In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • Upcoming vote for Maemo Community Council and referendum on the future of maemo.org
  2. Applications
    • Preview of MeeCast (from the people who brought you OMWeather) for Harmattan
    • gPodder 2.18 in Extras-testing needs votes; and problems with package promotion?
  3. Development
    • Shared Harmattan repo for developer libraries
    • Requirement for Ovi: single instance Harmattan apps
  4. Community
    • Future of maemo.org: "The end is coming"
    • Future of maemo.org: A "modest proposal for a direction for maemo.org activities"
    • Future of maemo.org: Are the options for the Maemo community really limited to not-for-profit or death?
    • ...and 3 more
  5. Devices
    • Unlocked, SIM-free Nokia N9 in UK - soon for £520 for 16GB (ouch)
    • Progress in getting CrystalHD video acceleration on ExoPC
  6. In the Wild
    • HP stop producing webOS devices. Exploring options to "optimize value" of webOS
  7. Announcements
    • Jeremiah Foster running for Maemo Community Council
    • Scrobbler for Maemo; on N900, N9 and N950
    • Sandora falling sand game for Harmattan, available from COBS
    • ...and 3 more

Front Page

Upcoming vote for Maemo Community Council and referendum on the future of maemo.org

One of the bigger long-term issues resulting from the Elopocalypse in February is the status of maemo.org and its funding through next year. RM Bauer is looking to have a conclusion to these issues with a referendum as part of the election of the next Community Council: Community members should be considering whether they want to stand for Council. Anyone who has karma of over 100 is eligible to stand, including employees and sub-contractors of Nokia. When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to maemo-community (which they must reply to to accept) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list. A further announcement will be made when nominations open, with more information.

A number of corrections have been pointed out to Rob, following his initial post. Nokia have not said they will not fund the servers past 2012, nor will the referendum be "binding" to the Council. Articles dealing with the debate will be part of our "future of maemo.org" series - if we miss something, please let us know.


Applications

Preview of MeeCast (from the people who brought you OMWeather) for Harmattan

Andrew Zhilin has put together a preview of the upcoming weather application for MeeGo, MeeCast. Brought to you by the same team that brought us OMWeather, the application has been reworked from the ground up: So let’s start with something you’ve been quite familiar with all these years and that got a complete overhaul to step onto Harmattan platform. It’s OMWeather and this time it’s not just a tweak of good ol’ weather widget – it’s a completely redesigned application so we had to choose some more “marketable” name for this OMWeather successor. Let me introduce you: MeeCast. Testing packages aren't yet available but, apparently, are on their way.

gPodder 2.18 in Extras-testing needs votes; and problems with package promotion?

Thomas Perl is looking for assistance getting the testing needed to get the latest gPodder update (which fixes issues with YouTube video downloading) through Extras QA. Thomas is also experiencing a strange dependency warning which could impact his ability to promote it to Extras when it comes time. gPodder 2.18 has been in Extras-Testing for some days now. It would be good to get some votes for it to get it into Extras, because it includes a bugfix that fixes YouTube downloads (users can't download videos from YouTube with the current version in Extras - this has been fixed in the version in Extras-Testing). Moreover, in the Extras-Testing page for the new package, it says "Warning: This package has missing dependencies!" for the dependency on "python-gtk2 (>= 2.12.1-6maemo10)". Looking at the Extras page for the old package[3] (which has the exact same dependency), the dependency is satisfied (in Extras) without problems. Why is that, and will that prevent me from promoting the new package to Extras once the vote limit is reached?

Development

Shared Harmattan repo for developer libraries

MeeGo.com user "rzr" has put together a repository in the community open build service (COBS) to allow developers a central place to make libraries and applications available. To make short, the repo provides over 200 packages, most of them arent very useful but may help developers or advanced users but there are a couple that worth to be installed rzr has stated that this repository is open to all maintainers, so if any developer or packager out there wants to try to reach a larger audience, this repository could offer that. Given that the current repository climate is leaning toward many developer-specific repositories, this is one option for a stop-gap while we wait for apps.formeego.org to become available.

