending day and nearly no sessions today:

• port to the ARM hard-float ABI — Ubuntu armhf someone?
• Linaro Review of LDS week
• easier access to -dbgsym packages

Some of people already packed and left, rest will go to have fun at UDS party.

Summary

It was my third UDS and I feel that it was best one. I had two blueprints to handle and both had great discussions which ended in many notes and work items. There was lot of people both from Ubuntu community and Linaro teams. I met many developers, some old friends, went to so many sessions that it took me most of time (I do not remember is list in post is complete).

It was nice to see amount of ARM netbooks at people hands — mostly Genesi Smartbooks but also several Toshiba AC100 ones. I think that it shows that times are changing and who knows… maybe at next event I will not use my ASUS UL30A laptop.

And this is another UDS with some added hardware. This time it is Pandaboard A1 which can replace my EA1 at my work for Linaro. Probably will keep both running one to another but one (EA1) with Ubuntu and second (A1) will be used for misc tests.

Now it is a time to drop laptop in hotel room and go for party!!!

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
UDS-O was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Why moved? New features, out of box support for Polish language, no problems with getting root access for applications, big community behind project were main reasons. And more… I have now custom kernel (Netarchy 1.3.0.2), DPI changed to 210 (from original 240) with use of Font Changer and normal font replaced by Ubuntu one (also done in Font Changer).

I was updating my phone from one nightly build to another. From one RC to other and today moved to final version. Upgrading usually went fine, but each time I had to reinstall custom kernel or change back to 210 DPI but that’s how it works. I will probably check other alternative builds one day but today I am satisfied with Cyanogenmod7.

But as this is final version then maybe I will find some time and (after discussions with our Android magicians) will do build of it with Linaro cross compiler — who knows, maybe will give few more percent of speed extra?

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Cyanogenmod7 released was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

This time I was working on backport PPA which contains current (11.04/natty) cross toolchain packages for Ubuntu 10.04 ‘lucid’ and 10.10 ‘maverick’. I got it working and populated recently. After announcement I got first bug reports so now I am trying to fix all issues.

But such events are not only work. It is also good time to meet people which you know, known but not met and others. One day I went to Andrea Gallo to say hi and was introduced to Rajeev Kapoor (also from ST-Ericsson). I was surprised that he remember me from times when I was working on NDK-15 support in Poky (around May–July 2007). I heard some forgotten stories, discussed current ST-E board work and we went to other groups.

Other day I met Jim Huang and Matt Hsu from 0xlab. It was first time when we met face to face but we were working with each other several years ago during Openmoko times. Now they work mostly on Android and shown me hibernation support for ARM. Beagleboard went to sleep and got back to running state in nearly no time.

Wednesday evening was nice. I went to Barcadia with guys from Texas Instruments where we met Texrat (Maemo community). Got some food, beers (“Arogant Bastard Ale” was interesting but even after second one I am still not worthy) and had some discussions. But what that place had was awesome: still working coin-up arcade machines from early 80′s! There were Space Invaders, Moon Patrol and several others. I lost few coins on Galaga just to notice how awful player I am ;D

On Thursday we went for a dinner to Medieval Times. It was a show with some kind of food. Next day someone nicely described it as “good bad experience” — I hope to not having to watch this kind of entertainment again.

It was good event. This time I was not so jetlagged like during UDS-N in Orlando so got sleep times better. And I do not suffer too much now.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Ubuntu/Linaro platform rally in Dallas, TX was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

In October I got Nokia N900 discount offer and I decided to take it. Device arrived month later and I got hooked. Finally device which I can use daily for my network activity without having to carry additional cellphone (like it was with Nokia 770 and N810 tablets). Maemo community existed already and I was a part of it. As there were developers already equipped with N900s there was a constant flow of new applications, themes, tweaks and hints. Platform was living. Nokia provided few system updates, some of them even gave some nice new features.

But at same time it was known that amount of love for Nokia N900 at headquarters is near zero. MeeGo was announced just few months after device release so it was known that there will be very limited support level and that some things will never be done (like Ovi Maps with voice navigation).

So I started slowly to look at market to know which way to go for next cellphone. Windows Mobile 6.x was out of question as this is platform which gets out of market now. Windows Phone 7 is fresh, strictly controlled so I do not want to go there — let it first get some devices, applications etc. Symbian? no way — been there already. Ok, Nokia N8 looks nice but it is still Symbian. MeeGo is not yet market ready when it comes to phones and even when mystic N9 will be released then it will not be pure MeeGo but rather some kind of mix of open components from MeeGo + huge set of closed sourced applications written by Nokia. And who knows how long it will be supported…

So I looked into Android. Installed NITDroid on N900 to play with FroYo and it looks and behaves quite good. There are lot of communities (usually around families of devices), custom system images are something normal for popular devices (so if vendor does not support upgrades to newer OS versions then community usually do). Also lot of friends already use Android powered devices (cellphones, tablets etc) so there are lot of hints from them what to choose when it comes to hardware or software.

