Marcin Juszkiewicz

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.

So what was on topic:

• OE e.V. meeting (minutes)
• Establishment of technical steering committee (summary)
• OE and Poky (summary)
• Software development for OE derived distributions (summary)
• Learning to love distro flags, or, What’s a distro for? (summary)
• State of the art in package management (summary)
• Splitting the recipes tree (summary)
• Future plans for stable branch(es) (summary)
• Bugtracker Discussion (summary)
• Hosting arrangements (summary)
• Death to checksums.ini? (summary)
• BitBake Future Roadmap (summary)
• OE Core Changes (summary)

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 :)

I just ordered N900 for 250€ directly from Nokia thanks to discount which I got recently.

Plan to write review after first days of use so stay tuned.

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.

It got several updates today:

• Linux kernel 2.6.32-rc4 from Open-RD git tree
• U-Boot 2009.08 from mainline Marvell branch
• Samba 3.3.9 for sharing data over network
• 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 ;)

Some time passed since ELC-E took place. I did not wrote about it before because I was busy with other things and wanted to wait for presentations to be available.

The whole event took place in Grenoble, France on 15-16 October. I was there as a guest of ST-Ericsson company and had one talk there.

There were just 3 tracks so it was much easier to choose which talks to attend. I was on:

• Jon Masters “Porting Linux” — interesting and it was nice to see the person which do LKML summary podcast
• Grégory Clement “How We Got a 3D Application Booting in 5 Seconds Under Linux” — author told about few tricks they tried in a bit boring way
• Sascha Hauer, Marc Kleine-Budde “U-Boot-v2” — project looks nice and I hope that my devices will migrate to this one day
• Cedric Hombourger “Why OpenEmbedded Proved a Good Foundation for MontaVista” — lot of people attended, interesting talk it was. Nice part was when Cedric told that they checked all of currently available free build systems and chosen our one.
• Samuel Ortiz “Linux Wifi Solutions for Mobile Platforms” — lot of technical informations but now I know more about Linux WLAN stack that I did
• Matt Porter “Mythbusters: Android” — nice talk about this system and which parts of it needs lot of work to be usable on other devices then just phones. I was also interested in it as I had Android on Nokia N810 during ELC-E but finally decided to go back to Maemo.
• Alessandro Rubini “Use of the Fast IRQ (FIQ) in ARM-Linux” — again lot of technical informations but I really like how Alessandro do his talks.
• Alex de Vries “Technical Features and Components of Open Source Build Systems” — nice summary of what open embedded distributions lacks and what needs to be done. Was fun to listen how Alex tries to not say “open embedded distributions” too often ;)
• Pierre Pronchery “Hackable Devices: The New Possibilities of Open Hardware”
• Michael Opdenacker “Small Business” — most of small companies which attended have OpenEmbedded services in a list of what they do

I planned to attend few more but decided that Friday will be a good time to see Grenoble in other places then just hotel and conference centre.

What was a nice surprise for me was the amount of people familiar with OpenEmbedded. Most of people which I spoke with used it for misc projects. I had a talk with one guy about “stable” branches and how our view differ. For me “stable/2009” branch is what has to be buildable all the time but can take some updates, he prefers project branches with halted development and just very important fixes related with project.

My “Hacking with OpenEmbedded” talk got some interesting questions. Mostly about Maemo5 support but I do not know too much about it’s status.

Was it worth going? Definitely yes. Met friends, got new contacts, discussed about different projects. Was good to be there. I just hope that next time it will be in a place easier to get to — I had to fly thought Amsterdam so whole trip took me about 12 hours (each way). But on return trip I had interesting talk with Ruud Derwig during flight :D

Will something from ELC-E lands in OpenEmbedded area? Few things:

• I had a talk with Atmel guys about their work on updating linux4sam website and their OpenEmbedded support. AT91 devices will get 2.6.30 kernel in OE and it will land also in “stable/2009” branch on which they plan to base their repository (instead of old stable branch).
• my work on ST-Ericsson NHK-15 board starts to appear in official metadata. I still need to test it on board but base is added.
• one company plans to release OMAP3 based developer board soon and this will be their first use of OpenEmbedded

Yesterday Robert Schuster sent report about OpenEmbedded e.V. general assembly which took place in Berlin some time ago. One of things which was done was voting for new members so now I am officially OpenEmbedded e.V. member :)

On Friday evening I got email from Quim Gil (Nokia) with information that I was selected for Nokia N900 device discount. Yes, even I got it. Not decided yet will I apply for it or not (need to check cash state).

Why “even I”? Some of Maemo people know my opinions about it. And it does not stopped me from buying N810 for full price. I also have 770 (got it for free from Nokia guy with words like “sorry, we are out of N800”). I sort of ignored all previous developer programs (I sent email when the 770 one was done).

During ELC-E conference I played a little bit with N900. It feels a bit too heavy for me but I was nicely surprised by keyboard — it is even usable when I though that it will be worse. Whole system feels more advanced then Diablo (finally more proper Contacts application). But there are still some annoying bugs: Contacts app does not always scroll to just added field or lack of portrait mode. And that launcher without any categories…

Basically I will treat N900 not like “Internet tablet” but as a Smartphone. I tried to use 770 and n810 and the software most of time did not allowed me to make it fit for me.

I know that I have some bugs to check on it. From what I saw there is a Polish translation of Maemo5 so some bugs will be harder to check. So first days would be probably full of bugzilla work.

Will I use it as a each-day-phone instead of my Nokia E66 (Symbian)? No idea yet but I would like to because it is more open platform then S60 so with some time spent I can adapt it more to my needs.

So far my list of things which I expect is not so long:

• SyncML synchronization over the Internet for PIM data (I use ScheduleWorld a lot)
• IMAP4 offline capable mailer which will make a use of screen resolution (no less then 10 emails in list view)
• Calendar with Agenda view (all events from a week at once in a list)
• Widgets for calendar, birthdays, todos (so it will give functionality of S60 Today screen)
• one place to disable/enable roaming for data (no more having this option in Ovi Maps, mailer, IM app etc)
• navigation with routing
• time defined switching of profiles with running applications on change of profile, enabling/disabling bluetooth (like BestProfiles on S60 do)

And few other things which I forgot.

I am sure that it will take few Maemo5 updates to satisfy this list and that I will have to life with it or try to write my own apps for that. Time will show. I know that for start N900 will be degradation not advancing.