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GUADEC 2008

Tickets bought, insurance bought, maps of Istanbul loaded into Maemo Mapper on N810 o I am nearly ready for GUADEC 2008. This year it will take place in Istanbul, Turkey but it is still European conference :)

Trip starts on Monday morning — bus from Szczecin to Berlin Texel, then flight (Turkish Airlines) to Istanbul. Short trip to hotel Senator and I will be ready to wait for rest of OH gang to arrive. I do not plan to get lost like I did year ago :)

List of talks to attend is generated and stored in GPE Calendar (when Maemo will get good PIM…) and this year I plan to attend most of this list. Too bad that Quim Gil talk is on Monday — I will not attend his talk. I hope that some familiar people from Maemo community will attend so we will be able to talk a bit.

But conference is not everything — I plan to take a walk though city to show something as I do not know when I will be there next time.

Ah — and I have to remember about N810 headset — GSM calls to/from Turkey are expensive so VoIP calls will be my only way to contact rather.

Tags: gpe guadec maemo n810 No Comments »

How to remove Skype installer from OS2008 menu

OS2008 for Nokia tablets comes with Skype installer pre-installed to make installing it as easy as possible. But how to remove it if you do not use Skype at all?

The solution is not so simple if you do not know anything about how dpkg works. But if you know then you probably do not need to read rest of post :)

I looked at that “problem” and here is a solution:

1. run X-Terminal
2. became root (sudo gainroot or any other method)
3. edit dpkg status file: vi /var/lib/dpkg/status and search for “skype-installer” - it will be listed once and you have to remove it.
4. back in shell run dpkg --purge skype-installer

And that’s all — no more “Skype” entry in menus.

Tags: maemo nokia 5 Comments »

Feel the power of USB with Nokia tablet

Over year ago I wrote post about USB — connected most of my devices/gadgets into desktop USB ports and checked how system reacts to it. As Kees Jongenburger gave me USB AF/AF adapter during this year LinuxTag I decided to do the same with N810 tablet.

Required software

In theory nothing is needed as N8×0 tablets are equipped in USB On-The-Go port and proper support is enabled in kernel. To make things easier users can install USBControl (available in normal Maemo repositories).

But there is one problem — default kernel is compiled with OTG whitelist enabled. As a result some classes of devices are rejected — for example all my USB Hubs. After disabling of CONFIG_USB_OTG_WHITELIST (and recompilation of kernel) they got supported.

Attached hardware

I decided to not connect everything USB I have but most of it. Resulting list (names in brackets are added by hand):

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 (Nokia N810 internal USB Host)
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 058f:9254 Alcor Micro Corp. Hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 058f:6362 Alcor Micro Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0c76:0007 JMTek, LLC. 
Bus 001 Device 008: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 020: ID 1457:5122 (OpenMoko GTA01 phone)
Bus 001 Device 021: ID 046d:0b02 Logitech, Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 023: ID 046d:c70e Logitech, Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 024: ID 046d:c70a Logitech, Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 026: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 027: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd 8-bit FIFO
Bus 001 Device 028: ID 0fce:d016 Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB 
Bus 001 Device 029: ID 05e3:0606 Genesys Logic, Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 030: ID 0a81:0205 Chesen Electronics Corp. PS/2 Keyboard+Mouse Adapter
Bus 001 Device 031: ID 1130:0202 Tenx Technology, Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 033: ID 0a46:9601 Davicom Semiconductor, Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 034: ID 13fe:1d00 (2GB pendrive from GUADEC 2007) 

In other words:

• 3 hubs (2 of them were powered, one had 7 ports)
• Ethernet card (dm9601 based)
• serial port
• PS/2 -> USB adapter for keyboard and mouse
• 2 pendrives
• Bluetooth adapter (those 3 Logitech entries)
• panic button
• Openmoko GTA01 pda/phone
• my cellphone
• multi slot card reader

Obligatory screen shot

Screenshot must be — especially when it shows that GUI was not ready for this amount of devices. But thats expected — in normal situations no one connects more then one device (especially when USB hubs are not supported).

