Losca

I have a new GPG key

2012-01-06T11:08:00.000+02:00


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1,SHA512

Hello,

I'm transitioning from my 2003 GPG key to a new one.

The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but I eventually 
plan to revoke it, so please use the new one from now on. I would also 
like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust. This message 
is signed by both keys to certify the transition.

The old key was:

pub   1024D/FC7F6D0F 2003-07-10
      Key fingerprint = E6A8 8BA0 D28A 3629 30A9  899F 82D7 DF6D FC7F 6D0F

The new key is:

pub   4096R/90BDD207 2012-01-06
      Key fingerprint = 6B85 4D46 E843 3CD7 CDC0  3630 E0F7 59F7 90BD D207

To fetch my new key from a public key server, you can simply do:

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-key 90BDD207

If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is 
signed by the old one:

  gpg --check-sigs 90BDD207

If you don't already know my old key, or you just want to be double 
extra paranoid, you can check the fingerprint against the one above:

  gpg --fingerprint 90BDD207

If you are satisfied that you've got the right key, and the UIDs match 
what you expect, I'd appreciate it if you would sign my key:

  gpg --sign-key 90BDD207

Lastly, if you could send me these signatures, i would appreciate it. 
You can either send me an e-mail with the new signatures by attaching 
the following file:

  gpg --armor --export 90BDD207 > timojyrinki.asc

Or you can just upload the signatures to a public keyserver directly:

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-key 90BDD207

Please let me know if there is any trouble, and sorry for the inconvenience.

(this post has been modified from the example at 
http://www.debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog/48)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAk8GuZoACgkQgtffbfx/bQ9nqACglWyHnDTFQfdKmz8OCd3oL6iR
hcEAmgKJ7RZsgwxwkRGPhygy5y1Ztb+3iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJPBrmaAAoJEOD3WfeQ
vdIHdVQQAMT1yvIogzbtK6sUnWqwbrXI9pDEFk7AzJTb80R+wzxsw7gu9gcBDk8G
BL2O26GKUqKWA3ytuApSl42FJam/Lusi9npT3XNkmHs6FaBMNuLYrqEXmCwXwWr/
OrLyeeLiF4yxgbNWbv+600BqAWqFlo6NeTgQKsJWtCjR3RVMxX3R8nzjDnKJuF+z
c6+2JKBWyx/HVUKcJpJrFDDR36HRFvVJomTuma2JCQ/RAl9vzAguqNYOi1QkuuQv
EF1gXH7gLifukGuwquP1DHP6SWWkj77jtRWr5ewC0xymbrArzAwKbvMQl3VpKBHh
MmpJjYP3ECyL14AKi/TY2Lidi0Sf6yqFMcPcreoih01N0OU0NXmD4IrHMT24/ssb
okDUe1o3YImjGq1jTACvlzC8s54EfLsqDgSP98SGVpuoDqPJUwVk4nuHj8q0vDSs
qZox26gVwB2FAOUi1BFiZbIzM5rsyYfCGyWUGiAwBFf54lYRAeCDCt8iAOOL1Ov/
TumIGYdLoXnDuOJq1VjXLGx2OFDrpyU8SPGoa3zNEVz39tgxQ48ASJEqcqt7HvBy
IW+TTsMLdJ1Ait9aCM3mzzr1iwP8TrL0qUsdRLOE6AKdAqocIfqXY8OeDKhbUiOJ
CXWk5q3xheK3sDWUXX7J63bAAUH4jFnpQEOVMJKBUNMKsWa0iXDS
=mklN
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On discussing free software mobile phones

2011-11-17T12:15:00.001+02:00

Since I think I just summarized a few thoughts of mine well at LWN, I'll copy-paste it here:

I can grumble about Android from time to time, but I do not say that it sucks. Extreme views are what are annoying. Android is what it is and it's great as it is, even though it could be different as well.

When it comes to discussing about free software and mobile phones, I'm especially annoyed by two types of comments:

1. People essentially saying that there is no value in an open project, ie. free software code dumps should be enough for everybody. I'm interested in the long term viability of free software projects, and it is hard to have successful projects without there being all sorts of factors that make up a good project - like transparency, inclusion, meritocracy. Even though the mobile projects have had little resources and a hard road, it's not useful to forget about these goal in the longer term. For example Debian, Mer, SHR, KDE Plasma Active have some of these in the mobile sector. I hope the best for them (and participate).

2. People complaining about something being not 100% free software, while not themselves actually even interested in it for other sake than complaining. When I've been talking about free software mobile phones, from time to time there is someone complaining about eg. not open GSM stack, wlan firmwares etc.. and to put it sharply probably writing the message from iPhone, while I'm reading it on Neo FreeRunner. If the complainer would be Harald Welte, I'd probably listen and agree with him.

So there. For more civilized discussion.

Free software mobile phone galore

2011-11-07T13:01:00.001+02:00

Almost forgot to post this. My mobile phones running free software in photos. From left to right:

Neo FreeRunner (GTA02a5) running QtMoko
Neo FreeRunner (GTA02a7) running Debian
Nokia N900 running MeeGo CE (now Nemo Mobile)
Nokia N950 running Meego CE (now Nemo Mobile)
Nokia N9 running Harmattan (stock software)

All of that software running on the devices is more or less free software, with Harmattan obviously being by far the least free, especially applications, but still better than any other on-the-shelf phone software *), and the others being 99% or "Ubuntu like" free ie. possibly with firmware and a few driver exceptions. N9 needs some bootloader work still before Nemo, Debian, Ubuntu etc. can be run there. I've collected a few things about N9 from this point of view at a wiki page.
*) Not sure about every Android phone, but Android is not openly developed anyway so it's hardly a similar free software project such as freedesktop.org projects or Qt

I gave my N900 away now since obviously I cannot make full use of each one of these. I'm multi-SIMming my N9 and the GTA02a7 Neo FreeRunner for daily use, while the other FreeRunner and N950 are purely for tinkering related purposes. The development FreeRunner will get on upgrade to GTA04 once it's available, and then hopefully that can be made into a daily usable phone as well.

