Marcin Juszkiewicz

I just called official Nokia shop and asked when they will sell internet tablets N800 and N810 in Poland. The salesman on other side told me that I am first one who asks about it. He promised to ask in company — tomorrow I should know the answer.

But why I think that it will be “We do not plan to sell internet tablets in Poland.”…

For my last trip to England I took Nokia 770 tablet. There was no time to buy London city map so I had to solve it somehow.

After installation of Maemo Mapper I downloaded some maps from Google Maps service. I have to say that MM is really good written software — quite easy to use, powerful and useful. On return trip I was in a book shop and looked at paper city map of London — it was less usable then Maemo Mapper :)

I wonder how this application works with GPS unit as this should remove a need for looking at street name plates. Maybe one day Nokia will start to sell their tablets in Poland so I will be able to test it on N810.

I arrived at Luton airport about 12:50, grabbed luggage and got the bus to Victoria station (it costs 8 quids). From there train to Bromley South and short walk to the hotel.

According to the guy at reception I was first one (not counting people which came a day before). So I dropped bags, took a shower and came directly to OH office.

Office… Guys building Falcon Millennium from LEGO bricks, lot of strange devices on shelves (old E-ink readers, old PDA such as Apple Newton MessagePad and different developer boards). I toyed a bit with Nokia devices, played Metal Slug with Tomas using very nice dualpad controller. It was funtastic evening.

Next day started with breakfast (at least hotel used this name). Then grouping in the office and car trip to the Hop Farm when whole fun planned for this day had to take place. I have to admit that sitting on ‘driver seat’ (from European point of view) and not having driving wheel was not a problem for me. No minds like ‘they going to kill us’ etc related to driving on the wrong side of road.

The Hop Farm… Shooting (rifle and pistol — I prefer pistol), arching… QUADS and 4x4 driving!

Combine quad bike with mud — what will you get? Lot of pure fun (maybe not exactly pure due to being muddied from head to down) — especially second run was great. Quad was sliding, drifting, rotate when I tried to make a turn at full speed. It was really best part of day.

Other nice part was 4x4 driving — blind folded. One drives and someone behind him gives directions which way to turn. During after lunch run place was so muddied that we were able to take very sharp turns which were not possible before. But the real fun started after we did blind fold driving… We got offer to just drive — no limited seeing etc. Gods… This Jeep reacted to driver moves very nicely, especially during sharp turns which were quite easy to do — just turn driving wheel to the max and accelerate ;)

Big thanks for Sid (Matthew’s wife) for organizing whole event — it was really nice experience :)

After whole day of fun we came back to the office. Some interesting discussions took place and we made a trip to the Tiger’s Head for a dinner. The taxi driver surprised me with Christmas wishing in Polish — we are everywhere ;)

Food was nice, so did beer (the even had Laffe). Matthew gave gift for each of us. I got ‘panic button’ ;) And I am curious which keycode it sends.

Next day was return trip. This time not alone as part of it I did with Dodji. We came to Bromley North station then switch on Groove Park and ended on London Bridge. From there we did a walk to Liverpool station where we split as he was going for EuroStar train and I to Stansted airport.

Tomorrow I will go to England — this time for OpenedHand Xmas party which will take place somewhere near London.

This time I plan trip with more attention to details. First connections from Luton airport -> Bromley. It will probably be bus to Victoria Station, then train to Bromley South and finally walk. Return one from Bromley to Stansted airport will be two trains + walk (Cannon Street Station -> Liverpool Station) + train to airport.

As I had no time to buy London city map I will take Nokia 770 tablet with Maemo mapper and set of downloaded maps so I should not have problems like I had in Birmingham during GUADEC.

Finally I booted ARMv6 rootfs in QEmu (used 2007-11-21 CVS one). All changes will be available in Poky in next few days.

OpenedHand Linux (Poky) 3.0+snapshot-20071206 qemuarm ttyAMA0

qemuarm login: root

root@qemuarm:~# uname -a
Linux qemuarm 2.6.23 #11 Fri Dec 7 19:59:57 CET 2007 armv6l unknown unknown GNU/Linux
root@qemuarm:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 3 (v6l)
BogoMIPS        : 524.28
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 6TEJ
CPU variant     : 0x1
CPU part        : 0xb36
CPU revision    : 3
Cache type      : write-through
Cache clean     : not required
Cache lockdown  : not supported
Cache format    : Harvard
I size          : 4096
I assoc         : 4
I line length   : 32
I sets          : 32
D size          : 65536
D assoc         : 4
D line length   : 32
D sets          : 512

Hardware        : ARM-Versatile PB
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0000000000000000

During last days I spent time on adding ARMv6 related stuff into Poky.

First problem was lack of ARMv6 support in QEmu which we use to generate binary locales (you need at least 128M of RAM to get localedef working on device). All information which I found in net was info from Paul Brook that he has ARMv6/v7 emulation working but can not release it due to license of ARM documentation.

But finally he got signed permission to show code to the world and QEmu got ARMv6/v7 support. Refreshing all our patches took some time for me and Richard ‘RP’ Purdie but finally we got it working. Binary locales for ARMv4t and ARMv5te worked but not for ARMv6 ;( The solution was quite simple — adding “—cpu arm1136” into qemu-arm invocation. As a result I added new variable into “bitbake.conf” — QEMU_OPTIONS which set proper “—cpu” value.

So now, when we have binary locales working for all our devices the next change was possibility to generate only UTF-8 locales (does someone use other ones?). Change was quite simple and that is how “LOCALE_UTF8_ONLY” variable was born.

Now I have other thing to solve — get “qemuarm” (our ARM emulation machine) working with ARMv6 rootfs (I have to test it on something — all my ARM devices are ARMv4/v4t or v5te only). There is “RealView” emulation in QEmu which handle it but it lack many features so I have to rather try to get “VersatilePB” working with ARMv6. I just hope that messing with Linux kernel sources will not be too hard to get it working…

During night some selected people got link to page on one of OpenMoko servers. After accepting EULA they got gllin package.

What is in package? Gllin binary itself, starter script and set of libraries from OM2007.1 release (OABI). They used “—library-path” option of dynamic linker to use old libraries on OM2007.2 system:

lib/ld-linux.so.2 --library-path /home/root/gllin/lib:/home/root/gllin/usr/lib /home/root/gllin/gllin.real -low 5
lib/ld-linux.so.2 --library-path /home/root/gllin/lib:/home/root/gllin/usr/lib /home/root/gllin/gllin.real -periodic 1

What I do not like is location where those files are stored - $HOME should not be touched by packages… But they will probably change it later.

Now who first will share informations how good it works for him/her?

I do not know how it is in other mobile phones but there is one annoying thing in my Sony Ericsson k750i phone. It is how it handle audio…

As phone has FM radio integrated I use it very often. When I go somewhere I usually plug headset (which was provided with phone) and turn on radio. The problem is when someone calls me… The phone starts ringing but it does not use headset for output :( Yes — ring tone is played on internal loudspeaker instead of headset. Good part is that radio playing is interrupted so I have occasion to hear ring and press headset button to receive call. Bad part is that radio is interrupted from time to time sometimes even without calls so it is hard to find out sometimes is it radio problem or incoming call.

If there will be a day that I will switch to Neo1973 (and I hope that it will be GTA02 version) then at least that problem will be solved. Or it will be solvable due to openness of platform.