Compiz fullscreen unredirection - update

Update January 2013: Both Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.10 now have this new feature enabled by default!

Here's an update to my previous entry. In summary, the Compiz update for Ubuntu 12.10 is now in the quantal-proposed updates, and enables unredirection by default for fullscreen applications like games. Happy gaming holidays! A new Compiz update 0.9.7.12 enabling unredirection by default for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS users is in the SRU PPA.

Several changes have happened since the last update, addressing some potential issues uncovered by the people testing the updates (thanks to all!). Daniel has again done all the hard work with regards to actual development.

Changes affecting both 12.10 & 12.04 LTS:

• Some drivers do not offer tear-free Xv output without a compositor (or glXSwapBuffers in general). Therefore there is a new option available, for which the default setting enables redirection exception in case of some common video players (eg. Adobe Flash plugin and Totem). The option is Composite -> Undirect Match (unredirect_match) available in the CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm). The most notable driver is intel on Intel SB/IVB. Those newer chips don't support the XvPreferOverlay xorg.conf option that would bring tear-free non-composited Xv video on earlier Intels.
• The default setting for unredirect_match should be fine for existing users. But if you want to enable unredirection also for the common/default video players and risk tearing on some drivers and some applications, change the unredirect_match option to be just '(any)'. This might help with video playback on older/slower integrated graphics which are only barely powerful enough to play HD videos.

12.04 LTS only:

• 0.9.7.10 will not be uploaded to precise, it was just used for early testing. 0.9.7.12 currently tested in the SRU PPA enables unredirection by default also on the 12.04 LTS release.
• Intel and nouveau mesa drivers are now blacklisted from unredirection on Mesa 8.0 because of so far unresolved driver problems. The blacklist is however configurable in OpenGL -> unredirect_driver_blacklist. The default blacklist regexp is '(nouveau|Intel).*Mesa 8.0'. This does not affect other drivers or Mesa 9.0, so those intel and nouveau users that install 12.04.2 LTS after the end of January or opt-in into the 'LTS-Q' hardware enablement stack for existing installations around the same time will not be blacklisted anymore. Update January 2013: on 12.04 LTS (only), as a last minute change, also Mesa 9.0 in combination with Intel or Nouveau is blacklisted by default at least until LTS-Q stack is properly testable. You can modify the unredirect_driver_blacklist in CCSM -> OpenGL. It was found out that at least mesa 9.0 _only_ from x-updates is not enough - Intel has graphics display problems. It is probable that the problems go away with the full 12.04.2 stack (kernel, X.org, libdrm, mesa) at which point the Intel/nouveau blacklisting can be removed.
• The original unredirect_fullscreen_windows option is actually forced on now, because of potential gconf setting migration problems. Disabling unredirection can be done via the unredirect_match option above, by simply blanking the string in there, including removing the '(any)' part - everything will be redirected in that case.

Game performance improvement for Ubuntu available for testing

Unity, which uses Compiz and Nux for drawing, recently had a regression with full screen gaming speeds (LP: #1024304). While the performance of Compiz itself was improved significantly in Ubuntu 12.10, the big changes like full OpenGL ES support brought in some regressions at least from benchmarking point of view. Unity/Compiz has had a small performance impact also in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS depending on what it's being compared to. Any compositing method will necessarily bring some performance hit, but there's another option...

Many people know already about enabling the setting "Unredirect Fullscreen Windows" in Compiz's Composite plugin, but having to enable it manually meant that most people didn't get to use it. The feature detects when an application is running full screen, and simply takes compositing out of the equation, improving performance. Getting the feature work fluently has required fixes in both Compiz and drivers, which is why it hasn't been enabled by default before (LP: #1063690).

But things are progressing now. The Unity team's SRU PPA now has a test build of the new Compiz 0.9.8.6 for Ubuntu 12.10, which enables this feature by default:

ppa:unity-team/sru

Since Phoronix is a frequent reporter on Linux gaming performance, I (very) quickly run phoronix-test-suite's Open Arena test on my Sandy Bridge machine with the stock Ubuntu 12.10 (quantal) Compiz and with Compiz upgraded from the PPA: 18% increase in fps! (test1_1 has older compiz, test1_2 the newer, no settings touched)

The idea is to get the new Compiz into quantal-proposed after the previous snapshot release 1:0.9.8.4+bzr3412-0ubuntu0.1 gets its bug fixes properly verified via the Stable Release Updates process. Note that also this previous snapshot contains all the needed fixes for unredirecting fullscreen windows, the final tagged 0.9.8.6 version just switches the default to be enabled.