Which cellphone to choose? I have few candidates:

• Nexus S – brand new device, Google supported so should get few OS releases, runs latest Android
• Nexus One – nearly year on market, also Google supported, runs Android 2.2, newest version “should be out in few weeks”
• HTC Desire – nearly same as Nexus One but this time as official HTC device. Android 2.2, should get at least 2.3 version from HTC
• HTC Desire HD – hardware similar to previous one but bigger screen
• HTC Desire Z – Desire + hardware QWERTY keyboard
• Samsung Galaxy S – Android 2.1 but 2.3 is promised

Which to buy? Nexus S looks good and I will be in US in January…

And this will be my 4th cellphone running Linux…

UPDATE: added Samsung Galaxy S because vendor promised Android 2.3 — but it depends when it will be available.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Going to Android was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

So far I used mostly ARM developer boards from ST Microelectronics/ST Ericsson, Atmel, Cirrus Logic, Intel, Simple machines, Bug Labs, Texas Instruments. Some were better then others etc. But what ideal developer board should have? Let me try to create a list:

• 2 serial ports (one can be null modem, second should have RTS/CTS/DTR lines)
• working Ethernet not placed on USB bus (so it works when USB does not)
• powered USB host port (more then one would be great)
• USB device port
• JTAG connector
• one power input — +5V or +12V — other should be forbidden as those ones can be taken from PC PSU which can power multiple devices at same time
• SD/MMC slot — even if it is over slow SPI (like on Sim.One — 250KB/s max)
• GPIO pins
• I²C bus
• SPI bus
• keypad with Up/Down/Left/Right + Enter at least
• easily reachable reset button (pins to short are acceptable as micro switch can be put on them)
• few LEDs controlled by system
• all connectors put on one or two edges of board — top one + one of side ones are ok (Atmel at91sam9m10-ekes for example)
• mounting holes (so board can be mounted on A5 sheet holder for presentation at stand)
• backup battery for RTC
• U-Boot
• quite fresh kernel (not NHK-15 due to 2.6.20 kernel which is 3 years old now)

What to avoid:

• female serial port connectors (Atmel NGW100) — most devs will find 3 null modem cables before straight one
• flat cables which connect “debug boards” with main board (Openmoko phones, NHK-15 from ST Ericsson)
• RJ45 connectors for serial console (Sim.One) — DB9 or properly done USB->RS232 adapter on-board are best
• placing connectors on all edges (BeagleBoard — but it had to be cheap)
• non standard bootloaders (U-Boot is what I prefer)
• Ethernet on USB (Bug 2.0) — it is hard to use when you have problems with USB Host
• jumpers (Atmel boards)
• non standard connectors (Bug r1.2 and it’s Handylink crap — next versions use iPod connector which is easier to use)

I am trying to not cover should developer board contain display with touchscreen or not as it depends on type of board. But if screen is present then more then QVGA (320×240) would be nice (WVGA anyone?). Some kind of video out connector can also be used but would be nice to have one of VGA/DVI/HDMI so normal PC monitor can be used — Composite video and S-Video require searching for some kind of TV…

Which boards are my favorites? There are few:

• FriendlyARM with WVGA screen — cheap product which gives access to everything needed to start with embedded Linux
• Atmel AT91SAM9263-EK — my first own developer board
• BeagleBoard Cx — has own problems but I like the power of it

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
What makes a good developer board? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Same day I played a bit with it on Nokia N900. Results were nicer then with using “dbus-monitor” or “dbus-send” but speed was a bit slow (due to Python used). But there was a hope: Mickeyl already started rewriting “mickeydbus” in Vala which should give speed boost.

Yesterday I built “mickeydbus2″ for Maemo5 using OpenEmbedded (more about it in next posts) and played with it. Few bugs appeared, but I fixed some, Mickeyl did rest and coded few improvements.