By the way, see you in FSCONS in Gothenburg next weekend. Even rms will be there, which is always interesting of course :)

From MeeGo to Tizen, Debian, ...?

2011-10-03T15:01:00.000+03:00

The MeeGo community is frustrated with the news of the MeeGo brand being abandoned. Some are understandably angry or otherwise not happy about how Linux Foundation, Intel handled the Tizen announcement and community in general - or more like how they didn't handle it at all.Last week Openmind 2011 happened to be arranged in Tampere on the very same day as Tizen announcement came alive. It was good in the way that it lead to the fact that Nomovok's CEO Pasi Nieminen was able to initiate the "Reigniting MeeGo" session not just by talking vague things about future, but actually about the process which led to Tizen and the unfortunately brief initial PR about it. Pasi is intense on emphasizing the quality and role of Qt in Tizen as well, even though officially Tizen is all about HTML5 and apparently from Samsung's part at least EFL is provided as a native toolkit. However, the promise of Tizen compared to MeeGo is reportedly that the toolkit is not specified in compliancy documents, so HTML5 with WAC is the main/only "3rd party apps" layer whereas others can be offered case-by-case. This means that unlike before, the underlying system can be built on top of practically any distribution (theoretically) and using whatever toolkits and other techniques wanted. Obviously the "Nordic System Integrators" are probably all very keen of using Qt to produce more of Nokia N9 quality user experiences in various products.

Taking the corporate hat off, I as a community member am also puzzled. The only reason I was not completely blown by the news was that I didn't yet manage to get involved in MeeGo community on a daily basis, since I'm involved with a dozen communities already. Instead I've been more like scratching the surface with MeeGo Network Finland meetings, IRC activity, OBS usage for building a few apps for MeeGo Harmattan and MeeGo proper etc. But I can somewhat understand how people like Jarkko Moilanen from meego-fi feel. They have given a _lot_ to the MeeGo community and brand, all taken away without hearing or pre-notice.

So where to now for MeeGo community? Tizen is one obvious choice. However, for all the talks that even I started this post with, Tizen is still vaporware today, and the dislike of how community is being treated might make it easy to consider other options. Also, if Tizen's reference implementation has lesser meaning, it might also mean less to actually be "in" the Tizen community than in MeeGo. I met Jos Poortvliet at Openmind, and he invited people to openSUSE. There is a lot of common ground with MeeGo and openSUSE - strong OBS usage, RPM packaging, community side focused on KDE and therefore Qt.

I would like to now point similarly to Debian! If one is tired about corporate interests and not listening to community, there is no match for Debian's 15+ years history, purely volunteer based, trust based organization, and first of all scope. While openSUSE has traditionally focused on desktop (even though like Jos pointed out they are open to all new contributions and projects), Debian has always had the "universal" scope, ie. no boundaries besides producing free software operating system for various purposes. There are over 10 architectures maintained at the moment, including the ARM (different ports for ARMv4 and hard-float ARMv7) and x86 from MeeGo world. There are even alternative kernels to Linux, mainly the GNU/kFreeBSD port. There are multiple relevant plans and projects like the Smartphones wiki area, most noticeably Debian on Neo FreeRunner. I have run Debian on my primary mobile phone for over 2.5 years, although now in the recent months I've had dual-SIM in my Nokia N950 as well (Debian not yet running on Nokia N950 or Nokia N9 - but it can and will be done!).

What Debian may lack in both good and bad is corporate funding, if you don't count the still quite respectful contributions from Ubuntu to Debian (it's in Ubuntu's interests to contribute as much possible back to Debian, so that the delta remains small). For each and every aspect, it needs a volunteer - there are a thousand volunteer Debian Developers, and at least a double of that of people without the official DD status but who still maintain a package or two among the 25000+ packages in Debian. That means also that one my find it more lucrative to join a project that has paid people to do some of the "boring parts", more of fancy web tools, including for bug handling and build systems like the OBS (which I do love by the way). On the other hand, there is no other project in my opinion where what you do really matters as much.

To find out more about Debian from MeeGo perspective, please see the recent mailing list post Mobile UXes - From the DebConf11 BoF to the stars where I wrote most of the MeeGo (CE) part when I was asked to and known of my MeeGo involvement.

Last but not certainly least, there is the Mer project - originally "maemo reconstructed", ie. making Nokia's "not really distro" into a real distro by filling in the void places. Now it's obviously MeeGo reconstructed, and they aim to be the MeeGo they always wanted MeeGo to be! Read the post for details from Carsten Munk and other key Mer people. They share the love for Qt, and want the core to be as lean as possible. They also aim to incorporate the most community like aspect from MeeGo - MeeGo CE - as the reference vendor in Mer. They also aim to be Tizen compliant - and when Tizen comes alive, I wouldn't see why the Tizen reference implementation couldn't be used for saving resources. Maybe Nomovok and/or others could offer the Qt maintaining part.