For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (precise) there will be two steps. First of all, Daniel van Vugt has just backported the required Compiz fixes to the 0.9.7 branch of Compiz that the 12.04 LTS uses and tagged the 0.9.7.10 release. Also in the case of precise, there is an earlier snapshot release in the SRU system, but that one does not yet include the needed backports even though it includes many other fixes. The 0.9.7.10 will be available in the same SRU PPA soon. Secondly, once the fixes are in but the feature is not yet enabled by default, the X.org driver team will need to look at additional fixes for the drivers before enabling the Unredirect Fullscreen Windows by default. But after that, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS should also see a Compiz release with this feature turned on by default.

UDS GTA04 Hacking

I'm sitting at the Bella Sky lobby bar while UDS people keep pouring in. I guess I have to start this UDS with some hacking (and a little beer)! I bootstrapped an Ubuntu armhf rootfs and coupled it with QtMoko's kernel already earlier after I received my GTA04 but it didn't boot right away so I had nothing to report. I wanted armhf so I chose QtMoko's 'experimental' Debian armhf rootfs + boot files as the reference to look at while working on the Ubuntu rootfs. I now went through again some of the configuration files, and voilà:

Now running apt-get install unity over SSH :) It will require OpenGL ES 2.0 hw acceleration to run, now that the support was integrated in Ubuntu 12.10. I will therefore need to tinker what kind of OMAP3 armhf binary blobs there are available, and what's again the situation with X.org DDX driver as well. I always feel that the fun starts at this point for me, when I've the device booting and I can SSH in. That's why I'm happy the work from Golden Delicious GmbH and QtMoko helped me to get here...

OpenPhoenux GTA04

Postman was on a kind mood yesterday. My OpenPhoenux GTA04 arrived! I had my newer Neo FreeRunner upgraded via the service from Golden Delicious.

First, something rare to behold in phones nowadays - Made in Bavaria:

As a sidenote, also rare now - my Nokia N9 is one of the last phones that had this:

It's sad that's now a thing of the past for both hardware assembly and software! But that's just a hint for new companies to step in.

But back to GTA04 - a quick boot to the pre-installed Debian w/ LXDE:

And then as a shortcut unpacked and booted into QtMoko (well, it's also Debian) instead to test that phone functionality also works - and it does:

Next up: brewing something of my own!

Light-weight security, Grub2 password setup problems 1.99 vs 2.00

I believe I'm not the only one who thinks that use case oriented Grub2 documentation is hard to find, and a lot of the documentation is obsolete or wrong. My main cause for writing this blog post is a currently unanswered question regarding 2.00, but meanwhile it seems months have passed and still most 1.99 documentation is wrong as well, which might be interesting to some.

The aim is to prevent grub entries from being edited, while not restricting actual booting. This protection is meant for computers not having any confidential stuff, but just wanting to do some light weight security with the assumption that the computer isn't physically opened.

Common setup

You will obviously want to disable any automatically generated root access giving entries, by for example uncommenting GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" in /etc/default/grub on Debian or Ubuntu. Also you would disable allowing any external boot devices to be used in BIOS/EFI/coreboot, which you would also have protected with a password. And that often means you need to also disable USB legacy support, since some BIOSes tend to offer all USB devices as bootable without password otherwise (note that I guess that could also cause problems accessing setup on desktop computers if your only keyboard is USB).

1.99

So to first fix the false instructions in various places - no, setting the superuser in 00_header as instructed is not enough. It might be, but does not apply if eg. old kernels are put into submenu (Ubuntu bug 718670, Fedora bug 836259). The protection from editing does not apply there. And if you remove all but one kernel so that there is no submenu, a submenu will be automatically created when there is a new kernel installed via security updates. I didn't need the submenu feature anyway, so I used to comment out the following lines in /etc/grub.d/10_linux:

  #if [ "$list" ] && ! $in_submenu; then
    #echo "submenu \"Previous Linux versions\" {"
    #in_submenu=:
  #fi

...

#if $in_submenu; then
#  echo "}"
#fi

I hope that was useful. I can imagine it causing a couple of family battles if the commonly instructed setup was the only protection used and there's for example a case of two computer savvy siblings that are eager to get to each others' computers...

2.00 & The Question

The problem with 2.00 is that the superusers setup yields a non-bootable system, ie. password is required for booting. But Google wasn't smiling at me today! Terrible. Can you help me (and others) with 2.00? The aim would be to have a 1.99-like setup where superuser password protects all entries from editing, but booting is fine without any passwords.

Update: Thanks, problem solved, see comments! Find the following line in /etc/grub.d/10_linux:

      echo "menuentry '$(echo "$os" | grub_quote)' ${CLASS} \$menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-simple-$boot_device_id' {" | sed "s/^/$submenu_indentation/"

And add --unrestricted there. Don't mix the line with the another menuentry line two lines earlier. The submenu problem doesn't exist anymore in 2.00.

Where computing takes you...

