Ubuntu Developer Summit and zombies

Part two of my random selection of photos follows. As for the UDS sessions participation, the rest of the week went in translations, Debian and mobile related discussions. Mostly translations/I18N whenever available, since those were a) primary reason for my sponsorship and b) I've had the most to contribute to Ubuntu in that area in the past, at least considering the visibility / impact.

I was happy to be able to participate to the second gun range visit. Otherwise it would not have felt I actually stepped out of the hotel, since I was too late on Monday for the first round and totally missed the ice skating thing.

The only thing hindering my UDS experience was total lack of good night's sleep. It seems I'm not much of a traveler in that aspect. Mostly the coffee and the pure hecticness of UDS were able to overcome the problem, but from time to time I'd just liked to sleep for 12 hours, which I finally did back home.

Thanks to all, that amount of hugely intelligent people in one place was quite an experience, together with the pace of the sessions. I do hope to see you again, preferably with a little more free time.

I don't know if you noticed it was possible to shoot classical kind of city photos from...

...the roof of our hotel.

Even though I flew away before Friday's Ubuntu Allstars, I was able to get some glimpses of the musical talent available at UDS.

This is just a proof I did see day-light during the trip.

Dell talk.

Zombies got shot...

...by this neat group of zombie hunters.

(note my GIMP skills to include everyone)

Ubuntu Developer Summit - days 1 and 2

UDS-Lucid is going strong. Looking back, I've participated in the following sessions so far in addition to corridor/lunch/etc. discussions:

• Mobile Roundtable * 2
• Boot performance work
• Reviving and improving community marketing
• Launchpad Translations Roundtable
• Daily Builds work in Lucid (which I videotaped)
  
• MariaDB database server
• Repository-based index replacing app-install-data
• Handling Kubuntu translations
• Translations best practices and policies
• OpenOffice.org planning/translations for lucid
• and finally some plenaries: How to run a good session, Software Center Roadmap, The Opportunistic Programmer Part 1 & 2, Kubuntu Netbook Preview, ARM, launchpadlib, KVM Part 1
  

Mainly writing this to post some pics, so here you go:

Sunday evening at the lobby. I was awake for about 24h.

It's the Lynx!

sabdfl

A view from my hotel room window

Monty explaining MariaDB

Plenary sessions room preparations


Huge thanks to Canonical for sponsoring me to come here, mostly because of my I18N/translations work. And of course also thanks to my own employer for still paying my salary for the week ;), which is why I'm following also the mobile track a bit and mentioning us to anyone interested about possible co-operation on ARM/embedded stuff in our "corporation community".

FSCONS over, "gave" a talk (FreeRunner again)

I was at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit from Friday evening to ca. Sunday early morning. I would have arrived earlier but the rather cheap Blue1 flew only once a day from Helsinki to Gothenburg. Gothenburg was a very wet place during the time I was there, but the event itself was great! Thanks to all the people met, especially the multitude of FSFE guys. A few pics first:



The first pic is from the Saturday evening social event at Berg211, not the conference place itself :)

The only unfortunate thing was missing the whole Sunday, including my own lightning talk about kernel mode-setting on Neo FreeRunner! Instead of canceling it I decided to make a video to replace my physical presence, so hopefully it got shown there and people enjoyed the shortness of it. I gloriously failed to learn Cinelerra or Kdenlive video editing software quickly (PiTiVi _will_ be both easy and great, but was not yet enough for this purpose), so resorted to a "nice" gedit + mplayer + xvidcap + cat + oggconvert setup ;) Yes, not nice. Actually quite an adventure, maybe next time I really learn some other way. I forgot to include a section to tell what actual benefit KMS could give besides being extremely cool - the thing is that Glamo is quite timing sensitive and user space cannot guarantee certain things so kernel based mode-setting could do better in terms of various things, including CPU usage. And it's a pre-requisite for any possible accelerated 3D support, though I didn't get the famous accelerated triangle up yet (some new fixes in the Thomas's git already, though) The video is distributable under CC-BY-SA, and originally Ogg Theora + Vorbis. Of course YouTube mangles it to non-free format, but too lazy to currently bother with better services.

...right, writing this, YouTube seems to have some serious trouble with my video. Is it because of Theora 1.1? Well, trying Dailymotion next, thanks to its openvideo (HTML5) thing which managed to catch my attention a while ago:

^ click me

The reason for my early departure from FSCONS was the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas, Texas. More on that later, writing this actually from the lobby there.

Openmind at Tampere

Openmind conference is again at Tampere, Finland today. The first keynote talk was from Quim Gil of Nokia, presenting N900 running Linux-based Maemo5. The talk mentioned a lot of openness thing, but I resisted my temptation to ask about ”how about loading the battery” when it was mentioned that you don't need to run Maemo on N900. Kudos again for the most open mass-market phone product on the market, despite there still being various serious shortcomings. Very far from Openmoko of course.

Video about using N900 as the presentation device as well at Youtube.


Openmind continues for today as a kind of prelude to the larger Mindtrek conference.

Update: here's one more photo of Teppo Sulonen, presenting ”City of Tampere IT solutions and Open Architecture”.

0.0% :P

timo@duuni:~$ vrms
Non-free packages installed on duuni

tangerine-icon-theme Tangerine Icon theme

1 non-free packages, 0.0% of 2418 installed packages.

CC-BY-SA used in tangerine-icon-theme is actually free according to RMS/FSF, just not that endorsed. I do know myself that CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are free, but not everyone does - FSF doesn't directly endorse Creative Commons licenses since they have also so severely non-free licenses with the non-commercial and no-derivatives requirements, and it's very easy to mix the non-free licenses with free licenses.