So, it might be that Tizen itself is enough for most people's needs. The key point however in this post is not to fall in agony if one corporate based project takes big turns - it has happened before, it will happen in the future. There are always enough political and business reasons from some points of view to do Big Changes. But the wider community is out there, always, and it's bigger than you think. You should consider where you want to contribute by asking yourself why you are/were part of for example the MeeGo community. Aaron Seigo from KDE asked us all this question in the Openmind MeeGo Reignited session, and I think it's good to repeat.

MeeGo (CE) and the FreeSmartphone.Org Distributions

2011-08-30T19:18:00.011+03:00

FreeSmartphone.Org (FSO), Openmoko, Debian's FSO group, SHR, QtMoko et cetera are a few of the community based intertwined projects to bring free software to smartphones. They have a relatively long and colorful history of doing this, and have nowadays been approaching multiple target devices despite limited resources and for example the losing of Openmoko Inc. in 2009. I've been using Debian on my Neo FreeRunner phone for over two years now, and over three years of FreeRunner use altogether. FSO2, the next generation freesmartphone.org stack, is finally coming into Debian now, extending the basic phone support besides Openmoko phones to eg. Palm Pre, Nexus One, Nokia N900 and a few HTC phones. It needs a lot of tweaking and eg. a proper kernel, but still.

Four years after beginning of sales of the first Openmoko device (Neo1973), we're still in the pioneering phase of free distributions for mobile phones. There is no "Ubuntu for phones" so to speak, not for even a selected models. Meanwhile, like so often in the wide world, competing free software approaches have arrived. Android is the obvious one, and has seen a port to Neo Freerunner among else. Android is not as open a project as one could like, and replaces everything we've known with its own code, but nevertheless it requires to be noted and is completely usable in its free software form. But since there are limitations to its approach, and since it's more of an own separate world from the rest of Linux distributions, it is not as interesting to me as the others in the long run, at least in its current shape.

A more similar competitor to FSO and distributions using FSO is MeeGo and its middleware, and to be more precise so far specifically Nokia's efforts on it. Obviously there is the strong competitor for the best general population smartphone of the year, the Qt based Nokia N9, but its default software is more of a proprietary thing even though it has a neatly rock solid free software foundation with separate free/non-free repositories and all that. Nice and great for the (GNU/)Linux in general, but the Harmattan software is not exactly on topic for this blog post. It's however in my opinion the best marketing to vendors around the world GNU/Linux + Qt can get as Android Linux has been taking most of the limelight. But meanwhile, with significantly smaller focus and resources, Nokia has also been sponsoring to try to create a truly community based mobile phone software stack at the MeeGo upstream, nowadays called "MeeGo Community Edition" or MeeGo CE for short. It co-operates with the MeeGo Handset target of MeeGo (and Intel) that hasn't got actual target consumer hardware at the moment, although that might change soon (?), but has been doing some nice applications recently. CE has the target hardware and additional device specific and non-specific software cooking. It used to target Nokia N900 only, but nowadays the project has added N950 (the for-developers-only phone) and N9 to the targets, and it is starting to seem there should be no showstoppers to bring MeeGo CE (or other distributions later on) to them, despite some earlier doubts. A few needed bits to void the warranty we all want to do are still missing, though, but coming. After that it's just developing free software. Usual caveats about specifics of a few kernel drivers apply, as the devices were not designed with the sole purpose of free software drivers in mind. Hopefully mobile 3D gets into a better shape in the coming years, but that's another story.

MeeGo (CE) smartphone middleware, of course, shares nothing with FSO *). While FSO is a "handle everything" in itself with its wide variety of daemons, MeeGo consists of more separate software like Intel's and Nokia's oFono for modem support. FSO demo UIs and SHR UIs have traditionally focused on using Enlightenment 17 for its suitability to low power machines, while in MeeGo everything is written in Qt. As Qt/QML is becoming faster and faster, and it's very powerful to write, there might be quite a bit of useful software emerging from there also for other distributions besides MeeGo itself. Actually, there is already a Debian MeeGo stack maintainer group available, although it hasn't yet focused on the UIs as far as I can see (if I'll have free time I'll join the effort and see for myself in more detail). There is also the QtMoko distribution, based on the original, canceled Trolltech/Nokia Qt Extended (Qtopia) project, but ported to newer Qt:s and put on top of Debian.

*) Although, correct me if I'm wrong and I might be, the Nokia N900 isi modem driver in FSO was ported/learned from oFono.

MeeGo CE is not only a project to bring a proper MeeGo distribution to a few smartphones, but also to shake out bugs in the MeeGo project's contributions and community processes. It is acting as a completely open MeeGo product contributor, and investigating how things should be optimally done so that everything gets integrated into the MeeGo properly, and that proper MeeGo software releases can be done for the target devices. Therefore it's also an important project for the vitality of the whole MeeGo.

MeeGo CE has so far had a whole team in Nokia working on it, but for obvious strategy related reasons community cannot rely on it lasting forever. The real hurdle is for the wider free smartphones community to be ready for really embracing a project that is already a community project but to outsiders might seem like a company project. I believe it's never easy to grow a volunteer community if the starting setup is a paid company team, but it mainly requires a) the interested people and b) the few smart ones to take control and communication responsibility so that it's not anymore seen as a company project. MeeGo CE never was a traditional company project, everything being done in the open and together with volunteers, but I just know how people perceive these things by default. People tend to assume stuff as someone else's responsibility

Whatever happens, I hope there are enough people interested in free software for mobile phones to carry on all these different approaches to the software needed. I hope MeeGo / MeeGo CE will have a great future, and I hope that both the middleware like FSO and MeeGo's components, and the UIs like FSO, SHR, QtMoko and MeeGo Handheld UIs continue to develop. I also hope other distributions like Debian will gather a strong suite of packaged software for smartphones. I know I have had some hard time to find suitable apps for my phone at times.

