Marcin Juszkiewicz

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.

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.

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…

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.