Anyway, it's non-free only according to Debian, since they have concerns about CC-BY-SA anti-drm portions. For me, CC-BY-SA 3.0 is fine enough (tangerine is 2.5) and Free by all means. I also think the (not uniform) anti-drm position within Debian is a bit two-edged. Not allowing drm so that users are not restricted should be ok in the same sense it's not allowed to make free, copyleft (eg. GPL) code non-free. I don't think anti-drm sections are always good, or that's always needed for all software (not all software needs to be copyleft either, it's just means to get freely usable software for the users). But done in the right way it's good to take into account these all kinds of things that can be done to restrict free software's free usage, including drm/patents/etc. GPLv3 got it quite well done, even though not all parties - wanting restrictions - can use it.

See Definition of Free Cultural Works for more about licenses for content.

Additionally to that one package I usually tend to have mplayer, apparently not now. But it's also free software, and it probably should be reworked so that it's in universe in Ubuntu too, since it's in main in Debian nowadays. It was originally put to multiverse because of the patent problems and even possible non-free code, but since a) potential patent problems don't make a software non-free right away (everything is potentially problematic in the current software patents world - it means more if some patent is actively enforced) and b) Debian has worked on the problematic parts, it would be beneficial not to mark mplayer non-free anymore in Ubuntu.

I use OpenJDK for Java without any problems, and Gnash for Flash with a little more problems ;) but I just don't want that Adobe trash on my machine.

FreeRunner as an audio player ++ (Intone)

Debian just got elementary library from E17. That means Intone is now compilable on Debian, which in turn means I have a lot easier time switching/adding songs than using my old gnome-mplayer when using Neo FreeRunner as a digital audio player! I can easily now browse the web or do other stuff without the audio skipping, as well, as Intone sets the process priorities nicely.

I like the separation of using finger-friendly applications for "basic" stuff and then using applications needing more accuracy (like mtpaint, pypennotes or just terminal) with a stylus.


It would be nice to see also Intone in Debian repositories at one point. Furthermore, I use tremor enabled MPlayer which is not the default and not available in Debian repositories in any form.

Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) on Neo FreeRunner + Debian

Edit Aug 18th: video available (ogv, also on youtube)

Forget AMD, Intel, NVIDIA! Thomas White's incredible work with Neo FreeRunner's puny graphics dec...accelerator, Smedia Glamo 3362 is starting to bear fruits. Not listening to such comments as ”the chip will never be used anywhere else” and ”why not spend your time doing something more relevant”, he has chosen to actually do what he likes and sees as an interesting challenge. And that's often the spirit of free software, so I don't really agree with the naysayers.

The camera shot on the right, running KMS-enabled X.org driver for the glamo chip on my Debian installation (visible software matchbox-window-manager, fbpanel, zhone), is a bit optimistic looking since Zhone happens to draw correctly. A lot of the drawing is not yet synced correctly, which shows as all text and images in eg. GTK applications being garbled. But as little as two days ago one couldn't yet much launch applications without X crashing, so the newest commits by Thomas were a big step forwards. I'm using Debian, and he's not, so I try to find time to help in debugging even though I really can't much help with the driver code.

The driver is not just one piece of code, but consists of a kernel drm driver (direct rendering manager) using GEM, libdrm support for the kernel driver and finally the X.org driver supporting these other components and offering buzz-words like DRI2. There is also a beginning of a Mesa 3D driver, though it is so far just a skeleton driver since the 2D/KMS/EXA/DRM parts are what should be done first before dwelling into the OpenGL realm.

Openmoko the company is basically nowadays just producing new Neo FreeRunners to resellers, but the community of the so far only Free phone is thriving. The final (Openmoko produced, from where gta02-core continues) version of the phone, with the famous buzzing problem fixed, appeared on store shelves some time ago, offering better out-of-the-box phone functionality in addition to all the ”mini computer” features. It was also offered to Debconf visitors on discount.

It's not only cool to have kernel mode-setting, though it is indeed very cool as well. The reason for much sorrow in the whole OM project has been the graphics chip, and some of the problems with the chip are only finally solvable with the kernel doing the mode-setting. So it's both a very modern thing to use KMS, but there are also clear potential benefits of having accurate control over this very ”sensitive” piece of silicon. The current non-KMS X.org driver for example busy loops in order to try to feed the chip at a correct pace, causing CPU usage every time there is any drawing going on.

This is somehow reminding me about getting the best out of 8-bit computers and other hardware with some specific limitations. The glamo chip is very limited in some ways, but also capable in some other ways like theoretically offering MPEG-4 decoding, OpenGL ES 3D support. It's a mixed bag of things, and I can very well imagine it's indeed an interesting challenge to work on it, if you just have the skills (I don't) and nerves (proper debugging tools help).