For those interested about how I use Debian as my mobile phone OS, see http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/User:TimoJyrinki

Blogger, atom, rss & planetplanet 2.5 years later

2011-06-17T22:48:00.003+03:00

Just reminding myself (and you) of the following pretty important tip that I got 2.5 years ago and already forgot: use alt=rss in blogger feeds when giving the feed to planetplanet. Planetplanet treats the "updated" field of Atom feeds similar to "published".

So hopefully planet Debian fixed now as well.

”Tuning an old but free phone” video now available

2011-04-21T13:38:00.006+03:00

It was good that I didn't hold up my blog post in November until the videos from FSCONS 2010 (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) are out, but now they finally are:

Timo Jyrinki - Tuning an old but free phone (pt 1/2)
Timo Jyrinki - Tuning an old but free phone (pt 2/2)

Definitely see also all videos and since Vimeo doesn't work in G n a s h, use a script to download.

ps. As a related item to the talk's future oriented aspects, while waiting for GTA04A3 boards to arrive, GTA04A2 has been patched to run Debian/LXDE.

MeeGo Summit FI Days 1 & 2

2011-04-16T12:14:00.012+03:00

MeeGo Summit FI is now nearing completion, with several keynotes and other presentations, Meegathon 24h contest just coming to an end and a lot of interesting discussions had. See full program for details. Yesterday was a hugely energetic day, but today the lack of sleep starts to kick in a bit at least for me.

Some highlights via photos:

Keynote venue was a movie theater

MeeGo status update by Valtteri Halla / Intel - talking among else about tablets, IVI, and the 20 person team at Nokia doing MeeGo(.com) for N900 phone

Mikko Terho / Nokia - "Internet for the next billion => Qt good candidate", "code wins politics and standards"

Carsten Munk / Nomovok - "Hacking your existence: the importance of open-ended devices in the MeeGo world"

In addition to MeeGo tablet demonstrations a Wayland compositor was demoed by a Nomovok employee.

One of the many Qt / QML related talks was held by Tapani Mikola / Nokia

Evening party

Day 2 started with a few more presentations and Finhack event launching in the Protomo room as well

Still remaining for the day are Meegathon demonstrations (well actually I'm right now already following those while finishing this - cool demos!) , Meegathon awards, a panel discussion on "MeeGo, Nokia, Finns - finished? Can MeeGo be important in Finland without being inside Nokia's core?", BoF sessions and finally Intel AppUp Application Lab including some MeeGo table give-outs.

Thanks to organizers, many of whom were volunteers. The event has been running completely smoothly, coming not as a big surprise after the hugely successful last summer's Akademy 2010 also held in Tampere.

MeeGo Summit FI starts tomorrow

2011-04-14T18:37:00.009+03:00

I'm participating in the MeeGo Summit FI that starts tomorrow, and I'm already in Tampere now, as you can see. The summit is at an interesting time, given that there is a huge amount of stuff happening around MeeGo while at the same time Nokia is balancing on what do both in the far future and what to do to ship the MeeGo device they've already promised. The summit is fully and overly booked for >300 attendees. There is also Finhack free software event happening alongside on Saturday at the same venue.

The company I work for, Nomovok's CEO illustrated the MeeGo situation extraordinarily well a little less than two months ago. I think it's one of the best insights you can get from anywhere in public at the moment. Now things are starting to really heat up. Of course the Big thing is the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in the end of May, but it takes nothing away from this being the major event both in the country formerly known as NokiaLandia, and also globally given the amount of MeeGo related talent here. Nomovok is teasing people with the SteelRat - a launchpad for MeeGo tablet creation and an UX, based on latest MeeGo Core - a beta of which will be available now in Tampere and first version in San Fransisco. Meanwhile we and others are investing in also the MeeGo IVI and MeeGo TV platforms, not forgetting about the handset industry that is more visible to many tech savvy consumers.

At the same time there is a lot of exciting stuff going on in the Ubuntu project (Ubuntu 11.04 upcoming, I'm already using it and reporting bugs), together with Linaro and other ARM players. As a founder of Ubuntu Finland I'm always eager to see if I can work there also on work time, not only on free time. And regarding ARM, Nomovok is the key player in having ARM on MeeGo as well.

Then on the completely other end of spectrum, I'm eagerly waiting for the GTA04 project to have my Neo FreeRunner(s) bumped up to modern specs. At the end of the day I'm still using over 2,5 year old phone myself, since I want to run the software that is both free and completely selected (and if I want, done) by me. With GTA04, I could choose between MeeGo armv7hl port, Debian armhf port or Ubuntu as the base distribution to use my software.

Openmoko is dead, long live the Openmoko ...with ”GTA04” project

2011-01-31T18:42:00.005+02:00

The 2008 product release, Openmoko Inc's – now in other business areas than mobile phones – Neo FreeRunner is finally starting to get a ”spiritual” successor, in form of the GTA04 project (not to forget about gta02-core project, either). Yes, the ”even schematics and cover CAD files are CC-BY-SA” free mobile phone is back... or at least if the German company Golden Delicious finishes what's it has been doing lately. Of course, the original FreeRunner is also still on sale as an improved version.

