In this edition...

Front Page
- MeeGo Conference 2010 Early Bird Events
Applications
- Fixing broken Python Qt apps
Development
- locationd - event-based notification of location proximity
- Linaro 10.11 released
- Valgrind on ARM
- How to make modern mobile applications with Qt Quick components
Community
- Maemo Community Council at the MeeGo Conference
- MeeGo Conference bridge building competition
- Maemo Meeting Minutes from Thursday, November 11
- Get involved with creating next week's MWKN issue at MeeGoConf
Devices
- In-car (IVI) demo of MeeGo
- N900 MeeGo chroot, part 3
Announcements
- Facebook Status Updater - effing
- OSGB - show location in UK Ordnance Survey coordinates
- Shortcut Stash: app launcher, bookmark & folder opening widget
- mFakeCaller - spoof incoming calls for getting out of tricky situations, meetings, ...

Front Page

Applications »

MeeGo Conference 2010 Early Bird Events

As MeeGo Conference 2010 attendees filtered into the D4 hotels the weekend before the conference, a number of informal learning and collaboration sessions, called "Early Bird Events," got underway in the Ballroom at Ballsbridge Towers. Sessions included Qt overviews, Qt Creator & QML tutorials, a hands-on Linux Developer tools seminar, hackathons, and UX design discussions, among other topics. Quite a number of the almost one hundred participants had one and a half days of pure development immersion. Expectedly, several people created their own round tables scattered around the hotel. The atmosphere was one of excitement and fun as everyone connected with old friends and talked about new possibilities. It is because of events like this - those that happen 'outside' of the regular conference schedule - that innovations withing the development community happen.

Applications »

Applications

Development »« Front Page

Fixing broken Python Qt apps

A bug in the packaging interface seems to be responsible for an errant promotion of the SIP module for PyQt4 which has caused problems for Python Qt applications. Council member Attila Csipa and maemo.org webmaster Niels Breet are working on the best solution: Upon further inspection - apparently somehow something pulled in the sip and common packages from devel into stable (wasn't me), which is very bad. Will notify Niels to fix this. In the meantime, Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh has a suggested workaround, which *may* help; if you're relatively comfortable with executing commands as root.

Development »« Front Page

Development

Community »« Applications

locationd - event-based notification of location proximity

Locationd is an application that generates alerts based on your current GPS location. I've been working on an application that can generate alerts based on your current location. In its current state, it will generate dbus signals when a user-defined point of interest is nearby. I'm now learning how to create a desktop widget that can watch the dbus notifications and do something useful with them, but even as it is, it can still find interesting use, perhaps with dbus-scripts. The .deb is available from the developer's own repository. As usual, care should be taken when installing and using packages from unvetted sources.

Linaro 10.11 released

Jamie Bennett has announced that Linaro 10.11 has been announced. Linaro "aims to provide stable, optimised and tested tools and code for multiple software distributions to use and hence reduce low level fragmentation and improve the optimisation of embedded Linux- software". This release includes a completely rebuilt archive using GCC 4.4.4 and the latest ARM optimised tool chain, the Linux kernel version 2.6.35, support for cross-compiling, a new hardware pack way of building images, 3D acceleration improvements, u-boot enhancements and initial device tree support, a new QA tracking structure, the list goes on.

Valgrind on ARM

Lucas Maneos has announced a working build of Valgrind for ARMv7. This requires a CPU capable of running the ARMv7-A instruction set (Cortex A5, A8 and A9). Valgrind provides fairly complete coverage of the user space instruction set, including ARM and Thumb integer code, VFPv3, NEON and V6 media instructions. The Memcheck, Cachegrind and Massif tools work properly; other tools work to varying degrees. He is currently looking for feedback from people who are using it.

How to make modern mobile applications with Qt Quick components

Kate Alhola discusses Qt Quick Commonents and why using them to create UIs is better than GTK/Hildon. What UI toolkit I should use for mobile application development has been a top issue since Maemo5/Fremantle SDK alpha release. There were two choices available, GTK+/Hindon and Qt. The amount of choices has been increased since then and caused a lot of confusion among developers.

Community »« Applications

Community

Devices »« Development

Maemo Community Council at the MeeGo Conference

Your whole Maemo Community Council will be available at the MeeGo Conference this year, and have opened themselves up to a number of communication channels to make sure you can get in touch; including a talk.maemo.org thread: During the conference, however busy we are we will try to check this thread. If you hear or read something and want us to go and ask questions, post them here. If you want to find out how we've got on (or whether we've fallen out and are not speaking each other), you'll find it here. We'll try to keep some sort of real time reactions in here. Blogging our well thought out responses will come afterwards: this will be a bit raw. If you're attending the conference here in Dublin, be sure to seek them out and say "Hi!".

