Handhelds, Linux and Heros

Since OpenSync switched to CMake build system I had to get along with CMake in the Maemo SDK. I have to admit the fun was limited. In fact CMake has some advantages over autotools - most notably: It is much faster. One major drawback is that it is more complicated to use pkg-config with it.

I have never worked with CMake before, but OpenSync had some quite good examples how to check and support additional libraries. So I hacked cmake support for some basic Maemo components (libhildon, libosso) and Maemo-like Debian packages.

My cmake files can be found here:

http://www.kernelconcepts.de/~fuchs/maemo/

CMake itself is in the official extras-devel repository at maemo.org. Just add this line to your sources.list:
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel chinook free

The package is available for all other SDKs from the same location.

The DpkgDeb.cmake file is based on the updated DpkgDeb.cmake by Mehdi Rabah. The other ones are based on random files found in OpenSync SVN.

I have made an installable package for Maemo Sync, but do not expect too much. Its a basic port of the current Multisync-gui to Maemo. It is only tested to so far that the GUI starts up and registeres correctly. The fact that I had to use cmake for building Maemo software caused some headaches here… the quality of the source distribution package is still quite bad.

I also did not decide if I want it to become a project forked from Multisync-gui or to maintained with Multisync-gui adding optional support for Maemo environment. The always changing OpenSync API would be a reason to stay with Multisync-gui, but the fact that I have different opinions about UI design, Glade is involved and cmake are reasons for making it a separate project.

Binary package and sources are located here. You also need the OpenSync packages from Graham’s daily repository.

Another minor improvement of the GPE application packages in this repository is that latest Starling supports OGG playback. You only need to have an OGG plugin for GStreamer installed. The mogg package provides this for example.

Any feedback is welcome - if you manage to sync data with either the command line tool msynctool or using Maemo Sync please drop me a line. I would like to collect information which sync peers work with latest OpenSync and how to set up these.

Enjoy!

I made some progress porting the multisync-gui to Maemo. The idea is to offer an easy to use graphical user interface for synchronizing data between the Maemo based tablets and other devices. The OpenSync framework that is used offers several plugins for interfacing data sources already. The most interesting ones are the two SyncML ones (HTTP server and client) and the GPE plugin we can use for the PIM applications on the Maemo device.

Currently it is far from beeing useful, but there are some windows to make screenshots now :-) The first thing I want to archieve is to be able to sync PIM data from a Series60 cellphone.

Speaking about Series60 - I received my Forum Nokia Champion diploma today which came with a great target device for syncing experiments :) Many thanks to Nokia for this nice reward and for the great Forum Nokia Champion program and to Nils who suggested me for it!

Making a useful mobile Logic Analyzer is quite a challenge, but the basic needs are there. sump.org has a nice VHDL design and Java software for a 32 channel Logic Analyzer
based on a Xilinx Spartan FPGA. The whole design is GPL licensed. The current VHDL implementation is available for several Xilinx FPGA evaluation boards and uses a serial port for communication with a device (usually a PC) running the GUI software. The FPGA board takes care about sampling and buffering of the sample data before it is transferred to the controlling device.

Robert Schuster of tarent did a great job to get the Java software running on a Nokia N800 and on the Neo1973.

It was not too complicated to make the VHDL part work on an inexpensive Spartan-3E eval board. This hardware of course does not really fit the needs for two reasons: First it is too big to accompany a mobile consumer device such as a N810 or the Neo 1973. Second it does not support other input signal levels than 3.3V which is a real showstopper. A better hardware design that fits the needs based on a small FPGA industry module, a battery and some line drivers would be easy to do… but that’s something for a new story later :-) Before that I need to get a serial connection from a N810 to the board and check how the software performs on this device…

The board I used for my test was a Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kit.Ther is quite some room for improvement since a a major share of the FPGAs blocks are unused and it does not yet make much of use of all the nice features on the board such as external RAM, flash, display and USB.

Additional screenshots can be found at http://scap.linuxtogo.org.

There are some cool things going at LinuxToGo - maybe the most notable is that the Linux on Smartphones project started to become active after sleeping for more than one year. The basic idea of this project / freesmartphone.org is to create a place for collecting, defining and implementing open standards for Linux driven smartphones. That means doing for mobile phones what freedesktop.org does for the desktop environments. Its quite interesting to take a look - there is quite some content yet.

