My Symbian based Nokia E66 phone has Ovi Maps installed so one day I decided to make use of routing function in it when I was driving to the town (on a road where I did not needed to be guided). BT headset on ear, paired with phone and let’s drive.
At start road was selected quite properly, the problems started later. Many times it was recalculating route (the funniest was when I stopped at traffic lights it recalculated route and then made it again after driving for 5 meters). Directions changes information were also distracting: “on 200m go left” then “go right” when I reached point. Or “go left,right” when it was straight road or when I had to turn right at crossing.
I have to admit that after two tries I totally gave up on driving with it and switched back to TomTom device. But there is one good thing in Ovi Maps — it works quite good for walk navigation. I used it in many cities abroad and it handled. I hope that Maemo5 version will work at least that good as Symbian one.
Today I found some time and played with Maemo 5 SDK. As I am one of those who do not like Scratchbox I used official image for VirtualBox. After boot I landed in GNOME session of Ubuntu 8.10 and after few moments I got Maemo 5 started thanks to instructions from forum.
Ok, so let’s test it. As official release notes mentioned Polish translation I switched to it. What I saw was disaster… And the problem is that latest firmware has same version available. Examples:
Desktop (here we have wdgt_va_24h_time)Statusbar clock (wdgt_va_date_long this time)Calendar - new entry (wdgt_va forever!)Calendar - today view (today in Polish is wdgt_va_date_long)Calendar - week view (who will tell which day is today?)Calendar - settings (looks nice - except of wdgtbdsave)sfil_ap_name is good name for applicationWorld clock (but which cities is has?)
Note: I did system update by using “apt-get update;apt-get upgrade” followed by “fakeroot dpkg --configure -a” (because sbox root ‘emulation’ was too weak for “libosso-abook”). As a result translation “6.0+r7250+0m5” were installed (“calendar-l10n-plpl” package). Scary, isn’t it?
Next thing which I looked at was instant messaging — which I was not able to use since there was no Jabber support. It has ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, MSN, Sametime, Salut, QQ, Groupwise, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo but no Jabber. I even installed “telepathy-extras” but that added me yet another MSN and still no Jabber… Probably other package needs to be installed but why it has to be? OK, maybe SDK image does not contain same packages as device one but why it supports such poor thing like Gadu-Gadu out-of-box?
Contacts app is improved when compared to Maemo4 one — finally something closer to application which I described some time ago in other post. Has some bugs (I can not enter “+48123456789” as number because only digits are available (and ‘p’ for internal numbers).
Looks like there will be a long list of things to report as bugs when/if I will get my N900 (so far it is somewhere in deep nowhere). Why not reporting them now? Simple — I want to be able to check them on device itself.
Other things I will check next time. Now it is time to sleep.
Today I got nice package in post office — Simplemachines One developer board (Sim.One in short). It is based on Cirrus Logic EP9307 processor with Maverick Crunch floating point unit. I got board with #0006 serial number.
Board is much better then EDB9301 which I used so far for EP93xx toolchain tests. What is on board:
EP9307CPU
64MB ram
8MBNOR flash
MMC slot (connected over SPI so ~250KB/s max)
2 USB host ports
VGA out port — XGA 8bit or SVGA 8/16/24bit
serial port in RJ-45 instead of standard DB9 (but cable is in package)
audio in/out jacks
many connectors with different signals — will have to check schematics for that.
By default board boots into Debian ‘lenny’ system stored on 4GBSDHC card. But there are problems with it as this is MMC over SPI so speed is very limited (about 250KB/s only) and it time outs quite often so I plan to move to USB stick during next days.
Next step will be adding it into OpenEmbedded and running Ångström as base distribution.
Yesterday Richard Purdie released maintenance version of Poky ‘pinky’ branch. It contains mostly fixes to get it into buildable state in all distributions released since 3.1.1 was done.
It got over 50 changes during 1.5 year of development. Most of them were done by me as part of my work for Bug Labs company and their BUG Linux distribution. As policy of handling fixes requires to make them also in development branch it was more then just make a fix for ‘pinky’ — I also had to take care of ‘elroy’ (which had to be next stable version) and ‘master’. Some time ago support for ‘elroy’ was dropped anyway.
If you look at ‘git log’ output you will notice few authors other then just me. Thats because if fix was present in other sources such like Poky ‘master’ or OpenEmbedded I cherrypicked it and adapted to make it apply with keeping original author credits.
Did I add something new into it? Yes, few things were added:
SPLASH support in task-poky so you can use own bootsplash tool instead of psplash
warning for ‘/proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr’ not being set to 0 (which would break qemu)
Python 2.6 compatibility
BP/BPN variables which were used in Jalimo repository which we use as one of overlays
automatic resizing of ext2/3 images if rootfs do not fit in default size
What will future bring? I hope that new stable branch for Poky will be created in next few months so developers will be able to switch. I know that some companies did a move from ‘pinky’ to ‘master’ (or snapshot of it + own changes). We at Bug Labs are moving into OpenEmbedded ‘stable/2009’ as we need newer software and want some functionality which is not present in ‘pinky’.
During last weekend I was in Cambridge, UK where OEDEM 2009 took place. This time it was organized by Phil Blundell from Reciva company (they make nice Internet radio devices, new ones do also FM and DAB).
I travelled by Berlin and Stansted due to fact that at those days there are no flights Londyn — Szczecin on Friday and Sunday. That gave opportunity to meet Henning and Robert in Berlin and discuss misc things during travel.
Friday evening was spent in Red Lion pub in Histon. Nice, tasty English beers and interesting place. Both ways with taxi because of raining and price was comparable to public transport.
On Saturday we walked to OEDEM place using Phil’s notes and got there with just one short cut missed (we found it next day).
What was discussed during meeting? Many things, we had also OE e.V. meeting during which we voted for few new members, chosen new board, decided on sponsoring and selected Robert Schuster for PR guy.
Each entry was already summarized so I provided links for those who did not read OpenEmbedded development mailing list. Discussion was hot, many subjects had different opinions from audience and it was great.
As usual it was nice to meet friends from OE in person and for few of them connect face to name. And again I did not had any spare time to look around the city of OEDEM — too many things in small amount of time. But maybe another time :)
In February 2007 I started officially working on Poky Linux. It was due to my contracting work for OpenedHand company. In August 2008 Intel acquired them so I ended direct development of Poky in October 2008.
But that does not mean that I ended supporting this build system. I started contract work for BugLabs company and they are using Poky ‘pinky’ release. During that time I fixed some bugs (mostly by backporting fixes from Poky ‘master’ or OpenEmbedded) but most of time did not touched main development branch.
Until now — I have customer which uses main branch for own development. So looks like I will provide some new code for development branch during next weeks.
Half year passed since I started using Sheevaplug at home. Currently it is my IRC station (with self-compiled irssi due to Perl problems in OpenEmbedded) and today it will also became central file server as I just received 1.5TB Samsung drive + USB enclosure for it.
NFS kernel daemon for sharing storage for my devices
Yes, two storage serving daemons. Samba will provide access to multimedia data when NFS will be more used for developer board root file systems and such.
Now hard drive is working connected via ESATA but after copying it will be connected to Sheevaplug instead of my workstation.
Just to cut questions — I bought Welland ME-752H enclosure. It allows to use Serial ATA 3.5” drives and connect them by USB or ESATA interfaces. The bonus part is 2 port USB hub so I will not be out of USB ports in Sheeva ;)