MeeGo Conference bridge building competition

Day one of the MeeGo Conference's Early Birds Event culminated in a bridge building competition. Ten teams, 100 lollypop sticks and 1 glue gun each produced a number of whacky designs. Dave Neary organised and judged the contest: The winning bridge, made by the team “The Unbreakables”, Casper van Donderen, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen and Sivan Greenberg, survived the shopping basket we used as the breaking tool, with 25 1L bottles of water on top – impressive! The bridge was eventually broken when Chani tried to hang off it.

Maemo Meeting Minutes from Thursday, November 11

There was a good meeting in #maemo-meeting on IRC on November 11. Attendance was high and a lot of subjects were covered by the council, the maemo.org staff and the community attendees: There are still a number of open-ended questions pertaining to the current maemo.org "ownership" and infrastructure. Now that the m.o staff is employed by the community, a few philosophical shifts must be made. As of today's meeting, we have decided to create a Read the minutes at the link below.

Get involved with creating next week's MWKN issue at MeeGoConf

This issue of MWKN was produced in the MeeGo Conference breakout area, with a number of people coming along to help; and Tim Samoff helping Ryan Abel and Andrew Flegg with editing duties: Getting involved as a contributor, or an editor (to help with putting the issue together), couldn't be easier; and we'd love to have more people involved. Please feel free to get involved ahead of time or - if you're going to around on Sunday evening - let me know, and you can either come along and help edit the issue; give us moral support or just get a flavour of what it is we do. If you'd like to get involved, either as a contributor or as an editor, and couldn't make it; links are in the article.

Devices »« Development

Devices

Announcements »« Community

In-car (IVI) demo of MeeGo

A MeeGo PC, specifically designed to be integrated into automobiles, was recently released by GENIVI Alliance. The demo in the video shows an early release of the IVI UX likely, running on an Atom-based platform. The IVI UX faces similar challenges to providing a good "kitchen" machine experience, for example on the O2 Joggler; but without the mobility features.

N900 MeeGo chroot, part 3

alan bruce continues his series of blog posts on getting MeeGo running on the N900 in a chroot environment with part 3, which covers Alan's new, streamlined MeeGo image and improved scripts. In my first post in this series, I walked you through making a Meego chroot image from the raw images provided by Meego. In the second post, I gave you some rough scripts for starting the Meego UI in a Maemo chroot with the assistance of Easy Debian. In this post I'll present my new MeeGo image with the newest Meego UI and all the pieces installed to run without Easy Debian. I also present new scripts that streamline and improve the process. The chroot approach offers a lower-impact way to test and program on MeeGo, as it doesn't require rebooting out of your primary environment.

Announcements »« Community

Announcements

« Devices

Facebook Status Updater - effing

Richard Merren has released the first versions of a new app; put together with Qt Creator: I have written a Facebook status update application, which can now be found in the extras-devel repository under the name "effing". Following the Linux model of "do one thing, and do a half-assed job of it" (OK...I might have modified that a little bit), I wanted a simple app that shows my current Facebook status and lets me update it. As the package is in its early stages, and still in Extras-devel, care should be taken when enabling the repository and installing software.

OSGB - show location in UK Ordnance Survey coordinates

Ordnance Survey is the British Government's official mapping agency, and Talk user "Dr Random" has released a new application to turn your current GPS position into OS coordinates; making it easier to find your position on the highly detailed Ordnance Survey (paper) maps. In releasing it, he said: There are no options or anything, it just displays the current coordinates, altitude (from the GPS, unfortunately I can't correct that as I don't know what the GPS does internally), satellite fixes, and speed. It also writes a kml file to the directory with the path followed whilst it is running. This is always called osgb.kml. Currently, the app is shipped as a zip file attached to a Talk thread. This isn't the most secure, or vetted, distribution mechanism and so extra caution should be taken.

Shortcut Stash: app launcher, bookmark & folder opening widget

A new 'quick' application launcher called Shortcut Stash is being developed by Peter Pykäläinen. Shortcut Stash can open bookmarks and browse folders right from a handy Home widget. Shortcut Stash is an app launcher, open bookmarks and browse folders widget. (Have a look at the attached images) Help is needed in creating a .deb package.

mFakeCaller - spoof incoming calls for getting out of tricky situations, meetings, ...

mFakeCaller, by Ryan Faulkner is a simple application that fakes an incoming call. Using the application, users can spoof a "Private number" with tone and vibration. Use it just like the default phone app to fake phone calls when you're in a pinch. mFakeCaller is a very simple application that fakes an incoming call - for those awkward situations when you just need some excuse to flee! Or to make your mate think his hot girlfriend is calling you a lot, so he breaks up with her in a rage of jealousy and you can chance your arm with her on the rebound. "He said what? Hmm I heard he's been drinking a lot lately. You know, he never really understood you.. but i do... " </sleaze> The application is currently in Extras-devel. Usual caveats apply.

« Devices