Since I have two FreeRunners, I look forward to replacing one of those with the new innards while keeping the other one as a daily phone while kernel and modem drivers get ready with the new platform. With a newer platform with ARMv7 instruction set, there would be easily also other ”traditional” distributions choices besides Debian to choose from, like Ubuntu or MeeGo. Both have oFono (+ telepathy etc.) packaged up, while Ubuntu also has a lot of the FreeSmartphone.Org (FSO) stack that has come to Ubuntu from Debian's pkg-fso team that I'm part of. Both software stacks are capable of getting updated with new modem drivers, although I think currently FSO has more daily / only phone users than oFono at this point of time still (I haven't yet heard of many Nokia N900 users using only free software distribution while using the phone functionality of such a distro as the one to count on).

So, a quote from today's Openmoko Community Updates:

---cut---

GTA04

GTA04 is a project by the long time distributor and hw developer, German company Golden Delicious. The name is loaned from Openmoko project because of the spiritual continuation - GTA01 was the codename for Neo1973, GTA02 was the Neo FreeRunner, and GTA03 was the canceled successor product. Besides offering improved versions of Neo FreeRunner (better battery life, better audio output), they've a complete replacement board planned to fit an existing Neo FreeRunner case and use the existing display.

The key details of GTA04 include among else:

OMAP3530 ARMv7 CPU
UMTS/3G (HSPA)
USB 2.0 OTG
WLAN, BT, FM transceiver
Barometric Altimeter, Accelerometer, Compass, Gyroscope
Optionally camera

Find your GTA04 information at the following addresses:

http://www.gta04.org/ - technical: u-boot, kernel, Debian...
http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04 - shopping page
http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04-Early-Adopter - the early adopter program, although already finished

Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS 2010)

2010-11-30T14:00:00.004+02:00

Just a note that the slides are available (non-slideshare link) for my presentation ”Tuning an old but free phone” (description) that I held in the tremendously great event FSCONS 2010. It could be described as a smaller scale FOSDEM, but that would be actually down-playing it since the free software effects on society are something that I've actually never seen elsewhere on such a scale. My talk was among the purely technical ones, though.

I was planning to hold on with this blog post until the recorded videos arrive, but since it seems it might not be during this year I will just post this now that slides are available.

I've shared a few photos as well at Flickr...

Keynote: Karin Kosina, The Inanna Project. A tech + art workshop for female artists in Damascus, Syria. An experiment in art, technology, and the transformative power of Free Hardware and Software.

Erik de Bruijn, The Future of RepRap, a self-replicating open source 3D printer that fabricates arbitrary objects including parts of itself.

Social event at the Berg 211.

Malin Nilsson on Gender, class and global flows. Using free software to fuel a revolution in home based industrial work.

Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies.

Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies (audience).

A few summaries available on a Qaiku seminar channel.

Openmoko Community Updates 2010-11-01

2010-11-01T09:01:00.004+02:00

(many exciting news from this old project/community working on the "Free Your Phone" idea, so as an publisher of the update sharing via blog as well. FreeRunner still available at eg. http://www.pulster.de/engl/index.html and the improved "+" versions at http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=Neo%20Freerunner, if an old/slow hardware is enough for you when you know you can tweak it to your liking)

Period 2010-09-01 to 2010-10-31

Distributions

Debian GNU/Linux

Debian is a universal operating system used on many embedded devices, servers and home computers. Using Debian on the FreeRunner gives access to the huge army of software packaged in the Debian repositories, already compiled for the Neo's ARM(v4) processor. Moreover, one can build one's own source files for programs without having to learn the OpenEmbedded way. For an existing Debian/Ubuntu user, choosing Debian for Neo FreeRunner makes phone a very familiar, trustworthy and flexible place to hack in.

General news:

New Openmoko specific Linux 2.6.34 kernel is now available as a package in the pkg-fso repository! Just do apt-get install linux-image-2.6.34-openmoko-gta02 (and check the symbolic links in /boot). Details at http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2010-October/063463.html
While Debian itself is in freeze, omhacks 0.12 with newer kernel support and more was released at the pkg-fso repository: http://pkg-fso.nomeata.de/sid/omhacks
The main information wiki page was put up-to-date: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnFreeRunner
Even the most conservative daily FR phone users might be willing to upgrade at least to latest FSO1 stack: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/User:TimoJyrinki#currentphonestack - of course, FSO2 (fso-gsmd) is also packaged and waiting for users...

Codename: 'sid'
Homepage: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnFreeRunner
Image: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Debian

Hardware	Works
Neo 1973	yes
FreeRunner	yes
HTC-Dream	yes
Other	yes

Applications

New Applications

aTrack 0.8

APRS tracker and communicator for mobile devices. It turns your Neo into bidirectional APRS unit and besides others it allows you to track your position, do text messaging, object creation or display stations around.

Homepage: http://atrack.googlecode.com/
Package: [1]
Tested on: SHR-Unstable

Application Updates

Gamerunner GnuBoy 0.8

A gameboy emulator which runs very nice, even with sound (sometimes it freezes, then you have to press the A button and everything is ok). You need the gamerunner distro or a gamepad to use it. Using frameskip to run smooth at 320*240 pixel. In second controll mode in gamerunner you can use savestates by pressing top right corne to save and left lower corner to load. Select is right lower corner.

Homepage: http://jlime.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=3005
Package: [nopacket no packet sorry]
Tested on: Gamerunner, QTMoko

FoxtrotGPS 1.0.0

FoxtrotGPS is an offshoot of Marcus Bauer's excellent Free & Open Source tangoGPS application, with a focus on cooperation and fostering community innovation. 1.0.0 announcement.