It's so nerdy to drool over lines in the X.org log, but I just can help it:

X.Org X Server 1.6.3
Release Date: 2009-7-31
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.28 armv5tel Debian
Current Operating System: Linux neo 2.6.29-GTA02_mydrm #2 PREEMPT Mon Aug 17 18:24:39 EEST 2009 armv4tl
...
II) Using KMS!
...
(WW) Glamo(0): EXA hardware acceleration initialising
(II) EXA(0): Driver allocated offscreen pixmaps
(II) EXA(0): Driver registered support for the following operations:
(II) Solid
(II) Copy
(II) Glamo(0): Initialized EXA acceleration
...
(II) Glamo(0): RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message.
...
(II) Glamo(0): [glamo-dri] Name of DRM device is '/dev/dri/card0'
(WW) Glamo(0): [DRI2] Version 1 API (broken front buffer rendering)
(II) Glamo(0): [DRI2] Setup complete
...
(II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer
(II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib/dri/glamo_dri.so
(II) GLX: Initialized DRI2 GL provider for screen 0
(II) Glamo(0): Adding framebuffer....!
(II) Glamo(0): 8 480 640 16 16 960
(II) Glamo(0): rootPixmap = 0x1d0a00
(II) Glamo(0): Done

VALO-CD (FLOSS-CD) project

While Ubuntu 9.04 is all the rage (and ubuntu-fi was also updated and we have the neatest distro selector around), I was actually supposed to make a note about the Finnish VALO-CD, a collection of libre software to help people take the first steps to become independent from single software vendors. It is loosely based on The Open Disc Project.

Some funny details include that first of all VALO equals to FLOSS in Finnish, but as Finnish does not have ambiguity between freedom and price, we do not need so many terms in the acronym. That is, we have a proper word for ”libre” (”vapaa”). Secondly ”valo” as a non-acronym means ”light”, which I guess is somewhat proper.

VALO-CD project is also in co-operation with vapaasuomi.fi, a community of people specifically interested in the libre aspect of software and content.

Non-technical work should be more important than fixing "small" technical issues like crashes

I thought to write this since a blog is a more correct place for this kind of stuff than arguing about priority issues in bug reports. The title is one way of explaining the need of FLOSS distributions to shift a bit away from just improving on technical aspects. My controversial claim would be that fixing highly visible I18N bugs is more important than fixing random crashers. People are accustomed to seeing application crashes from time to time, but do not want to be disrupted with non-native language in their basic computer usage. Not all people agree, and neither all people should agree.

I'm quite technical kind of person myself, but I think it's not just proper artwork / design teams we are (still) missing on FLOSS distributions, but that in general non-technical people should get more involved. It will mean the usual ”bah, those marketing/artwork guys” vs. ”bah those nerds only tweaking kernels” discussions will raise, but it is IMHO needed to have more heterogenic group of people making contributions to distribution development. Some more technically oriented developers would still not value I18N or artwork issues as much as application crashes, and that's perfectly ok and those guys rock, but the average (statistically) mindset of a contributing person would shift to treat different kind of issues more equally.

As an example let's take Ubuntu, the arguably most John Doe -oriented distribution there is. It is still far from concentrating enough on non-technical issues, but it is already getting a lot of heat from more technically oriented developers and users by doing the amount it does and being successful with it. Ubuntu 9.04 is going to rock I18N-wise , but the people responsible of realizing the need for most of the fixes (and offering a fix for many of them) are a small group of people between the technical developers and the users, who understand when there is a technical mistake somewhere regarding I18N. Currently the average Ubuntu developer is more interested in point number 1 in the Ubuntu philosophy than the numbers 2 and 3, and that would need to change.

What I see as lacking here is that technical developers mostly still use English on their computer even if it would not be their native language. I would hope that some percentage of FLOSS distribution developers would be willing to use their own distro in their own language. It seems currently rare that this happens, since otherwise we would not rely as much on completely other people to file bugs on things that are very visible, annoying and giving a bad impression about a distro to any non-English user. One way to understand the importance of the problems is to discuss more with ordinary users, since at least I've heard a _lot_ about many I18N bugs from various people, but the same people never mention crashes separately even if those would happen (some may say "oh yes it crashes sometimes but not too often").

In addition to Ubuntu, I hope that other distros will offer competition in the field as well, because competition always yields better results. Fedora is doing some stuff very nicely, and their upstream-integrated L10N services is better than Ubuntu's Launchpad in some ways, but probably because so many developers are US-based, some really visible bugs get even less attention than in Ubuntu.

I ♥ Lenny

Congratulations! I just wrote a longer post at Ubuntu Finland's blog:”Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 julkaistu”.

At FOSDEM

It has been a fast-moving weekend at FOSDEM. It's soon time to leave for the airport, but meanwhile a quick thanks to all the people I have met on this trip. Also there have been several interesting talks in eg. the Debian and Embedded tracks, but I think last year there was more in the form of talks for me. Anyway, I'd say the trip was a success, from the Friday's beer event to the more formal program on Sat/Sun. I tried to reach the GNOME Beer Event, but unfortunately sleeping sounded like a more rational choice after a dinner and having not slept too well after the Friday's beer event.

Here are a couple of quick photos for you.


Beer


FOSDEM main entrance


Debian on Neo FreeRunner presentation

Tickets arrived – coming to FOSDEM!

Flights and hotel are booked, so I'm coming to FOSDEM. There are a lot of people to meet, at least some FSFE, Debian, MediaWiki and Ubuntu people. Of course, no boundaries to meeting any amount of intelligent guys and gals.

There will be three of us there, as can be seen, from Friday to Sunday. I will be reachable via e-mail, jabber, IRC or even phone. The first three assuming there is WLAN available for my Aspire One at a given point of time so I can SSH to a server.

Betawikissä tuhannen euron porkkana

--- cut ---
Vuoden 2007 lopussa Siebrand asetti lokalisointitavoitteet MediaWikille.Tavoitteet olivat todella kunnianhimoisia. Näyttääkin siltä, että näihin ei päästä. Emme kuitenkaan aio luovuttaa ilman taistelua. Vielä on vajaa viikko aikaa saavuttaa nuo tavoitteet. Sinä voit auttaa saavuttamaan tavoitteet suomen kielen osalta.

