Monday, April 28th, 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz
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 »
Friday, April 11th, 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz
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).
- 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”.
- 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.
- Transfer it to the desktop.
- Grab OS2008 firmware image from Maemo website.
- Unpack firmware image to get kernel and images of “initfs” and “rootfs”.
- 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)
UPDATE: there is second part of that story.
Tags: maemo nokia poky qemu 18 Comments »
Saturday, April 5th, 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz
Thanks to work done by Jiri Benc in his “ukeyboard” alternative control panel for language and regional settings I am able to present Polish layout for N810 hardware keyboard.
Polish chars are on Chr+ (where is one of “acelnosxz”).
Also few other combinations are added:
Fn+Space = |
Chr+Space = Tab
Chr+j = [
Chr+k = ]
Original functions of “Chr” key were dropped — there is no small on screen keyboard after single press of “Chr” and no option to enter other national chars (like “öïüõôōő” etc).
Click here to simple install.
Tags: maemo n810 nokia pl 5 Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz
One of my home computers exports lot of music over Samba (everything as one share). In next room I have HiFi system where I like to play some of them. So I decided that N810 (or even 770) should be enough for it.
Default Media Player
Simple application with support for simple media library (internal flash, memory cards and Internet links). Playing from my Samba collection is possible but require adding files (no way to add folders) so playing more then one album can be real PITA as file requester always starts in “Documents” folder instead of last selected one.
Canola2
Nice looking application with support for simple media library (one folder in internal flash, memory cards and Internet links). No Samba support at all.
UKMP
No idea does it supports Samba or not — after installation is just told “no albums found, bye”. I wonder how people are supposed to use it… Maybe it require “faking” some albums before first start… I have to admit that I have no idea — UKMP homepage contains release notes not documentation rather.
Also it’s post installation script do very nasty things:
rm /media/mmc1/covers/songlist.txt
rm /media/mmc2/covers/songlist.txt
rm /media/mmc1/covers/*.avi.jpg
cp /usr/bin/MediaCenter.py /usr/bin/MediaCenter
cp /usr/bin/uktube.py /usr/bin/uktube
cp /usr/bin/ukmp.py /usr/bin/ukmp
rm /usr/bin/MediaCenter.pyc
chmod a+x /usr/bin/MediaCenter
chmod a+x /usr/bin/uktube
chmod a+x /usr/bin/ukmp
rm /media/mmc1/covers/songlist.txt
rm /media/mmc2/covers/songlist.txt
rm /media/mmc1/covers/*.avi.jpg
For me this is good example of “I do not have idea how to build package” and “I do not care about users data”.
Kagu
Simple(?) interface, no possibility to tell where to check for media files…
MPD based streaming
Other solution is streaming from Samba machine (with “mpd” for example) and then playing stream with even default media player. But then I would have to use two programs just to be able to play songs (one to control “mpd” and second for playing stream). I did not tested this way (yet).
Local mounting music collection
I can probably install smbfs and smbmount packages (or rather build and install) and then play from “local filesystem”.
Other way is use of FUSE to mount Samba shares but (as usual) fuse packages are not available for Maemo.
And what will happen when shares will be not available? None of those players will know that it was remote folder and will probably poll() it for updates…
Summary
Nice device but still no media player which will be able to play my media directly.
Arghhhh…
Tags: maemo media player nokia 9 Comments »