Gracefully recovering from gpsd shutting down
GPX routepoints support
Integration of distribution patches
Map tiles are displayed immediately after downloading
GeoRSS points can be imported as POIs (script)
Various other fixes and improvements
Since no feedback gotten from the sister project and some changes will not be imported, version number 1.0.0 was selected to show that there is divergence

Homepage: http://www.foxtrotgps.org/
Package: foxtrotgps
Tested on: Debian

General News

Most important and change making mails on the mailing lists, blogs etc.. Coolest hacks, screenshots, themes etc..

GPRS

GPRS on FreeRunner is unstable? Too many connections hang the modem? Unfixable? NO MORE! Our magician lindi has conjured a tc (traffic control) command that makes the data flow more stable even under heavy load. Huge thanks! http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/2264#comment:21 (use the lower one for faster operation)

Kernels

Debian wiki now includes generic view on the multitude of Openmoko related kernel branches out there: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnFreeRunner#KernelBranchesinAutumn2010

State of upstreaming kernel parts was updated by Lars-Peter Clausen and others in this thread: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/openmoko-kernel/2010-September/011205.html - as always, help is welcome in the land of the kernel!

Spin-off Hardware Projects

Another spin-off project possible: Always Innovating MiniBook would be a great basis for a free phone - it just lacks a GSM/3G chip... for now: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2010-October/063358.html

Openmoko Beagle Hybrid moving to OMAP4/Cortex-A9: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2010-October/063437.html

Event News

2010-10-12 Next "FYP.de / Openmoko Stammtisch" in Munich, Germany [2]

2010-12-04 German Open Hard&Software Workshop on 4th/5th December 2010 in Munich; will cover Openmoko, Beagle Board, Arduino, OpenPandora, ...; still in planing phase; to stay and participate in planning loop please subscribe to: http://lists.goldelico.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hard-software-event

2011-01-24 Mobile FOSS MiniConf at LCA2011 announced a call for papers that closes on Friday 22nd October 2010. So submit something about OpenMoko today!

2011-02-05/06 FOSDEM 2011 calls for Main Speakers and Devrooms [3] that closes on Saturday 16th October 2010. So submit something about OpenMoko today!

Unboxing and Tinkering Dell Latitude 2110 with Ubuntu 9.10

2010-07-10T01:13:00.009+03:00

This entry includes a few photos of my Dell Latitude 2110 which shipped with Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix. Mostly it's however a critical view on the software shipped. Critical simply because I investigate it quite closely to see how it could be improved especially when sold to end users in non-English countries in the future. The device itself is great, as is the Ubuntu shipped with it. The laptop has the 1.83GHz Atom N470 which is quite nice together with its integrated and battery saving graphics. I also chose 1366x768 resolution for the screen and 16GB SSD for storage. But anyway, this is not a review of any sort.

Currently Dell Latitude 2110 netbook is the only laptop available with Ubuntu in the Dell Finland's web store. A few others have specifications that list Ubuntu as a choice, but in the actual customization view there is no Ubuntu to be selected. So this is the only one, and also only for corporate customers - the web site even says "big companies". In reality though this is reflected in one and only place - there is a mandatory "Company" field in the order form. However, not even the company ID ("Y-tunnus") is required. I did use a company name there, but I wonder if they would care if one would just put "-" or "Ubuntu Finland" or anything there...

Software Observations

I boot it up, and was greeted first with a Dell EULA. Next up was familiar (Ubuntu 9.10 era) Ubuntu logo, white on black. Some churning and a set up wizard was presented:

It worked nicely otherwise, but even though I selected Finnish as the language, it first suggested US keyboard by default. This is in contrast to what normal Ubuntu installer does - offers Finnish keyboard as well.

After that the Ubuntu Netbook interface appeared, and I checked around a bit. Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix shipped with Latitude 2110 seems quite default. No extra repositories. Extra software however is installed, noticed by simply looking through Ubuntu menus: they include Dell Recovery Media creation tool, Citrix Receiver and Vmware View Client.

Digging a bit deeper, I checked the package selection with Synaptic. The reason there are no extra repositories is that packages are installed without repositories. The following packages were "local or obsolete" after refreshing the normal Ubuntu repositories:

Local/main:
- alsa-driver-hda-intel-dkms (git.20100301)
- dell-recovery
- realtek-rts-pstor-card-driver-dkms
- vmware-view-client

UPDATE Sep 01, 2010: Added link to dell-recovery (in Ubuntu repositories) and especially the SD card reader (GPLv2). Patched ALSA shouldn't be needed for anything in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS anymore, and vmware-view-client is available elsewhere. The non-free stuff below are a) not that interesting and b) non-free, potentially non-distributable.

Local/non-free
- ctxusb
- icaclient
- libmotif4
- libmrm4
- libuil4
- libxm4

The great thing is that seemingly most of the customization is indeed done via packages. Great job with both that and correctly separating archive entries depending on whether the software is free or not. The packages themselves are located in the recovery partition of the hard drive.

Some more package observations:
- adobe-flashplugin is installed by default from Canonical partner repository (and the repository is enabled by default)
- besides it, no extra non-free software is installed, that is nothing from multiverse and only bcmwl-kernel-source from restricted
- also, nothing from universe

Language Problems

I didn't expect a fully Finnish laptop since the language of Ubuntu couldn't be selected when customizing the order, and I didn't get one. It's clear there is no effort yet put to actual localized offerings, but still it was possible to choose (any) language with the first boot of Latitude 2110.

