Yesterday I was playing a bit with Mugshot.
I thought it would be great to have a Maemo group there. Unfortunately I only found that there was indeed a Maemo group after I had already created another one 
.
So if you were wondering how come there’s a second empty Maemo group, now you know . I couldn’t figure out a way to delete it. Maybe it will be garbage collected after some time?
Nokia’s Maemo / Internet Tablet team is hiring in Helsinki.
A couple of positions are open in the Desktop team. We are focused on the development of User Interface and Data Management building blocks and frameworks.
The GNOME Mobile platform and the Hildon Application Framework are the most visible parts of what we work on.
To check out these positions or apply follow the links:
Technical Project Manager - Address Book, Search, Backup,…
Error Manager / Q.A - Lead the way in bug squashing (fixed term August 2007 to April 2008)
Are you using Sardine?
Sardine is for Maemo developers interested in following the development
of the Maemo Platform, particularly the Hildon Application Framework.
That’s not a large crowd, but still fewer people than we hoped are using
Sardine.
We’ve got some ideas why but we’d rather hear from you. This is important for the future of Maemo.
If that’s important to you please take one minute to answer this really short survey.
A Garage account is required but the survey is anonymous.
I will summarize and post the results here and in the maemo-developers list.
Last Monday evening I got back after three weeks out of the office.
These were two fairly uneventful (but very much needed) weeks off spent with the family and then a week out to attend ELC 2007.
The inevitable pile of email, unresolved problems and high priority issues was as expected waiting for me
But also many things have been moving along nicely. One good example is the number of presentations around Maemo, the Internet Tablets and mobile/embedded that have been accepted for this year’s GUADEC.
Going to ELC
On my way to ELC, I had planned to stay one day in London visiting Matthew Allum.
I was set to arrive at 09:00 and fully enjoy an extraordinarily warm and sunny Saturday.
I suppose that couldn’t happen just like that. And it didn’t. My flight got delayed 5 hours due to a failure in the plane’s hydraulic system. So with nearly perfect weather in both Helsinki and London I ended up spending half of the day in the airport 
.
Somehow when I end up stranded in airports I tend to meet interesting people. This time it was a gentleman from the UK returning from a trip to sell his Internet PR company - an interesting concept - and an Australian executive with a paint company recently acquired by a bigger Finnish firm. The latter claimed extensive previous experience in the travel industry and assured me that despite the best efforts of the engineers a plane just repaired would be significantly more likely to malfunction
I did make it safe and sound to London eventually, in time to still enjoy a few hours of light in London, a pleasant walk in the woods and a nice dinner at the Allums’.
ELC
It was my first time at ELC. There were good and interesting talks even if the overall activity and energy level in the conference is not quite the same in a GUADEC or FOSDEM.
Many presentations can be found here already.
Thomas Gleixner’s keynote (Embedded Linux - An Increasing Nightmare) painted a picture of missed opportunities and disconnectedness in the use of the Linux Kernel in embedded devices. When it comes to working with upstream, the Maemo and Internet Tablets efforts are in comparatively quite good shape. I’m quite in tune with one of the comments to the article in LWN that points to the tension between short-term drawbacks and long-term benefits and the need for management buy-in.
Looking back two years ago when we revealed Maemo and the Nokia 770 I can contrast the initial overriding short-term focus on getting the first product out that resulted among other things in a rather large patch to Gtk+ with what followed - a longer term investment on connecting our development better to upstream, and folding back our patches. It really pays off if you can expect to continue making products with the same code base and release software updates.
Jonathan Corbet’s talks on the state of the Linux Kernel were good as well carrying important messages for an audience of industry embedded developers.
Robi Karp presented and demoed Fancy Pants. Very nicely done and a good example of what you can do with E17 stack though I can’t really get excited about proprietary UI building blocks.
Koen Kooi presented on Open Embedded. I haven’t followed OE too closely so an opportunity to contrast it with Maemo’s approach to development is always welcome and thought provoking.
Matt Mackall presented on System Wide Memory Profiling and demonstrated pagemap
There was a visit to the Tech Museum in San Jose which is definitely worth seeing. Among many other things there’s a bunch of robot demonstrators including one that will pick up and arrange blocks to form sentences and another that will sketch your picture based on a segmented black and white image.
And there was a demo session too. It was remarkable how many of the devices demonstrated where using Gtk+.
The GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative
That brings me to the GMAE initiative.