Do you ever have those afternoons you get a ”great” idea and you've all the evening time for that task. The task is a relaxing one and won't need much attention, and you can watch a movie or something.  But then, it happens that the evening turns into night as you realize a couple of little details adding complexity to the idea, and the task turns out to be much more invasive to your evening than you thought?

In this example, I got the great idea to upgrade my Debian running NAS device (thanks Martin for everything!) to use ext4 instead of ext3. The kind of idea that takes a long time for relatively little practical benefit, but it just feels like a nice thing do when you've the extra amounts of nerd time available. It's basically just opening the NAS device up, mounting its hard disk to a laptop via external case, running the tune2fs and fsck then putting the disk back. It just takes a long time for the initial fsck (to make sure everything's intact) and then the required fsck run to get ext4 mountable.

Only in this situation, it would have been beneficial to have the ext4 support in the flashed initramfs before the migration. So... before the photo below, I've already:

1. done the ext4 migration and fsck:s
2. screwed the disk back to the NAS case, attached cables and found that it doesn't boot
3. (on the laptop with the hard disk attached again tried manually unpacking initramfs and adding ext4 module... also had time to bind mount everything and chroot into the ARM system to run update-initramfs manually... also tried booting with those... until remembered the simple fact that the /boot partition is only for show and also the initramfs is loaded directly from flash)
4. copied the main root filesystem content from the original disk to another external disk with ext3 partition
5. attached the another disk (with same UUID:s) to the QNAP NAS device, booted, double-checked that I have now ext4 specified under /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, reconfigured the linux image that also regenerates initramfs and flashes it

And in the photo, what's happening is that:

1. I've again the original disk reattached and system booted with the initramfs generated and flashed from the ext3 disk
2. the NAS device is hanging in the air, cover open, from the closet where I've things stuffed in (normally secured with cable ties), and I need to support it with a knee or one hand since the 2TB disk is much heavier than the small SSD I used as the ext3 disk so the power cable and RJ-45 cable would have pretty heavy load
3. Since I've only one hand in use and can't use a laptop, I'm logging in via my Nokia N9 and then reflashing the kernel + initramfs from this original disk, just to make sure everything is now alright and also after that flashing it still boots (it does!). Note that I feel like the setup is secure enough for non-interrupted flashing so that I can indeed support the NAS with a knee, use one hand to keep N9 and another hand to take a photo with a camera.

And so we have had a productive and educating afternoon/evening/night once again. Does this ever happen to you?

Tampere Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release party in pictures

A couple of photos from the Ubuntu release fest in Tampere yesterday.

People gathering up before presentations

Tieto's Markus Mannio

Again, continuing on how Ubuntu is used at Tieto

A cut to the end of presentations, Trine 2 game licenses from Frozenbyte being raffled. A great game available on Linux.

Tablets running KDE Plasma, and Ubuntu for Android being demoed.

Someone else probably has photos of my generic Ubuntu 12.04 LTS presentation (what's new, what's next), and likewise for the other presentations (Ubuntu for Android, uTouch) held. Those will be available as slides and videos later on, although do note the whole event was in the crypto-language called Finnish.

Thanks to the organizers, sponsors and everyone I met, it was a great event with nice little dinner and wine served at the end!

Ubuzen in the Bay Area

Enough said.

You can reach me most probably at the UDS on the Oakland side, and most directly via IRC if you don't see me.

Edit: Launch!

On brands, marketing and technical details

I have a few thoughts based on the yet another round of debate where marketing clashes with free software advocation and technical details. Nothing new in the debate itself, but I'm adding a couple of insights.

Marketing is not highly respected by many technical people, and neither by the people wanting more advocating than the messing up with facts and feelings that the marketing does. I'm all for advocating free software, but it's currently not something you can use for marketing to win big markets. If we advance to a world where free software is as wanted as the green values today are, it can be used in marketing as well similar to all the ecological (according to the market department at least) products today, but alas the benefits of free software are not yet as universally known. Since it doesn't say much that touches the masses, advocating has a negative marketing effect since it takes space away from the potentially "hitting" marketing moves, in those cases where you target the big masses in the first place. "Open" this and that has some marketing power in it nowadays, but it's a mess of different meanings that probably doesn't advance libre software freedoms as such. Wikipedia has probably been the biggest contributor to advancing general knowledge of software and culture libre. Disclaimer: I'm not a proper marketing person, some more professional might have better insights in this area. If I'd be a proper marketing person, I'd decorate this blog post with fancy pictures so that more people would actually read it.