Language problems are quite ok at this point since the device is not being sold as a localized home user product yet. Nevertheless, it's good to list issues that need to be fixed before localized devices can be sold. At least in Finnish, dunno how's the state of for example Inspiron 10 devices shipped in Germany and elsewhere to also end users via web.

Number two problem regarding languages software was (number one being the wrong suggested keyboard) that full Finnish support was not offered to be installed (and it wasn't installed by default). Since the selection of language was possible during first run, suggesting download of or automatically downloading language support should be done. Normal Ubuntu does it also in Ubuntu 9.10 just nicely also in the cases that installation is done without Internet connection / full language support, so somehow Dell has unfortunately disabled that feature or not allowing it to run. The hook that checks the language support and shows a message is included in language-selector, the message itself in file /usr/share/language-support/incomplete-language-support-gnome.note.

I ran Language Selector manually, which fixed the problem and indeed works fine nowadays in Ubuntu. However, I also noticed that in Language Selector "For my menus and windows, use" had "English (United States)" selected, so only the second item had Finnish selected. It seems therefore that the setting up of the language during setup wizard doesn't do a complete job anyway for the new user created at least. Only after selecting it manually did the language tool correctly download and enable all the needed support for my language.

The Only Big Problem (...that was fixed)

Now for the only big WTF during my tinkering:

/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00secure containing lines:

APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated "true";
Aptitude::CmdLine::Ignore-Trust-Violations "true";

This simply leads to eg. synaptic package manager complaining about all upgrades being unauthenticated, and elsewhere possible well needed warnings are simply not shown. I have no idea what's the basis for shipping this kind of security hindering settings with the laptop.

UPDATE: This was later fixed in Ubuntu as a security issue, see CVE-2010-0834.

What Next

After these observations and being quite happy with a laptop that has Ubuntu straight out-of-the-box (which also saved 80€ of money + taxes compared to default OS), I created a recovery ISO image with Dell's tools and then I let Update Manager upgrade Ubuntu to 10.04.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was smooth enough already, but I also upgraded latest Intel graphics drivers from xorg-edgers. My only irritation is the Broadcom WLAN driver 'wl'. It works just fine in 10.04 LTS. The irritation is the amount of battery eating wakeups it generates even when there is no traffic going on. AFAIK it's a non-free driver from the vendor, and once again it's one of those that works in principle but is miles from being a well behaving kernel driver. It seems the free b43 driver does not support the BCM43224 chipset (14e4:4353) yet, so unfortunately I'm currently stuck with this driver. Luckily the laptop (and Ubuntu) is otherwise so great on using power, that I still get 5+ hours of battery usage at least (haven't measured much yet).

I'm very happy with what Dell is doing. I do hope the consumer sales would soar (and become available in Finland in the first place via the consumer retail channels there already exist). I also hope the language support bugs would be fixed - it's not tremendously hard, I could probably fix and test all the problems myself if I'd be given the task. Maybe the new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS offerings will already have some of it working better. All in all the Dell Latitude 2110 with Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix was a problem-free ride, and had I simply used it in English it would have worked out-of-the-box smooth as butter.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release fest in Tampere, Finland

2010-05-06T09:46:00.005+03:00

The main release party in Finland was held at Tampere, Finland and organized by Ixonos Plc and COSS. It was a great success, as proven by the almost 200 participants and great speakers.

The first sessions were mostly about the basics of Ubuntu and its roots in Debian and elsewhere. Then Tuure Vartiainen from Tampere University of Technology shared with us the release from the official Finnish mirror perspective (fi.archive.ubuntu.com, fi.releases.ubuntu.com, ...). 10.04 LTS release date was very hectic and the transfer speeds were not constantly optimal, but quite good anyway. For 10.10 they hope to up the network connectivity to 10G. I also took the opportunity to thank him later personally for the Ubuntu Finnish Remix mirroring which was arranged right before the release as well.

The next-to-final session was about Ubuntu for senior people with brief demoing of how Ubuntu UI can be customized. To give a little different perspective to usage of Ubuntu, the final speaker was a theater director and dramatist Jotaarkka Pennanen from Interactive Film Productions. Blender among else was praised.

In addition to speakers, we had 300 Ubuntu Finnish Remix CD:s, Ubuntu posters, Free Software Foundation Europe flyers, COSS flyers et cetera. After the main program there was a dinner and some wine offered to participants, which was a great social ending to the event.

Now a few photos follow. Unfortunately they are from before the event actually began, so others have probably more crowded photos and photos of the speakers themselves.

Ubuntu 10.04 and 3G modems – usb-modeswitch or not?

2010-02-12T17:18:00.004+02:00

I'm writing a blog entry instead of just replying to myself on a mailing list, since this subject might be interesting to a largish portion of the community. Most people assume things just magically work out by themselves and then after a release wonder why it wasn't so.

So, I raised a question on ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list about whether usb-modeswitch should be included in the default Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation instead of it only being in the universe repository. Reason was simply that firstly, I've read some general wonderings from the community about why it isn't already so. Secondly, without it my 3G modem (Huawei E1552) was first not functional, but right after installing usb-modeswitch package Network Manager worked smoothly with it.

Since I didn't get much discussion going on besides some statements that it doesn't work for everybody and even has caused extra problems for some others (in 9.10), I asked for a small round of comments on the subject on IRC. The channels are logged so I believe I can quote those a bit.