Finally there is a new project some developers (including me) were waiting for a long time. The mobile-linux project joins efforts of projects porting Linux to all sorts of mobile devices. One important change in contrast to a similar but older project is that mobile-linux aims on merging its work upstream. It does not only provide a GIT repository but also a mailinglist for discussing kernel related topics. It would be cool if some more project joined this initiative in order to get in touch with each other.

There is a new release of gpe-sudoku which includes a lot of fixes and minor improvements. It is supposed to work in a plain GTK (non-Maemo) environment too and the Maemo variant works much better now. Packages for Chinook and Bora are avalilabe from here. Please report bugs!

Enjoy….

Did I ever complain about the fact that days are too short to write about interesting things? Time to do so… but well, finally I managed to write a short summary about latest updates:

Thanks to Nora we have a major improvement of the design of the GPE website. I even managed to update the PDA image on the index page last week. GPE is going to work on Maemo Chinook as soon as it is ready I guess - Graham and Christoph are doing a good job sorting out the remaining issues and building new binary packages. I’ll work on this a little bit soon I guess, I’ll get a N810 from the Maemo device program as well.

The new kernel concepts website is online now and finally has both German and English language support as well as a much better look&feel and a nice new shop. The only major task remaining is the English translation of all the shop contents.

There are some more updates… family updates, workstation upgrade (Intellistation M-Pro to Z-Pro) and a lot of minor updates, but nothing that is really relevant to the public :)

Have a good time…

Graham announced a set of stable GPE binary packages for both Nokia 770 and N800 (the Gregale and Bora distributions). I just tried the Bora packages and can confirm that the packages seem to be fine. I have updated my install files for easy installation of all GPE components both from stable and experimental repository. These can be found here. Please don’t forget that you have to add the SDK feed before installing the applications - there is an install file for it too.

Many thanks for the packages and happy hacking!

 Update:  There are more binary packages avalilable: The Ångström distribution has updated GPE packages with all GPE 2.8 components  in its unstable feed now.

The release 2.8 of GPE is complete and available for download. The new release comes with a large number of bugfixes and improvements such as an improved calendar, many fixed import/export and synchronisation issues as well as support for Maemo in additional components like Starling (the new audio player) and gpe-filemanager.

The full announcement can be found here.

Many thanks to all the contributors that made this release possible!

Enjoy… and happy hacking :-)

Its quite some time ago since I managed to write down some lines about what’s going on here… so here a few bits that might be interesting in a few lines:

My open source activities are currently focused on getting some releases out in order to prepare new releases of GPE and GPE Phone edition. Today I released gpe-applauncher 0.9 which comes with one important new feature: Easy to use hotkey management. You can define applications to be launched on a certain keypress or internal functions to be triggered in a simple ini-like configuration file. That makes it much easier to adapt gpe-applauncher to various devices with all different button layouts.

Another activity is playing around with different UIs for gpe-applauncher - I hacked a widget for an extremely simple list-based launcher, but I’m not yet happy with it. You should be able to guess from the screenshot how it is intended to work:

Sorry no BLING yet, but maybe some time in future… ;-)

Another one of todays releases is machined which supplies device specific data (currently only battery and charger information) via DBus to applications. I guess I’ll add some more features… but it is not intended to replace HAL - its meant to be a specialized tool for G(PE)² and maybe GPE too. The main focus of machined is to keep it small and simple.

Apart from these releases I’m trying to get rid of a real monster: A DEC LPS20 turbo printserver… if someone is interested in spare parts for such a machine, please let me know before Wednesday. And no, there is no chance that I ship this one anywhere:-)

Some more nice things that happened lately:

Graham built up to date Maemo (770 and N800) packages from GPE SVN. They can be found here. These include gpe-filemanager and Starling (the GPE audio player) now as well as latest libmimedir.

Goxboxlive published an experimental G(PE)² image for the HTC Universal which is available here together with quite al

After several unpleasant topics I have good news again:

The LiPS Forum just released their first set of standards to the public. These include the LiPS Reference Model, Address Book and Voice Call backends and user interface service specifications. The most interesting fact here is that these are based on… GTK 2.x.
The full announcement can be found at the website of the LiPS Forum here.

This is a quite important step for our GPE Phone Edition project which works on an Open Source implementation of these standards and of course for the development of Linux based phones in general too.

LiPS is an industry consortium which defines standards for mobile phones based on Linux and related Open Source solutions. In the current members list we find some quite well known companies in the Open Source landscape.