The announcement of the GNOME Mobile and Embedded initiative was for me the highlight of ELC and what brought Quim and me there in the first place.
Jeff Waugh did a great job with his presentation.
A discussion panel on GMAE followed in the afternoon with David Schlesinger (ACCESS), Jeff Waugh (GNOME), Matthew Allum (OpenedHand) and myself representing Nokia.
Bill Weinberg facilitated the discussion which turned out to be both stimulating and most enjoyable.
The online media picked up nicely on the announcement:
Now it’s time to join the GMAE developers list.
There are good reasons to be excited about GMAE.
There’s an impressive list of organizations behind the initiative:
GNOME Foundation supporters ACCESS, Canonical, Debian, Igalia, Imendio, Intel, Nokia, OLPC, OpenedHand and Red Hat, and GMAE contributors CodeThink, Collabora, FIC, Fluendo, Kernel Concepts, Movial, Nomovok, Openismus, Vernier, Waugh Partners and Wolfson Microelectronics.
All of these have been active using and improving the GNOME platform for some time and working together in the context of the GNOME project.
What GMAE brings is the visibility to these efforts and the added emphasis on mobile and embedded devices - in the community and to other players considering GNOME for their devices.
I had not had the change to play with Vernier’s device before. It is really neat. I wish I had access to something like that when at high school 
Also participating are Open Source projects such as Avahi, BlueZ, Cairo, GNOME, GPE, GStreamer, GTK+, Hildon, Maemo, Matchbox, OpenMoko, Telepathy and Tinymail; and industry organisations CELF, the Linux Foundation and LiPS.
These and other projects make up the GNOME Mobile Platform.
GMAE stack
Software stack in Internet Tablets
So much of the Maemo platform is covered in GMAE that it is now possible to draw a very simplified diagram of the software stack in Nokia’s Internet Tablets and to propose a (partial) definition for Maemo in terms of the software it covers.
Looking closer the picture is a bit more complex.
Intel, Mobile Internet devices and Hildon
While I was away, the news broke out at the Intel Developers Forum of Intel’s new reference platform for Mobile Internet Devices.
It is exciting to see Intel betting on Linux and GMAE for Internet-oriented mobile devices, in much the same way Nokia is.
Even more exciting, Intel is looking at the Hildon Application Framework for their reference platform.
We had the chance to meet Bob Spencer from Intel at ELC and to chat about the possibilities for collaboration on Hildon’s further development.
As Quim pointed out, this is an important step for Hildon.
OS 2007 / 770 hacker edition
Also while I was away, there has been renewed discussion in the mailing lists about the OS 2007 / 770 hacker edition.
I must confess I was slightly disappointed with the initial reaction to the first releases. There were words of support
and interest but (I thought) not too many active users. So the recent surge of interest and the total number of downloads
has somehow surprised me (and others).
The reports of people for whom the hacker edition works better than OS 2006 are very interesting as well.
Well, that should teach me not to correlate too strongly traffic in the mailing lists with real interest
Stay tuned, things will start moving again
FOSDEM
FOSDEM is this weekend. This year’s schedule is even better than usual. And this year I’m not missing it. . Tomorrow I’m flying to Brussels.
There’s a lot more going on than any single person could cover. I’m personally interested in X / UI / graphics, embedded, GNOME, metadata/search, and that’s far too much.
But it’s OK since there’s a bunch of other Nokia Maemo people going as well.
Sunday I’m participating in an open discussion about Company Involvement in Open Source Projects representing Nokia. I’m looking forward to that even though I will unfortunately miss a few cool presentations because of that.
Overall I expect to spend quite a bit of time in the GNOME and Embedded devrooms.
Hiring Maemo Core Developer
We are looking for a software engineer to join our Maemo / Internet Tablets development team.
This is a core developer position with a focus on Maemo platform development.
If you are interested and will be in FOSDEM drop me an email to carlos_AT_maemo.org or Jabber me on carlos.h.guerreiro_AT_gmail.com so we can arrange to meet.
An update to the OS 2007 / 770 hacker edition is now available for download.
The main news is that sound is now working including media and system sounds.
Video works to some extent, though not the sample clip that comes with the image which is intended for the N800.
VOIP calls work too.
This time it’s a fiasco image. You can flash it in the same way as official releases.
This is described in Markku’s notes which are up-to-date with the latest developments.