Colin Watson said among else:

"surely we just want the kernel to DTRT [do the right thing] by default ... this is the upstream trend ... it already DTRT for quite a few devices"
"I'd be very concerned about advertising that it's the Way to get things to work, and thus undermining getting things fixed in the kernel"
"I agree that usb-modeswitch is often a way to get otherwise non-working hardware to work ... I'm just not very convinced it's a real properly supportable option"
"but I'm just another user from this point of view, albeit one who ended up in quite a few discussions with various appropriate upstreams last time round :)"

Later on Paul Sladen continued a bit, among else:

"usb-modeswitch is a very long-winded way of sending a single usb-mass-storage command to the device's first profile"
"grep -hr MessageContent usb_modeswitch.d/ | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -rn shows the level of duplication in the configuration files"
"...I do like that it is done in userspace though, as so easy to disable if you wanted something else".

Meanwhile I also IM:d a bit with Antti Kaijanmäki from whom I probably originally coined the idea of following whether usb-modeswitch is integrated into Ubuntu or not. He mainly said that he doubts the feasibility of updating kernel's USB storage quirks in a stable release, compared to having stable release upgrades about the usb-modeswitch-data udev rules. He also proposed discussing maintainability and usability by distros with the Debian maintainer and upstream, although it sounds like Colin might have had some talks already.

So there we are now. Apparently at this point it is hoped that as many quirks as possible are inserted in the kernel, see for example drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h in the kernel. But if you have concerns about if 10.04 LTS will be kept up-to-date regarding 3G modems and want to somehow participate in bringing usb-modeswitch into Ubuntu default installation or simply discuss how to handle the kernel SRUs properly, it's time to stand up and do something.

Should there perhaps be a process with which the usb-modeswitch developers would get the information they are gathering more easily to the upstream kernel _and_ (older) distribution kernels? Is this simply a case of being easier to address an issue with a "hackish" approach, or is the usb-modeswitch actually the right way to go?

Note that I'm no expert in this area, I simply become interested in various subject from time to time :)

-Timo, going to figure out a kernel quirk for his 3G modem

Neo FreeRunner "A7+" now available

2010-01-30T09:53:00.003+02:00

Thanks to Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller's efforts, a new "A7+" version of the world's only 100% free software (and even free hardware design, leading to further community development) phone, Neo FreeRunner, is available for sale at www.handheld-linux.com for 299€! New in this hardware version is prolonged battery life, due to a fix applied to the famous "#1024" bug. Now you should have theoretically about 5 days time suspended, but that's of course only if you don't actually do anything with this phone-computer.

In other news, despite the fact or because Openmoko Inc. has ceased its development efforts for now at least, concentrating on the WikiReader to recover from the economic problems, community finally questioned the reasoning behind some of the Linux kernel debug configuration in the official Openmoko kernel branch. Results? Speedup of certain kernel operations in the range of 2x to 5x! In practice that means Neo isn't actually anymore the sluggish device you used to get to know with. Of course it's not top of the line by any means, but being the only Free phone available on the market still, more free than most full-size computers in fact, it's a quite nice improvement to eg. boot time, application start up time et cetera. I merely was a messenger of these news from the kernel mailing list to the community, but I also provided a readily compiled kernel which I use in Debian and which seems to works for others as well (until their distributions package it up).

Over 1,5 years after launch of the FreeRunner, and even more since the original Neo 1973, the software is getting better all the time. The pace is slow, as is the case with any free/open project with limited community-only resources, but the best thing is that it never has to stop. A lot of the middleware, applications and so on will make it to future phones as well. Things like Intone music player, TangoGPS and literki keyboard might be nice little finger-usable applications in the future as well.

So, if you can manage without 3G and want to still have an unique mobile computer experience with basic phone functionality, running for example Debian for the "familiar experience" if you use Debian or Ubuntu on your other computers, it's still not too late to catch it. It seems we're still a couple of years away from any next effort of such level of freedom. I'm making through it by having bought a 59€ 3G modem for the more serious data needs. I'm still also thinking about a privoxy setup on my home server that would clean up and compress pages even via Neo's GPRS connection.

Ubuntu Developer Summit and zombies

2009-11-23T08:48:00.008+02:00

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

2009-11-18T03:16:00.005+02:00

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)

2009-11-16T00:43:00.006+02:00

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

2009-09-30T10:39:00.005+03:00

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

2009-09-11T14:43:00.004+03:00

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)

2009-09-09T14:56:00.007+03:00

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

2009-08-17T19:57:00.009+03:00

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

2009-04-24T10:23:00.002+03:00

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

2009-04-06T10:16:00.009+03:00

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

2009-02-15T13:45:00.004+02:00

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

At FOSDEM

2009-02-08T16:36:00.004+02:00

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!

2009-01-29T13:10:00.003+02:00

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

2008-12-26T13:30:00.003+02:00

--- 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

2008-11-27T15:47:00.004+02:00

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.

2008-11-27T15:30:00.005+02:00

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

2008-09-23T22:40:00.005+03:00

(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

2008-09-19T12:47:00.006+03:00

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...

2008-07-26T20:33:00.009+03:00

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

2008-07-03T22:10:00.002+03:00

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

2008-05-20T17:50:00.003+03:00

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

2007-11-12T15:19:00.000+02:00

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

2007-10-03T15:39:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-14T13:27:00.000+02:00

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

2007-01-11T11:22:00.000+02:00

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

2006-10-09T15:09:00.000+03:00

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

2006-08-31T15:02:00.000+03:00

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...

2006-08-10T14:56:00.000+03:00

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

2006-08-10T14:27:00.000+03:00

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

2006-08-07T14:19:00.000+03:00

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

2006-08-02T09:30:00.000+03:00

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.