Yhteistyössä Stichting Open Progressin kanssa pystymme tarjoamaan sinulle kannustusta. Tarjoamme 1000 euroa jaettuna kaikkien kääntäjien kesken, jotka ovat tehneet yli 500 uutta käännöstä MediaWikiin ja sen laajennuksiin vuoden loppuun mennessä.

Myös muut Betawikin projektit kaipaavat apua. Kiinnostaisiko sinua kääntää vaikkapa FreeCol-peliä tai Mantis-virheenseurantajärjestelmää. Ystävällinen ja yhteistyökykyinen ympäristö saattaa sinut vauhtiin sekä auttaa sinua kehittymään suomentajana parantamalla käännöksiä yhdessä.

Betawiki löytyy osoitteesta http://translatewiki.net.
--- cut ---
(lähde)

Katso myös http://lokalisointi.org/.

Pohjoismaista FLOSS-blogiyhteistyötä

Jos blogit.vapaasuomi.fi ei riitä, kannattaa harkita myös uutta pohjoismaista F{N}OSS-blogiyhteenliittymää: http://fnoss.org/planet/. Koskapa myös muut kirjoittavat sekä äidinkielellään että englanniksi, ei suomen kielikään haittaa.

Jeremiah Fosterin käynnistämä Planet onkin tervetullut lisäys, sillä en ainakaan itse tiedä kovinkaan paljon muiden Pohjoismaiden vapaisiin ohjelmistoihin liittyvistä asioista. Poikkeuksena ehkä Free Software Foundation Europen aktiivinen Ruotsi-osasto, joka on järjestänyt muun muassa FSCONS-tapahtuman.

Vastaavasti olen melko varma, että suomalaisten puuhista ei juurikaan Linusia enempää tiedetä, siitä huolimatta että täällähän tapahtuu vaikka mitä! COSS:lla on englanninkielinen sivusto, mutta noin muuten esimerkiksi vapaasuomi.fi tai eri jakeluiden sivustot jäänevät kielimuurin taakse. Kannattaakin välillä miettiä, miten kansainvälisiä yhteyksiä voisi parantaa. Kirjoitin vähän aikaa sitten FSFE:n wikiin Helsinki-sivua alkuun, tosin vain suomeksi :P Ja FSFE on nyt kuitenkin vain yksi järjestö monista.

Why I don't like blogger.

Hmm, I think it's happening again. I changed the Planet Ubuntu to only feed on posts tagged 'ubuntu' from now on, and now as an example tagged one post as 'ubuntu', in addition to this one I'm now writing. Google told me that using "Label actions" to change labels wouldn't affect the feed, but it looks like the feed timestamp for my previous, older post was again updated (not the "Published", but "Updated")... so I guess I won't be tagging any further old posts, unless it turns out the previous problem I had was that the Published stamp was also renewed and the Planet Ubuntu ignores Updated stamp.

If you have a solution, please tell it.

Update: Solution found! Thanks, artfwo.

Fixing Ubuntu translation problems in a CoC-adhering way

(sorry for spamming the planet earlier when I joined, I blame Blogger, and hi all)

It's not always easy to be an Ubuntu translator. Ubuntu has always gotten a good share of critic towards Launchpad, its translations handling and its lack of devotion towards KDE. Let's first list the problems briefly:

• Rosetta has struggled with translation imports, performance etc. each release, only slowly getting better. The struggle continues each release, but usually for different reasons than with the previous one.
  
• Fixing problems directly in Rosetta is impossible since Launchpad is closed source
• Initially some or many of the translation teams evolved chaotically, resulting in similarly chaotic translations in some cases, with no systematic way to fix all the problems until after Ubuntu 7.04.
• Some imports have historically been messed up, and the worst apparently were on the KDE side
  
• Ubuntu chose GNOME for the first flavor, and therefore KDE only for the second flavor.

There. Now that those are listed, let's just concentrate on making the most popular desktop distribution the best localized distribution there is with the aid of unique tools that are provided to enhance Ubuntu. The tools make it possible to translate every last bit (in main) regarding a distribution release, regardless of the multitude of release schedules or lack of with individual projects. If everything would be just mainline GNOME or KDE programs and distributions did zero customization (or integration), this would not be needed of course. As it is, Launchpad's Rosetta tool is still a bit unique. It's hard to have a devoted translator knowing each software's schedule for every language. An example is eg. F-Spot or any other individual, smallish project.

I have often felt alone pushing very visible i18n bugs in eg. installer and elsewhere, getting the source codes, trying to find the culprit, checking if all languages have the problem and trying to be as polite as possible when approaching all too busy developers, hopefully with ready made patches. I've enough free time only barely to check the most visible problems on the GNOME side in my language, since many problems are relatively complex and might be a combination of source code side problems and Rosetta's import problems.

So, the KDE4 Rosetta import problems are new, very bad but should not only result in bashing Ubuntu/Launchpad. Reportedly the main problem should also be resolved by week's end, let's hope so. After that, a lot of work remains to have top-notch KDE translations in Ubuntu. Here's hoping that if you do care about KDE translations (I would, if I simply had either free or paid time), don't just rant about the problems. Find out the package that actually has the problem, do exact bug reports, ask politely from the maintainer but only when you know what to ask, get the source code (if available ie. not Rosetta problem), do patches and PPA uploads with fixed packages. I'm not claiming such would not be done, I have just seen whenever I've booted into KDE in earlier releases that there are things that look like long-hanging fruits with that ugly English (it's ugly when you expect some other language:)) that could be fixed. On the GNOME side, like I stated, I've felt there are not too many people doing what I've done - helping in i18n of codec installation, ubufox, installer, hwtest, .desktop entries in default installation etc.