But what this app really do? It has 2 modes basically: listener and method inspector/caller. Example listen session:

Nokia-N900-42-11:~# mdbus2 -sl
[SIGNAL] org.freedesktop.DBus.NameAcquired  /org/freedesktop/DBus  org.freedesktop.DBus
( ":1.928" )
[SIGNAL] com.nokia.mce.signal.tklock_mode_ind  /com/nokia/mce/signal  :1.8
( "locked" )
[SIGNAL] org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.PropertyModified  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_slide  :1.12
( 1, [ ( "button.state.value", false, false ) ] )
[SIGNAL] org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Condition  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_slide  :1.12
( "ButtonPressed", "cover" )
[SIGNAL] org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.PropertyModified  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_kb_lock  :1.12
( 1, [ ( "button.state.value", false, false ) ] )
[SIGNAL] org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Condition  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_kb_lock  :1.12
( "ButtonPressed", "cover" )
[SIGNAL] com.nokia.mce.signal.tklock_mode_ind  /com/nokia/mce/signal  :1.8
( "unlocked" )
[SIGNAL] com.nokia.mce.signal.system_inactivity_ind  /com/nokia/mce/signal  :1.8
( false )
[SIGNAL] com.nokia.mce.signal.display_status_ind  /com/nokia/mce/signal  :1.8
( "on" )
[SIGNAL] org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.PropertyModified  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/bme  :1.12
( 2, [ ( "battery.reporting.current", false, false ), ( "battery.charge_level.percentage", false, false ) ] )
[SIGNAL] org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.PropertyModified  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_kb_lock  :1.12
( 1, [ ( "button.state.value", false, false ) ] )
[SIGNAL] org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Condition  /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/platform_kb_lock  :1.12
( "ButtonPressed", "cover" )

Asking for bus and methods:

Nokia-N900-42-11:~# mdbus2 -s org.bluez
/
/com
/com/nokia
/com/nokia/MaemoTelephony
/org
/org/bluez
/org/bluez/899
/org/bluez/899/any
/org/bluez/899/hci0
/org/bluez/899/hci0/dev_00_1D_82_32_0A_22
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# mdbus2 -s org.bluez /com/nokia/MaemoTelephony
[METHOD]    org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable.Introspect() -> ( s:none )
[METHOD]    com.nokia.MaemoTelephony.SetCallerId( s:none ) -> ()

And there is also interactive mode with tab completion:

Nokia-N900-42-11:~# mdbus2 -i -s
MDBUS2> org.bluez /com/nokia
/com/nokia                 /com/nokia/MaemoTelephony
MDBUS2> org.bluez /com/nokia/MaemoTelephony
[METHOD]    org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable.Introspect() -> ( s:none )
[METHOD]    com.nokia.MaemoTelephony.SetCallerId( s:none ) -> ()
MDBUS2>

How to get it on your N900? Enable “extras-devel” repository and install “mdbus2″ package. Report bugs, send us fixes, ideas, improvements. Git tree is available.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
MDBus2 for Maemo5 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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.

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

Then Openmoko arrived and forked IPKG — new project got OPKG name. It was written by OpenedHand and Openmoko developers. Their main goals were:

• callbacks for GUI package managers
• GPG signed repositories
• fixing bugs

Many things got changed, OE patches got merged, new bugs was added. Those who use CLI version of opkg (so far the only usable client) lost some functionalities — for example there is no progress bar when packages are fetched.

For last few months OPKG is in unmaintained mode again and I think that this is some kind of curse on embedded market package managers.

Some time ago I discovered that when many (>50) packages needs to be upgraded then opkg segfaults during process and this is not a matter of going out of RAM as I have ~400MB free. Today it did not gave value of PATH for post install scripts… I wonder what else can be found ;(

What are other options? So far I know two — dpkg + apt or rpm + yum. First one costs few megabytes of space, second one require also Python so it is not acceptable for most of our targets. Both also require rebuilding of everything :(

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Embedded package managers sucks was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

First problem was bootloader — I am not so familiar with RedBoot so it took me a while to get it to load kernel from TFTP server. For reference: proper command is "load -v -r -b 0x01000000 /zImage-ep9301" where “/zImage-ep9301″ is name of file to fetch. If you will get “Unrecognized image type: 0xe1a00000″ message instead then you forgot “-r” switch (RedBoot do not know format of zImage kernel). I got some hints from HitchHacker Guide to ENP-2611 page.

Second was Linux kernel as support for EDB9301 was not present in 2.6.29 version. Quick search on LAKML gave me patch which adds EDB9301 support. But even with this patch kernel does not wanted to boot due to different machine ID (454 instead of 462) — small patch to “arch/arm/tools/mach-types” solved problem :D

Now I have board booted with root over NFS and wait for “base-image” build to end to have rootfs which will fit that device better then Openmoko one ;D

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
EDB9301 hacking was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website