There are still many glitches here and there, instability and performance problems, but with media capabilities this image is much more attractive.
Help is appreciated. Markku’s notes are open to contributions. Additions and corrections are welcome, including suggestions for addressing the remaining issues.
Problem reports specific to this release are welcome as well and should go to this Garage project. Not to the Maemo bugzilla and definitely not to any Nokia support. There is no official support for this.
Finally, patches are most welcome, preferably attached to the Garage project’s tracker.
A first release of the OS 2007 / 770 hacker edition is now available for download.
Similarly to official IT OS releases, the download is offered to product owners only.
You will need to enter your Nokia 770 product identification number to download.
But this is not an official release. It’s not a end-user ready release. It’s a tool to allow developers to continue working on the 770, moving on to the OS 2007 / Bora software platform, bridging the gap between 770 and N800. It’s less than alpha. No Q.A. was done on it and who knows what it might do. It should not brick your device but then again, we can’t be totally sure of that either. I’m running it on my 770 and so far it’s doing fine
Multimedia is still quite broken, but there’s still hope.
Have a look at Markku’s notes if you are interested in the gory details. You will also find there instructions for how to flash this release on your 770. Markku is updating these notes as he continues to work on this. Help is appreciated. The wiki page is open to contributions. Additions and corrections are welcome, including suggestions for addressing the remaining issues.
Problem reports specific to this release are welcome as well and should go to this Garage project. Not to the Maemo bugzilla and definitely not to any Nokia support. There is no official support for this.
Finally, patches are most welcome, preferably attached to the Garage project’s tracker.
Some news on OS 2007 for the 770
We have commissioned Markku Vire to have a go at making OS 2007 run on the Nokia 770. This is the engineering release Ari talked out.
It’s by necessity a hybrid of OS 2007 and OS 2006. Device drivers, firmware and some userland packages (notably the Opera browser engine) are those in OS 2006. However, most components - including the kernel - are the ones in OS 2007 where necessary rebuilt and/or configured differently.
As far as the software platform is concerned, this makes this OS 2007 / 770 hacker edition pretty close to the real thing. We expect most applications built with Maemo Bora for the N800 to install and work, within the limitations of the hardware and subject to some software gaps - more on that below. We also expect applications that do not work on the N800 - due to changed APIs - not to work here as well.
That’s great since it should make this release a viable tool for checking if your app will work on the N800 - before you have one.
But it’s not the real thing. It’s not a end-user ready release. It’s a tool to allow developers to continue working on the 770, moving on to the OS 2007 / Bora software platform, bridging the gap between 770 and N800. It’s less than alpha. No Q.A. was done on it and who knows what it might do. It should not brick your device but then again, we can’t be totally sure of that either. I’m running it on my 770 and so far it’s doing fine
TigerT took the nice photo you can see below.
Markku made a lot of progress. Here’s what we’ve got so far:
. We are still trying to do something about that, Markku is getting help from our Multimedia guys. In any case, some of the codecs from OS 2007 are not shipped - again due to licensing restrictions.
.Have a look at Markku’s notes if you are interested in the gory details. He’ll be updating these notes as he continues to work on this.
An image will be available soon for download and flashing, to 770 users only.
After that, Maemo developers with a 770 and a bit of time on their hands are encouraged to check it out. Problem reports specific to this release should go to this Garage project. Not to the Maemo bugzilla and definitely not to any Nokia support. There is no official support for this.
We will work on this still for some time though it is hard to say how long. It will also depend on how this is received. It might be that we can get more of the DSP and Multimedia to work, or maybe not.
We can’t justify doing much work on this hybrid, our development focus is really on the N800. However, if we manage to make further progress we will release updated images. We’ll look at any patches that people in the Maemo community might turn up and consider applying them and releasing new images. We can’t promise we will do a good job there but let’s see what we can manage.
This is again, something new for us, and we hope to learn something in the process.
Nokia Multimedia is hiring a Engineering Manager to join our Open Source Software Operations team developing Nokia’s Internet Tablets and the Maemo Development platform.
We are looking for an experienced professional with a technical background in software engineering as well as a track record leading R&D teams in the context of product development.
Open source software and embedded software are at the center of what we do, so previous experience and a good grasp of the fundamentals of these domains will be highly valued, particularly with Linux and GNOME.
This is a great opportunity to join the action in a key role, working on an exciting new product category, in a highly motivated team.
Check out more information or apply here.