Of course the current KDE4 problems are bad, but we've had bad problems before, and there are bad problems on the GNOME side too :) Luckily there is also the possibility of post-release language packs, though I certainly hope there will be no need for those just because of the current situation. I'm also fearing how the documentation side turns out, since the deadline for documentation is 2nd of October, the delay from archive upload to Rosetta import completing is sometimes huge and the deadline for translations is 16th of October...

Regarding Rosetta-specific problems, I'd like to share a few additional observations:

• You need to do some ugly stuff to fix everything. Some import problems might not get debugged for a good time, so in addition to filing a bug report, please upload the upstream PO file as "Published upload". And I have to admit even I haven't filed bug reports of everything, currently unfiled is at least an investigation plea for why libc translation was never automatically imported in Finnish. I have filed some bugs, though, almost all fixed now.
  
• Go through everything relevant in Rosetta, yes browse through all 1400 template titles for those low-hanging fruits that can be fixed simply by making more translations. Check if anything highly visible is untranslated for one reason or other, and translate it.
• Do a basic installation of an Ubuntu flavor and use it in your own language - if you see anything not in your language, it's a bug. Try first figuring out if the problem is fixable by just translating something in Rosetta. You may also install additional language support (some big language like French or German might be good idea, since they have relatively good coverage) and check if the problem is global. Find out if the problem needs a source code patch, is a Rosetta import problem or something different.
• Sort by "Changed in Launchpad" in the template view for your language, revert whenever possible to upstream translations and commit fixes to upstream, see my instructions in a post to ubuntu-translators.
• Also see the same post and think if your language's Ubuntu translator team should be more strictly controlled.

In addition to those translation team members that are technically competent, I would hope that more non-native English speaking developers would use their native language, despite the fact that many computer hobbyists use English. The ordinary users don't use English, and even developers don't need to use English. With English, a non-native speaker might kind of lose the contact with the concepts of what the UI terms mean, since the images that words form in one's mind work the best only in one's native language. The same reason some even good translations sound funny to a English UI user, since they hadn't thought the "F-i-l-e" menu actually means a certain real-world thing adapted into non-real world's use.

If you got lost with the last chapter, concentrate on the previous ones ;)

Clutter usage increases in future Nokia devices

Just a tidbit from maemo summit I'm visiting: Clutter will be available and used in the so called "maemo 5", which is an SDK and eventually results in a device from Nokia. Clutter is a OpenGL "2.5D" library, which means in practice easy manipulation of 2D objects in 3D space, with all the OpenGL smoothness you will want. Even though I still wonder if it will ever be that Nokia devices will use 100% free software in the whole functionality, like is possible with the Openmoko devices, I definitely have to congratulate on choosing Clutter. Good usage of Clutter will show example to others, too.

Hopefully Clutter usage will also increase on the desktop side, as I think it's the enabler of more aesthetically pleasing user interfaces in all kind of devices. Just a random example of a suggestion for Ubuntu using new gdm face browser.

Neo FreeRunner does music, GPS, Internet and more...

I received my Neo some time ago and have been playing on and off with it ever since. Granted, it's not end-user ready indeed and even more courageous people should be ready to do some heavy learning. It's not that it wouldn't be mostly installing correct software and tweaking a few settings, but the fact that it's the first real phone using free software means there is a lot of low-level stuff that is being created along with Openmoko.

Anyway, things have progressed, initial GPS issues were fixed by the great Openmoko kernel team and generally the community has found fixes for anything I've thought asking about.

Currently the status I have is that:

• GPS works great, I'm using TangoGPS with OpenStreetMap to a great success - and this is one thing that's working very well out-of-the-box (now that the GPS fix issues are resolved)
• WLAN works - I initially used USB networking as specified in the Getting Started page and shown in the picture on the right (mini-USB connector), but now I simply click WLAN on and login to Neo from my laptop if I need to do some more heavy tinkering
• Music playing (Ogg) works, see picture below - mixer settings had to be tuned for adequate party speaker sound quality, but Neo is now ready for some DAP (Digital Audio Player) action as well (extra battery pack recommended for longer use...)
  
• Internet via GPRS didn't work at first, but I found a way to initialize it correctly and now it's just a matter of clicking a button - Neo's current software distribution comes with WebKit-based browser that does the job for basic browsing; my main usage has probably just been fetching AGPS data (and soon DGPS) for GPS speedup
• Oh yeah, as the final item - it works as a phone! This is actually not so straight-forward as one would think, and related to the previous note about low-level stuff... how about creating virtual modems you offer via gsm0710muxd and assigning GPRS and gsmd to use them ;)
• I also imported of all my contacts from my previous phone for the Evolution data server used currently in Neo

I have been trying to do my part in updating Openmoko Wiki with information I've found myself or on mailing lists, and I hope others will continue to do the same for everyone's benefit. I have also created a Finnish main page for the Openmoko project.

Here's an image of Neo connected to Altec Lansing inMotion iM4 speakers:

Neo FreeRunner has its quirks and problems, especially as the current software task has been abandoned in favor of the new "ASU" stack, which of course isn't ready (and which will be replaced with FSO at some point...), but still: it now works for about all the stuff I've used phones before, and some new things like GPS and of course the total freedom to change anything anywhere in the software.

It's an enormous promise, and I'm already getting delivered a lot of the good stuff.