Requirement for Ovi: single instance Harmattan apps

This article on the Qt Developer Network wiki describes how to make a Harmattan application run as a single instance app. It seems that there is a problem with the current SDK release that causes packages created through Qt Creator to be created and deployed with "single instance" broken. Fortunately there is a simple fix for this, and hopefully we will see the problem rectified in an upcoming version of the SDK.

Community

Future of maemo.org: "The end is coming"

alan bruce, another member of the Maemo Community Council, has posted his thoughts on the transitional position the community is in: Recently, there have been calls for the Maemo community to wrest all the closed bits out of the hands of Nokia, or to somehow turn Maemo into a separate, community-run entity, free of Nokia's sponsorship. I don't see these posts accomplishing anything for two simple reasons; we're never going to get the closed bits from Nokia, and the Maemo community is (almost) nothing without Nokia, mainly because Maemo is nothing without Nokia hardware and that hardware is no longer in production.

Future of maemo.org: A "modest proposal for a direction for maemo.org activities"

"tekki" has proposed a concrete plan for reducing maemo.org costs, and providing a future-proof base for Maemo device: Make a task force to submit and maintain OBS support for Diablo and Fremantle. That would then be contributed to apps.formeego.org, providing a direction for Extras and autobuilder. If Harmattan support already exists, D and F support cant be difficult. Make a task force for maintaining a modern kernel for N8x0 devices. 770 is a lost cause due to binary wifi driver. Propose people to base efforts for N900 on the MeeGo hardware adaptation.

Future of maemo.org: Are the options for the Maemo community really limited to not-for-profit or death?

Your editor, Andrew Flegg, is not convinced of the feasibility of setting up and running a not-for-profit organisation. Instead, he proposes a continuation of the arrangement between the Community Council and Nemein - who currently manage the infrastructure on behalf of the Community: This reduces the workload (by a factor of gazillion) whilst still putting the site, and the community, on a stable footing. We'd still be lacking people to step up and do the work (either in terms of leg work [e.g. stabilisation branches and management on CSSU, sys admin tasks] or "softer" tasks like the Council and Talk moderation), but it solves the funding "crisis" without expecting an unrealistic level of work from volunteers running an NFP.

How to request a MeeGo QA meeting

MeeGo's QA team has occasionally been accused of a lack of transparency; with major changes to Bugzilla being discussed on meego-qa before being rolled out to - and impacting - the whole project. The team is moving to having meetings scheduled on an as-needed basis, rather than regularly: Whenever we get proposed topics, a meeting will be scheduled at 07:00 UTC the coming Tuesday, the same time slot as before. Pls. kindly note that you'd better propose topics 24 hours before the meeting (7:00 UTC Monday), so that we get enough time to prepare and notify people. This is the same model being followed by the project leadership, with TSG meetings now being held when required; primarily to rubberstamp nominations from other teams.

Managing MeeGo "core" and community OBS

There has been more communication between the MeeGo Release Engineering and the MeeGo Information Technology teams about how to best fix the recent downtime that has been experienced with COBS, and how best to avoid it happening again. In this thread on the MeeGo IT mailing list Ryan Ware from release engineering states: We have a very good understanding of what the technical issues are that have been causing the downtime. We are working to resolve the issue. Hopefully we will have a resolution to this problem soon, and hopefully RE and IT will be able to work closely in the future to prevent such things from happening.

Karma calculation bug with Talk accounts?

With the upcoming elections, it is as important as ever that karma - the overall metric for an individual's contribution to the community - is accurate; however Piotr Jawidzyk seems to not have his posts and "thanks" at talk.maemo.org being included. Hopefully, Henri Bergius will get to the bottom of it quickly.