Some of the marketing can be done without sacrificing any of the advocation. The fabulous Fedora campaigns, graphics, slogans and materials are a great example of those and do an important job, even though Fedora isn't reaching the big masses with it (and Fedora isn't targeted for OEMs to ship to millions either). But they do hopefully reach a lot of level people on the grassroots level. I hope as a Debian Developer that more people valuing the freedoms of free software would help also Debian as a project to reach more of its advocation potential and developers from the more proprietary world. But I'm happy that at least some free software projects have nowadays true graphical and marketing talent. Even though not as widely known, freedoms of the software users including for example privacy aspects are a potential good marketing tool toward a portion of the developer pool.

Let's not forget that Android conquered the mobile market without using the brand power of Linux. The 30+ million people who know Linux a bit deeper than just "I've heard it" already run a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, but we need hotter brands than a project name of a kernel to reach the bigger masses. Call it Ubuntu, Fedora, or something, but no matter do what it needs to ship it to millions. AFAIK mostly Ubuntu and SUSE are shipping currently via desktop/notebook OEMs, and more Ubuntu than SUSE. Others aren't concentrating on the market, which is a very difficult one. Ubuntu is doing a lot more mass population advocating for free software than Android has ever done. Note for example the time any user tries to play a video for the first time in a non-free format - Ubuntu will tell the user about the problems related to those formats and asking a permission to install a free software player for those (or buy licensed codecs), and the Ubuntu Help texts describe a lot of details about restricted formats, DRM et cetera. Not to mention what happens if the person actually wanders into the community, discovering Debian, other free software projects, free software licenses and so on. Meanwhile Android users never notice anything being wrong while watching H.264 videos or watching DRM Flash videos. Granted, like Boot2Gecko debate shows, it may be a partially similar situation on shipping desktop Linux variants as well, in order to actually ship them via partners.

Anyway, the best example of brands is MeeGo. Even the LWN editor does not get into dissecting the meaning of MeeGo on Nokia N9, because "there has been no real agreement on that in the past", but just uses the brand name as is. That is  the power of brands. Technical people debate that it's not really MeeGo, it's maemo GNU/Linux with a special permission from Linux Foundation to use the MeeGo brand name, and then counter-argument with that the MeeGo is an API and maemo matches the MeeGo 1.2 API which is actually just Qt 4.7 API. And actually, as proven by the LWN example, it's not even "technical people". For most of technical people Nokia N9 is MeeGo as well. Only the people who have actually worked on it plus the couple of other people migrated from maemo and MeeGo.com communities to Mer project understand the legacy, history and the complete difference between the Maemo Harmattan platform and what MeeGo.com was. Yet at the same time like all GNU/FreeDesktop.org/Linux distributions, they are 95% same code, just all the infrastructure and packaging and polishing and history is different.

For 99.9% of people who know what MeeGo is, MeeGo is the cool Nokia smartphone, one of its kind and not sold in some of the major western markets, and/or the colorful sweet characters of meego.com shown at one time on a couple of netbooks. That is the brand, and the technical details do not matter even to the technical people unless they actually get into working on the projects directly.

To most people, the Linux brand is a mess of a lot of things, while other brands have the possibility at least to have a more differentiating and unique appearance.

GNOME 3.4 Finnish translation weekend

Just a quick note that the merry Finnish localization folks are organizing an (extended) localization weekend, starting today. As a nice step towards ease of use, they're utilizing the long developed, maybe even underused Translatewiki.net platform, or to be precise a separate instance of it. Translatewiki.net is used by MediaWiki (Wikimedia Foundation), StatusNet and other high profile projects. Co-incidentally the main developer of Translatewiki.net is Finnish as well.

Anyway enough of the platform, join the translation frenzy at http://l10n.laxstrom.name/wiki/Gnome_3.4, but do make sure to read the notes at http://muistio.tieke.fi/IYZxesy9uc.

I've promised to help in upstreaming those to git.gnome.org on Sunday. There is additionally a new report about Ubuntu 12.04 LTS translations schedule (to which these GNOME contributions will find their way as well) at the ubuntu-l10n-fin mailing list by Jiri.

Ja sama suomeksi.

I have a new GPG key

-----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)
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=mklN
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On discussing free software mobile phones

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

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, ...?

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

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

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

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 Gnash, 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

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

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

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:

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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

Latest news:

• gta04-owner mailing list founded, although occasionally you will find news also from the openmoko-community list among else; browse the list archives at http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/gta04-owner/
• First engineering sample (GTA04A2) is working in PDA mode (U-Boot in NAND Flash)
• GTA04A3 is getting final PCB layout fine tuning
• UMTS (3G) modules have arrived. And GTA04 likely to have 512 MB RAM, 512 MB NAND Flash and 1GHz DM3730 CPU. http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/gta04-owner/2011-January/000025.html

Visit the FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium next weekend (5th/6th of February, 2011) to see GTA04 in action and discuss about it! See http://fosdem.org/2011/ , http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/FOSDEM_2011 , http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2010-December/063899.html

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