Neo FreeRunner is now available, order yours

Neo FreeRunner, the GSM/WLAN/GPS phone to free your mind, is available now! Go ahead and order yours:

• pulster.de (Germany)
• bearstech (France)
• TrueBox Technologies (UK)
• IDA Systems (India)
• openmoko.com (US and the rest of the world, currently only 850/1800/1900 variant since the first hundreds/thousands of 900/1800/1900 variants were all sent to European re-sellers)

Yes, it has no 3G, as a proper chip suitable for a free driver implementation was not found in time, and the point was not to make yet another device full of compromises to users' freedoms. Everything else it probably has. Except for final software which it does not have, so please keep in mind this is still meant for developers at this point of time even though the hardware for this first device is now ready. It does work as a phone (calls, text messages, calendar) out of the box, though.

And of course I've ordered mine already, as part of a group sale! Though now that we have European re-sellers, the benefit is not as great as the postage costs aren't too big anyway.

Ubuntu Developer Summit at Prague

I thought I'd have provided nice photos and all that during the UDS-Intrepid (ie. the developer summit for the 8.10 releases of Ubuntu family, nicknamed "Intrepid Ibex"). All the nice photos on my camera are not just very easily available without the specific USB wire, and I actually doubt it'd be easy to find xD card reader since it's such a rare format. So, instead of getting multitude of crisp, noise-free photos from the best low-light digital compact camera on the market, you'll be getting one really crap camera phone picture from a phone with one of the worst and cheapest phone cameras there is! So, enjoy!



Anyway, it's been great to finally meet some of the people I've discussed on IRC over the years about eg. fixing Ubuntu I18N bugs. Just last night in the bar I was sitting with a bunch of Ubuntu people, knowing maybe one of them before-hand. After something like half an hour the guy on my left started talking about his package uploads etc. which sounded strangely familiar. It turned out he was Marc Tardif to which I had just a few weeks ago provided a small (but pretty visible/important for non-English users) i18n patch together with Finnish translation of the hwtest program he's maintaining. And things like that happen basically all the time here: "oh, it's You" (and mostly in a positive tone ;) ). It's a pretty good thing that at least here at the conference place we have name tags, especially for first-timers like me.

I still have a grand plan to find the Bluetooth guru around here and give him/her a Bluetooth dongle which is probably breaking some USB/Bluetooth standards but could be maybe made to work properly by someone else than me. I've two of those actually so I'd be happy to give this one away.

Voikko for N800 Internet Tablet + some AbiWord

A short note in case some people are interested: I just built Voikko, the open source Finnish spell-checking software, for Nokia N800. Instructions are available on how to install it. Note that I only very shortly tested it from the command line ("works, good"). I mainly wanted just to try reprero to do something, which provided to be very easy.

Apparently the ISP I used to host the files does not allow directory browsing. The Sources.gz file tells the whole story, ie. I also built and provide enchant, hunspell libraries which are not included on the tablet itself.

Addendum: I also tried building AbiWord to test Voikko graphically, using Ryan's instructions. I built the needed packages gsfonts, fribidi, libgsf (newer than maemo 3.1's libosso-gsf), libwmf and wv - they are now available in the same repository as Voikko. I quickly tested the AbiWord I built, but removed it from the repository as for some reason I didn't get hildon UI even though it should have been configured, eg. no keyboard input, and also because the plugins would be very much welcome too and I had some problems with those. But I did load up some text file and succesfully tested the spell-checking feature of AbiWord in Finnish, and it worked fluently :)

Openmind/Mindtrek

Openmind was held as part of and partly preceding MindTrek. On Tuesday the 2nd of October, talks included those from Novell, LiPS, Gnome etc. and also some Finnish companies like Saunalahti and Codento (as part of the Star Wreck Studios talk). Also our company, Nomovok, offered a talk about open source in public sector. For me the most interesting speech was that of OpenMoko by Michael Shiloh from FIC.

On Wednesday Open Source Business and Innovation was one track of the five in MindTrek. Speeches included those from Sun by Thorbiorn Fritzon and from Canonical by Amy Jiang (in picture). One especially nice thing was that also one of the keynote speakers in MindTrek Plenary was about free (as in freedom) software, namely The age of literate machines - a visionary look at open source by Zak Greant from Foo Associates, mozilla.org and more. I think it was a good general introduction to not just the term open source but the more general freedoms, since the public in general might be more interested in the freedoms free software gives than only the fact that one can see the source code - not too many people are coders after all.

The best part anyway was meeting the people, since concerning many talks I knew most of the stuff presented and the information given is probably more of use to people not that knowledgeable in libre software. Openmind Club on Tuesday evening was a successful event together with the various coffee breaks and lunches.

When a device simply works; TrekStor vibez

It's interesting to think whether a device is so simple that you just don't need any changes to it, and you have no relevant risks running proprietary software on the device. Take for example this TrekStor vibez 12GB I just bought. Its software is not free as in freedom, but related to freedoms it does play my FLAC and Ogg files just fine, in a gapless way and is really smooth to use. On the other hand, on my Nokia N800 I already feel constrained in some ways. And then again, I'm quite satisfied with my Panasonic camera.

After pondering for a while, I came to a conclusion that if the device is a) constantly holding my personal data and b) able to communicate via various wireless methods to the Internet and other devices, then I'm starting to (really) yearn for a completely free software.

Connected and non-connected devices

In the case of Vibez, it has the features I need, and I don't need to think about whether there is some proprietary software connecting to other devices or to the Internet - the only case where it is connected is when it acts as a USB mass storage device to my desktop computer.

(Of course, there are a _few_ small features I would like to add and share with others if I could, but it's not fatal not to have those.)

With the camera, it's quite similar. I take photos and before I actually do anything with the data, I've already transferred those off from the camera, and the camera surely does not share any of my photos with the surrounding device even by accident. When the cameras get integrated Bluetooth or WLAN connections, I probably would like the camera software to be libre, too.

