Marcin Juszkiewicz

Few days ago Nokia N800 tablet emulation was released into public. Richard integrated it into Poky so now we have QEMU which can be used not only to test ARM images on ARM Versatile or Sharp Zaurus but also to run on Nokia N800 tablet. Of course it is not limited to Poky images — Maemo boots very nicely on it :)

Poky

Booting Poky is easy: runqemu nokia800 after building of “poky-image-sato” for “nokia800” machine. After few minutes (needed to create NAND Flash image and boot into JFFS2 rootfs) Poky desktop appears:

Maemo

Booting Maemo takes few steps more now (will be improved).

1. Edit “scripts/poky-qemu-internal” script and in line 154 change KERNELCMDLINE to boot from “/dev/mtdblock3” instead of “/dev/mtdblock4” as Poky do not use Maemo’s “initfs”.
2. Get copy of “config” flash partition from N8x0 — simple “cat /dev/mtd1ro > config.mtd” is enough. Bad news: it does not work :( And the one which works for me is not distributable as it does not came from device but was pre-generated somehow.
3. Transfer it to the desktop.
4. Grab OS2008 firmware image from Maemo website.
5. Unpack firmware image to get kernel and images of “initfs” and “rootfs”.

6. Use poky-nokia800-flashutil to generate NAND Flash image:

   poky-nokia800-flashutil initfs.jffs2 maemo-image.qemuflash initfs poky-nokia800-flashutil config.mtd maemo-image.qemuflash config poky-nokia800-flashutil rootfs.jffs2 maemo-image.qemuflash rootfs

Then “touch maemo-image” and run one command: poky-qemu zImage maemo-image to boot it.

Status

Basic emulation works. There is no networking yet, DSP code is not emulated and few other limitations. But it is work in progress so expect improvements.

How to get it

Patch alone can be fetched from Poky repository.

Linux binaries of QEMU with N800 support can be built with Poky by bitbake qemu-sdk command. They will be also part of Poky Linux SDK.

UPDATE: poky-nokia800-flashutil instructions are fixed (thx to Yasser)

UPDATE: there is second part of that story.

Three months ago I wrote post about situation of my Nokia 770 tablet. Today I looked how situation looks with non-Maemo systems.

Flashed recent Poky Linux build. Device booted into nice Sato desktop which I am familiar with. As it was expected — no WiFi support in base system. Why? Licensing problem.

Nokia tablets WiFi stack in implemented by:

• firmware loaded to the chip at runtime (when interface is brought up)
• closed source wi-fi stack in module umac.ko
• open source glue layer cx3110x which forwards packets between firmware and umac.ko over SPI and implements support for linux wireless extensions API.

We also use 2.6.18 kernel from OS2007 instead of 2.6.16.27 from OS2006. With some hacking on “umac.ko” module from 2.6.16.27 + patching “cx3110x” driver I got module which loads on my device. But then other problem appeared — WPA Supplicant is unable to connect to WiFi interface due to lack of wireless extensions support. And Nokia implementation is closed source :(

On IRC I got information that there is a patch which adds WE18 support into cx3110x driver. Fetched, applied but situation is the same:

[ 7206.999359] umac: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
[ 7210.030334] CX3110x chip variant: STLC4370
[ 7210.319458] CX3110x: firmware version: 2.13.0.0.a.13.14
[ 7210.319580] Loaded CX3110x driver, version 0.8
root@nokia770:~# wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
ioctl[SIOCSIWPMKSA]: No such device

and then reboot :(

So it looks like my 770 will get Maemo OS2006 again and will end it’s life as console for simple games + music player. Too bad that it hard to make it work with other systems.

BTW: I wonder why Maemo.org forbids GoogleBot… It is really hard to find Maemo related things with Google :(

UPDATE: Niels Breet (X-Fade on #maemo) pointed me to maemo webdevs discussion which clarify that GoogleBot index Maemo websites. My fault — sorry guys. It is hard to find current informations in wiki but there are plans to move to MediaWiki and reorganize content.

This year I decided to strip my blog from CSS code used for making design (as part of CSS Naked day).

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your .

And I think that my blog do that quite well. OK, it has few bugs in code so no W3C validation but it is partially WordPress fault ;D

OpenEmbedded builds usually take lot of time as not everyone has build machines with multiple CPUs (or multi-core CPUs). But how to make them faster and make better use of multiple CPU cores?

Solution is in two BitBake variables:

1. PARALLEL_MAKE — this is passed to make so setting it to “-j X” is handy (where value of X depends on number of CPU cores)
2. BB_NUMBER_THREADS — amount of BitBake threads used to run tasks such as do_fetch, do_configure, do_compile etc. Do not set too big value or machine will melt and you will loose control over it ;)

Which values are sane? On Core2Quad I use “-j 4” and 16 BitBake threads. On dual core Athlon64 I use less threads (only 4) but this machine is also my desktop so I like to be able to work :) Sometimes I have two builds locally running with those settings and it is still usable.