Conclusion

USB Host ports are handy in devices like N810 tablet. Would be nice if there would be possibility to update firmware from thumb drive like it is one few other devices.

Tags: gadgets maemo n810 nokia openmoko 1 Comment »

Car navigation with N810

During last two weeks I did two 250km trips. First Poznań -> Szczecin, then return. Road into both directions is good and it is impossible to get lost but I took my N810 with me.

Before trip I started Maemo Mapper to generate route and fetch all needed maps (from Google Maps street view). This part was fast. I checked generated route does it have sense and stored on card as there is no offline route generation — you can do it only online by querying author’s website which send query to Google Maps, converts and returns XML.

Ok, time to go — I packed car with all our luggage and during that left N810 in car to get “gps fix” as internal GPS needs time for this operation. During trip we looked from time to time just to check are we on track. Few times tablet just rebooted which resulted in no GPS fix until next longer stop :( But it does not need to reboot to lose position — look at our return trip track (clean road, no tunnels etc):

I know that there are people who use Nokia tablets for car navigation. But how does it compare to TomTom Navigator which I had occasion to use one day…

Let’s see.

So it looks like I will not buy HH-12 car holder to use N810 for car navigation but rather TomTom device or some Windows CE/Mobile navigator with TomTom software to have something usable.

Tags: car google maemo n810 route No Comments »

Children make funny moves

Today was another night when I had to wake up to monitor my daughter and turn her to the back after about half hour. All due to night feeding.

Most of times I use this time to hack on my work projects and chat on IRC — mostly on #maemo as this channel never sleeps (gratz to KotCzarny and AStorm).

But back to the subject. Children and their funny moves… After I turned Mira to the back she squirms in a funny ways — all those hips shaking, hands waving before she will find optimal position so I can cover her with blanket.

She is sweet :)

Tags: children irc maemo 1 Comment »

Nokia N800 emulation

Few days ago Nokia N800 tablet emulation was released into public. Richard integrated it into Poky so now we have QEMU which can be used not only to test ARM images on ARM Versatile or Sharp Zaurus but also to run on Nokia N800 tablet. Of course it is not limited to Poky images — Maemo boots very nicely on it :)

Poky

Booting Poky is easy: runqemu nokia800 after building of “poky-image-sato” for “nokia800″ machine. After few minutes (needed to create NAND Flash image and boot into JFFS2 rootfs) Poky desktop appears:

Maemo

Booting Maemo takes few steps more now (will be improved).

1. Edit “scripts/poky-qemu-internal” script and in line 154 change KERNELCMDLINE to boot from “/dev/mtdblock3″ instead of “/dev/mtdblock4″ as Poky do not use Maemo’s “initfs”.
2. Get copy of “config” flash partition from N8×0 — simple “cat /dev/mtd1ro > config.mtd” is enough. Bad news: it does not work :( And the one which works for me is not distributable as it does not came from device but was pre-generated somehow.
3. Transfer it to the desktop.
4. Grab OS2008 firmware image from Maemo website.
5. Unpack firmware image to get kernel and images of “initfs” and “rootfs”.
6. Use poky-nokia800-flashutil to generate NAND Flash image:

poky-nokia800-flashutil initfs.jffs2 maemo-image.qemuflash initfs
poky-nokia800-flashutil config.mtd   maemo-image.qemuflash config
poky-nokia800-flashutil rootfs.jffs2 maemo-image.qemuflash rootfs

Then “touch maemo-image” and run one command: poky-qemu zImage maemo-image to boot it.

Status

Basic emulation works. There is no networking yet, DSP code is not emulated and few other limitations. But it is work in progress so expect improvements.

How to get it

Patch alone can be fetched from Poky repository.

Linux binaries of QEMU with N800 support can be built with Poky by bitbake qemu-sdk command. They will be also part of Poky Linux SDK — nightly builds are available on Poky website.

UPDATE: poky-nokia800-flashutil instructions are fixed (thx to Yasser)

Tags: maemo nokia poky qemu 17 Comments »