(And of course, I also have a couple of UI issues with my camera, which I would like to fix already...)

But with eg. an Internet Tablet, I'm communicating with my friends, it saves my passwords, it has constantly an access to WLAN networks and my Bluetooth EDGE phone. There is a lot of proprietary software on the N800, including lots concerning the access to hardware and many base libraries. I cannot change them or access the source code for them. What I would like to do with the Internet Tablet would be to install eg. the latest ARM version of Debian with eg. an "n800"-task. Or just be provided a similar setup out-of-the-box, ie. so that there is no way a power-user or a developer could feel hindered because of the proprietary software components in the device, even if the default configuration would naturally be so that all that is hidden from the casual user.

Coming back to my previous comparison with the FIC's Neo GSM/GPS device, it _is_ build completely with OpenEmbedded/Ångstrom, and it seems it will be a somewhat similar experience to the freedoms I'm enjoying on my desktops when using eg. Ubuntu, Debian and openSUSE. I can also give contributions to any software in it, if I want. And if I don't want, I can just use the (hopefully) quality software and be assured I can always check things if I want to.

Oh, the vibez itself

Aside from these thoughts, I really have to heartily recommend the TrekStor vibez to anyone in search of eg. a successor to the iAudio's M3/X5 devices, or anyone needing more than 4GB of storage and the playback ability of FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files. My previous player was a two-year old iAudio M3, and vibez has a remarkably smaller size, _very_ nice UI and other features. I hope that iAudio has some kind of a response in its mind, since iAudio 6, the rather comparable 4GB player from iAudio, is really lacking storage-wise if compared to vibez, and possibly in features too.

Maemo has a competitor in openness - OpenMoko

Great news for all the people who want their mobile devices to have some of that trustworthiness than their desktops. Two new, largely open Linux mobile devices are now or soon to be available: Nokia N800 (using maemo platform) and FIC Neo1973 (using OpenMoko platform). The former is a WLAN Internet Tablet, while the latter is a GSM/GPRS phone - but both share quite a lot in terms of RAM available (128MB), storage (eg. MicroSD), screen (ca. VGA touchscreen) etc.

Everyone knows already about maemo - Nokia's entry to open-source world. It's also clear that they have only began the path, and there are obvious compromises to the "openness" which is so widely touted about maemo - browsing is done with a closed-source browser, and with regards to media playing no open audio or video format is supported while many proprietary formats are. Being "open" is not just "you can install open source applications", it's also standing behind the open movement that is providing much of your device's functionality, and Nokia is not (at least yet) doing that, most probably partly because they are a big company.

OpenMoko, however, seems like a much more fresher start with regards to openness - with maemo the number of closed parts is too high to measure, but with OpenMoko it's clear that the process has been started from "all open" point of view. "Open, But No As Usual"-presentation illustrates this quite nicely.

At this point, it's of course clear that Nokia has already had a product out for over a year, and a new product is now selling. It may very well be that the largest mobile company in the world will dominate the device sales by other means - marketing, hardware quality, whatever. But still, it's clear that OpenMoko-based devices are superior in openness, so if they can match Nokia with product quality otherwise, and come up with new devices (eg. a WLAN-device), they might be in for some nice market share. It's all uncertain at this point, but highly interesting.

It's also interesting to see if this is where Nokia is stopping with its progress towards libre/open world (not just software), ie. "semi-open and relatively safe", or is it seeing that making even non-obvious (from marketing point of view) moves towards supporting eg. open media standards is worthwhile in the long run. I don't see any big improvements on this front if comparing Nokia 770 and N800, even though the development environment has again improved.

Game consoles and Linux

It's been announced long ago that PS3 will have Linux, though it's yet not sure if it's the actual OS for games or a dual-booting feature. Now there are people deciphering that an interview further emphasizes the possibility of Linux in Wii, too. And whether that is true or not, and whether Nintendo's Linux is a fully open platform or a proprietary one (except for code required to be published, eg. kernel), a fully open GNU/Linux for Wii is under development and scheduled to have something real available before Wii even ships.

With all this going on in entertainment devices and other embedded devices, one can only speculate if the possible successor for Xbox 360 will have Linux, too? Or would it be perhaps too humiliating to some parties...

Embedded Debian gadget of the day

We often hear the most stories about all the cool multimedia entertainment devices running Linux, but here's a "real" embedded device without all the glitter: Embedian's EBC-series. There's no single purpose those have designed for, so you can pick your box and put into use. I can see various amounts of eg. industrial automation you could do with this device, and do it with a fast start - everything is ready for attaching eg. measurement devices. Also the tools for controlling eg. sensors, robotics or for analyzing data might also be readily available in some open source project already, or could be implemented on top of some more general open source solutions more easily than developing from scratch. The devices seem to have designed with heavy environment requirements in mind, so those are definitely not the choice for home environment, but offer quite nice amount of opportunities in industrial environments.

Of course, stuff like this has been available before, but combining Debian with low-power devices (max. 2W) like the EBC-series' models should give a good run for the money for any proprietary solutions with regards to flexibility and price.

About the last bastions...

Related to the my first post, open source graphics drivers seem (Intel) to be having some boost (AMD) just now. This can only be a good thing, especially if the AMD (which bought ATI) part really happens. Closed graphics drivers are a pain to use, install or integrate in an otherwise open system like Linux. It would help if there was one other Big gfx chip vendor besides Intel that releases high-quality open source drivers. I believe it when I see it - the MIT (X/DRI part) and GPL (kernel part) licensed drivers with full support for all features. There were rumors about XGI releasing all of its drivers as open source, but nothing has been heard since ATI bought a part of XGI. AMD is a different thing, though, because AMD is competing directly with Intel.