Devices

Unlocked, SIM-free Nokia N9 in UK - soon for £520 for 16GB (ouch)

lead-in UK retailer Mobile Fun has announced that it’ll soon be stocking the Nokia N9, laying rest to those rumours of an Expansys exclusive. Speaking on its blog, the SIM free phone-shop confirmed: 'Here at Mobile Fun, we’re happy to say that we will be offering the handset, unlocked and sim free, in the very near future.' The retailer has also revealed its pricing for the handset, slapping the 16GB Nokia N9 with a £519.95 price-tag. However, the cost of the 32GB model is still to be confirmed – hinting that this may not be available on UK shores. The price elicits only one reaction from us: ouch.

Progress in getting CrystalHD video acceleration on ExoPC

Niels Mayer notes partial success getting CrystalHD working in MeeGo on the ExoPC. Once enabled, including the gstreamer plugin, the ExoPC's crystalhd hardware works "transparently" (modulo bugs and taking long time to unload/load sometimes) through the QML Video element, and thus works The install process is laborious and there are still bugs to be worked out.

In the Wild

HP stop producing webOS devices. Exploring options to "optimize value" of webOS

Last week HP announced that they would be halting production of webOS devices (and began a firesale of existing TouchPad stock): In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward. Ari Jaaksi (former head of Maemo/MeeGo Devices at Nokia, now with HP heading up webOS operations) announced on Twitter, "We will continue webOS platform full speed!" Despite the apparent enthusiasm, it's unclear what the options will be moving forward for webOS. Without any available hardware for the foreseeable future it certainly doesn't seem promising. The language sounds depressingly similar to what was coming out of Nokia around February 11th this year, so take from that what you will. Either way, this is another painful setback for mobile Linux and even more severely limits our choices with Nokia also out of the game.

Announcements

Jeremiah Foster running for Maemo Community Council

Although the nomination period has yet to officially start, Jeremiah Foster has jumped the gun and announced that he will be running for the Maemo Community Council in the upcoming election.

I would serve on the council as someone who would;

Ensure that open source Maemo software gets into Debian; Enable the integration of Maemo developers into the Debian project; Develop and extend the DEX process to Maemo; Help the community take advantage of the Debian infrastructure in a way that provides them the greatest independence and freedom

Scrobbler for Maemo; on N900, N9 and N950

Felipe Contreras has updated his Scrobbler app (for last.fm and libre.fm) to work with Fremantle: But now I also managed to port this to Harmattan, and it works perfectly on my Nokia N9. Interestingly enough, the new UI has a “favorite” feature directly integrated, it took me some time, as it’s not publicly documented, but I finally managed to hook into it, so everything works seamlessly Fremantle users can grab the update from Extras.

Sandora falling sand game for Harmattan, available from COBS

Sandora, a falling particle physics playground for OpenPandora, has been ported to Harmattan. The game offers a physics sandbox with a variety of particle types which can be added by touching the touchscreen, the new particles will then be subject to gravity. The development release is available from the packager's COBS repository.

Atomics for Harmattan

"dimitar" has released a simple atomic simulation application for Harmattan. The app is still in the early stages, and Dimitar has plans to add control configuration and features - such as different atom types and properties which would allow crystals to form: No controls or configurations yet but they may come in future. Only the accelerometer is used for now.

CuteTunes - MP3Tunes streaming music client for harmattan

MeeGo.com user "reffy" announces an MP3Tunes client for Harmattan (MP3Tunes is an online music storage solution that offers streaming of the user's collection). This is a client for the service. The user is given 2GB of free storage (you can request for a free 10GB upgrade.) to which they can upload music and videos. Premium options are also available. I haven't tested videos. The announcement was well received by the CEO of MP3Tunes who took time to comment in the forum.

A Quest Too Far for N950 Harmattan (Rogue-like game)

MeeGo.com user "aaporantalainen" has writen a Rogue-like game called "A Quest to Far" for the N950 using SDL. Geoffry acknowledges that SDL is overkill for a game like this, but for testing SDL in Harmattan the more applications the better.