How to check which one are good for you? Run htop on one console and builds on another. If CPU cores are busy and it does not hit swap too often then it is OK.

NOTE: this post was written in 2008 and may not fit newer versions of OpenEmbedded/Yocto based build systems.

Thanks to work done by Jiri Benc in his “ukeyboard” alternative control panel for language and regional settings I am able to present Polish layout for N810 hardware keyboard.

Polish chars are on Chr+ (where is one of “acelnosxz”).

Also few other combinations are added:

Fn+Space = | Chr+Space = Tab Chr+j = [ Chr+k = ]

Original functions of “Chr” key were dropped — there is no small on screen keyboard after single press of “Chr” and no option to enter other national chars (like “öïüõôōő” etc).

Click here to simple install.

Previous post about moving to London was 1st April joke. We plan to move from Poznań but not outside of Poland. So sorry guys — we will meet in UK one day but it will be short visit not staying.

I have to admit that I did not thought that so many people will take that post serious. First congratulations came less then half hour after publishing, then IRC greetings… Probably this is because it is so near to true — as person working alone at home I miss contact with coworkers (as this often ends in brainstorming) and OH office has some interesting gadgets :D

Why “moving to London” was chosen? I did not had a good idea for April’s fools joke and Ania (my wife) gave me this suggestion. Other ideas were:

• starting to work for Microsoft Canada (I had such offer month ago but no one would believe in this)
• dropping OpenEmbedded/Poky in favour of T2 from TimeSys (also hard to believe)

And few others also too hard to believe so I wrote what I wrote. Sorry guys.

After long discussion with my wife we decided to move to London, UK.

Why such move? Many reasons — I will name a few:

1. Many of our friends are already there.
2. I miss leaving home to go to the office (especially since I have small daughter).
3. I miss contact with coworkers.
4. More gadgets available at work.
5. End of hardware problems as company provides it.

When will it happen? I already discussed it with Matthew and it will happen in June/July (to be able to travel to GUADEC with all OH guys).

UPDATE: No — I will not move to London. This post is (maybe a bit cruel) 1st April joke. More info in other post.

One of my home computers exports lot of music over Samba (everything as one share). In next room I have HiFi system where I like to play some of them. So I decided that N810 (or even 770) should be enough for it.

Default Media Player

Simple application with support for simple media library (internal flash, memory cards and Internet links). Playing from my Samba collection is possible but require adding files (no way to add folders) so playing more then one album can be real PITA as file requester always starts in “Documents” folder instead of last selected one.

Canola2

Nice looking application with support for simple media library (one folder in internal flash, memory cards and Internet links). No Samba support at all.

UKMP

No idea does it supports Samba or not — after installation is just told “no albums found, bye”. I wonder how people are supposed to use it… Maybe it require “faking” some albums before first start… I have to admit that I have no idea — UKMP homepage contains release notes not documentation rather.

Also it’s post installation script do very nasty things:

rm /media/mmc1/covers/songlist.txt
rm /media/mmc2/covers/songlist.txt
rm /media/mmc1/covers/*.avi.jpg

cp /usr/bin/MediaCenter.py /usr/bin/MediaCenter
cp /usr/bin/uktube.py /usr/bin/uktube
cp /usr/bin/ukmp.py /usr/bin/ukmp
rm /usr/bin/MediaCenter.pyc

chmod a+x /usr/bin/MediaCenter
chmod a+x /usr/bin/uktube
chmod a+x /usr/bin/ukmp

rm /media/mmc1/covers/songlist.txt
rm /media/mmc2/covers/songlist.txt
rm /media/mmc1/covers/*.avi.jpg

For me this is good example of “I do not have idea how to build package” and “I do not care about users data”.

Kagu

Simple(?) interface, no possibility to tell where to check for media files…

MPD based streaming

Other solution is streaming from Samba machine (with “mpd” for example) and then playing stream with even default media player. But then I would have to use two programs just to be able to play songs (one to control “mpd” and second for playing stream). I did not tested this way (yet).

Local mounting music collection

I can probably install smbfs and smbmount packages (or rather build and install) and then play from “local filesystem”.

Other way is use of FUSE to mount Samba shares but (as usual) fuse packages are not available for Maemo.

And what will happen when shares will be not available? None of those players will know that it was remote folder and will probably poll() it for updates…

Summary

Nice device but still no media player which will be able to play my media directly.

Arghhhh…