Sony has got an embedded Linux

Sony Mylo looks like a nice Linux device. I have to emphasize the word looks, since the device looks really nifty, at least if the point was to make bit toy-like device with a nicely embedded qwerty keyboard. Sony seems to experiment with different kind of new entertainment devices, but it's hard to say what people are really interested in using it. Mylo can't connect to other devices via Bluetooth, and its display is similar in resolution to what's on my GSM phone currently. And there are just too many half-baked music player solutions already on the market, Mylo also has small storage space and plays only proprietary audio formats.

The device is using Wind River's embedded Linux system, which apparently is somehow related to Red Hat. Interesting. I wonder what's the state of openness of the Wind River Linux and products using it, if compared to eg. MontaVista Linux (products based on which are currently mostly closed except for the parts absolutely required to be open) or Nokia's Maemo (with which Nokia actively works _with_ the community on many fronts, though which still has some strictly closed parts, too).

More and more companies are jumping on the Linux train. Now if only they would also jump the open source & community train, instead of trying to handle Linux like an old-fashioned proprietary software.

Devices and open media formats

While the digital video and audio world is largely governed by more or less restricted formats like MP3 audio, MPEG-2/4 video, Windows Media, AAC etc., the openness of available truly open and royalty-free formats does not scare everyone. Among the interesting developments in both mobile and non-mobile devices I've find for example the following:

• Iwod G10 sounds like an interesting device, at least as a concept, that can play FLAC files in addition to MP3 files, and also is able to play Nintendo games. Too bad the memory is expandable my only 1GB cards - hardly enough to play much lossless-compressed audio.
• Volvo's Digital Jukebox supposedly provides your car with perfect-quality FLAC music too.
• Olive Symphony looks like the most high-end device currently on the market that's just for playing digital music.
• And last, as closest to my personal usage field, are the great music players by iAudio - all supporting at least Ogg Vorbis and (in the bigger devices) FLAC. iAudio 6 might be the perfect combination currently - small size, all important open music formats supported and enough storage capacity for moderate uses (4GB).
  

A lot more can be found on xiph.org's wiki (though it's mainly about Ogg Vorbis support). The main problem still is that AFAIK a very large majority of portable music player sales are governed by Ipod, which supports only restricted formats. I do appreciate the folks doing eg. iPod Linux, but I tend to think there's no support if there's no built-in support. The hardware manufacturers should start to stand behind open formats, and stop fighting each other on who has the most dominating restricted format they can ask license fees from. For example, even the largely likeable Nokia 770 lacks the support for Ogg audio and video, which means the manufacturer for some reason or other does not want to support "openness" in some fronts yet, while it clearly is very open and standards-endorsing in some other fronts. But Nokia is not in the music or video business as such, and business-wise it's always easiest to just support the mainstream formats, restricted or not. It's the pure audio-video entertainment device manufacturers that should start to support open formats first.

As a sidenote, it was nice to see this year's Assembly's video broadcasts in completely open Ogg Theora video format. I bet they have had some need for heavy hardware though, since unlike eg. Ogg Vorbis lossy audio codec and FLAC lossless audio codec, Theora is not really a completely optimized codec at this point, though the latest release improved a bit. But with Fluendo's very fluent (eh) combination of Cortado Java applet and Flumotion, it's now really easy to provide open media streams even though the battling proprietary operating systems (Windows and Mac OS) do not support anything open. This is how it should be - giving the open option to anyone as easily as possibly, and then at some point people could notice that why they need to use Java applets for playing something that plays in any free software operating system (like Linux or the BSDs) without any problems.

Free software - for the people

Greetings, fellow human beings. Here you have a new blog about happenings in the free/libre/open-source software, intertwined with the communities around it. It's an interesting world with no borders, consisting of people and companies believing eg. in the success of open-source as a development and business model, and/or in the general virtues of this way of developing the information society around us. I'm happy to see so many companies trying to (and sometimes succeeding to) find their way of embracing FOSS, or Free and Open Source Software, in their businesses. I'm especially happy to see new products that are not just "running Linux", but also being developed together with the community so that both the product and the components it uses are better than they would otherwise be.

I'm a computer user since ca. 1985, and have a M.Sc. degree from Helsinki University of Technology. Nowadays I work in a company called Nomovok, which develops open source based embedded solutions - suits me well. On spare time, I'm running the Ubuntu Finland site (an Ubuntu Linux information site for the Finnish people), translating some open source programs to Finnish, representing Finnish Wikipedia as a media contact and doing various bits of other stuff all around.

I'm interested in developments of the Ubuntu Linux, and related to it the fantastic Debian project with its GNU/Linux operating system on which among else Ubuntu is based. Furthermore, I'm interested in the open source and open format developments covering the last bastions of closed, proprietary desktop software - gcj/GNU Classpath (to replace Sun Java), Xiph.org/Ogg media codecs and Dirac (to replace WMV, MOV, MPEG-4, MP3 and other restricted formats), Gnash (to replace Adobe Flash player), DRI (to provide open source 3D drivers for all cards) etc. I like it more to celebrate the advancements in this free/open world, than to dwell on the negative things happening in our everyday lives (and especially beneath it). There are fortunately pages and people I can support who are trying to make this new digital world a better, more equal place for both people and businesses (Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation (also the FSF Europe), DefectiveByDesign.org, Open formats, ...)

So, stay tuned for posts about libre software, the communities around it and products that utilize the software & participate in the communities.