Linux UK - Maemo

'Roll-Away' keyboard

jamiebennett — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:32:25 +0000

A few times now on the N800 I have found myself wanting to do something more than finger type with the on screen keyboard (OSK). Usually I can type quite fast with it but when you are doing complicated character, symbol and number input it can be a royal pain in the (you can guess the rest). So my solution?

Maemo Summit registration is now OPEN!

jamiebennett — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:04:35 +0000

So the Maemo Summit registration is now open. Registration is free and if you can make it to Berlin on September 19th and 20th then it will most definitely be the place to be.

Quim Gil's post covers it all but one of the less covered aspects is that of promotion. This event is the first one the Maemo community has seen. Traditionally these events start small and grow but this summit has the potential to be an important part of the mobile and open source space that it deserves to be big from the start.

So, blog, link, talk about the event and hopefully we can get a turn out to rival OSim's (A little event held the preceeding couple of days ;))

See you there!?

mCurrency - A currency converter for Maemo

jamiebennett — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:27:46 +0000

I tend to do a lot of travelling abroad and the internet tablet always comes with me. I've been looking for a currency conversion application for Maemo for a little while now and the only offering seemed to be an repackage of gcur with slight tiding up to fit the smaller screen. The original repackager seems to have abandoned it so, spurred on by a request from users at the Internet Tablet Talk forums I decided to implement a conversion application of my own. I present to you ... mCurrency.

Installing Maemo's Diablo SDK under Ubuntu Hardy

jamiebennett — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:31:01 +0000

So Diablo has been released. Wasting no time I set about installing the new SDK under my distribution of choice, Ubuntu Hardy. The process is pretty painless thanks to the installer scripts but there are a few little gotcha's that you need to look out for.

It's time to start flashing again!

jamiebennett — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:51:07 +0000

OK, everyone get flashing.

Diablo, Nokia's latest release in the Tablet OS series, has officially been released. Go get it now.

I haven't had much time to play around with Diablo yet but I'll be posting my thoughts shortly.

If you want to know what's new in this release there is a great (and long) thread over on Internet Tablet Talk discussing the features.

Happy flashing.

EDIT: A comprehensive look at what packages have changed can be found here.

Carman needs some love

jamiebennett — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:21:46 +0000

For some time Carman, the car OBD-II analyser, had been incompatible with the OS2008 release of the maemo platform. Lots of noise and much anticipation was directed towards INDT to get it working with the new OS release and seemingly silently, with no fanfare, it is now available for download. After installing it I can see why.

Carman LIVES!

jamiebennett — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:30:03 +0000

Wow!

Its been a long time coming but it looks like Carman, the excellent car OBD-II analyzer for the Maemo platform (from the makers of Canola) is finally being developed again. After 4 months of no messages to the Carman commits mailing list this little gem appeared:

LugRadio Live UK

jamiebennett — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:58:14 +0000

Not strickly maemo related but I'm sure the two communitites overlap, LugRadio Live UK has been announce for 19th and 20th July 2008 at Wolverhampton University Student Union, Wulfruna St Wolverhampton, WV1 1LY.

From the reputation of past LugRadio's I'm sure this will be a blast. Be there if you can, I will be! If you can be there too get in touch and we can arrange a maemo/linux/drinking fest.

Planet Maemo Love

jamiebennett — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:45:00 +0000

A while ago I reported a shortfall of the http://planet.maemo.org site to bugzilla (https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2789). Clicking on the heart of a post to indicate that you like that particular one was a long winded process. A click first took you to a login page if you weren't already logged in. Then you would be asked to confirm the 'add to favorites' and finally you were dumped back to the planet site at the very top of the page, regardless of where you previously were on it.

Now after some love the planet site does a much more UI friendly 'ajaxy style' inline add. I encourage everyone to test it out and give some love to the people who post useful information to the site, if for nothing else, to give them a small ego boost so they keep on posting :-).

Now if only they would fix my other long standing bug https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2481

edit: w00t looks like the karma bug is fixed aswell!

Dr. Ari Jaaki’s talk at OSiM

jamiebennett — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:20:00 +0000

A couple of days ago Dr Ari Jaaki gave a talk on "What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help" at the Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) conference, San Francisco . In the talk Ari covers Nokia's stance when it comes to open source and how they are 'learning from their mistakes'. I was impressed by Ari's honesty when he pointed out Nokia's shortfalls in the open source community and the fact that they are trying to improve.

The talk can be heard on btpodshow.com. Its light on details but does skim over the higher level stuff quite well.

The reaction to this talk does highlight a few key points. Nokia started off on this 3 year journey (so far) with a different methodology to the one they have today. I think their past mistakes have forced them to re-evaluate their stance with the open source community but even now they are still doing things that really nark the community as a whole. Their continued stance on Ogg support on the web is worrying and even recently some code that were once open has being made closed source. Clearly Nokia still has some way to go.

Nokia is heading in the right direction, lets hope they continue.