Os 2008 4.2008.30 available OTA

A new update for Nokia Os 2008 is available for Nokia N810 (and I suppose N800 too).

All you have to do is connect to Internet, refresh package list and install the updates.

The main application that have been updated are Mail client and web browser. Map application has been updated too.

The total size to download is about 19 Mb and for the first time, no re-flash is required to update N810 firmware. At the end of the installation you're only required to restart the device.

Scratchbox on Ubuntu Hardy troubleshooting

Yesterday I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.10 to the new 8.04 RC and I "broke" my Scratchbox installation. I tried to install it again and I had still some problems logging into Scratchbox and installing the SDK.

The I found this page: http://suppressingfire.livejournal.com/35277.html

that explain how to fix these problems. In particular if you get this kind of error trying to log into Scratchbox:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso' failed!

You can fix it in this way:

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled

You can read the complete fix in my updated wiki: http://www.ptlug.org/wiki/Howto_Installing_Maemo_SDK_4

Installing Maemo SDK 4 HowTo Updated

I've updated my previous howto that explain how to install Maemo SDK 4 (Chinook). The other howto was written when Maemo SDK 4 Beta was out, now it's updated to 4.0.1 version of the SDK.

You can find it, as usual, on this wiki: http://www.ptlug.org/wiki/Howto_Installing_Maemo_SDK_4

If you have any suggestion or if you want to give me any idea to improve this howto, please leave me a comment.

PyMaemo Talk on May 10th in Florence at PyCon2 Conference

PyCon2 is the second edition of the Italian Python Conference and will take place on May 9/10/11, 2008 in Florence.

The conference is organized by Python Italia and more than 300 developers, students and researchers will be present for three days of tutorials and other important events.

PyCon 2008 edition will be opened by Richard Stallman with a keynote on Free Software and Free Ethics. Other famous developers will be presento too: Alex Martelli, Samuele Pedroni, Brian Fitzpatrick and many other.

I'll partecipate at the conference as speaker on May 10, with a talk on "PyMaemo: Python for Nokia Internet Tablets". In particular I'll talk about Maemo platform, Maemo SDK (how to install and configure it) and I'll explain how to use the two Eclipse plugins ESBox and Pluthon.

If you want to give me any suggestion or idea for this talk, please leave me a comment on this post, so I'll integrate it with my slides.

Maps for Nokia OS2008

I report this news from Andrew Jorgensen (Monologue):

The Map application for Nokia’s OS2008 (for N800 and N810) lets you download map data for a number of regions. The USA-West and USA-East regions are very large, though, and I have never been able to download them — it always fails about half way through. I know others have dealt with the same problem.

This morning I got a reply from Wayfinder Customer Support:

Dear Sir,
Thank you for contacting Wayfinder.

If the map download fails through the Internet Tablet, you can download the maps from this address: http://www.navicoretech.com/Consumer/Support/Downloads/tablet/en_GB/wfnavigator/

Best regards,
Annette
Customer Support
Wayfinder

Instructions for installing the map data are on that site. It’s still a slow download but at least you can use a download manager.

Eclipse plugins for Maemo Development

Maemo Team has just released a plugin for Maemo Eclipse integration. This tool allows developers to use Eclipse IDE to develop and test Maemo applications.

This release includes:

1. maemo PC Connectivity version 0.1 (Beta)
2. maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE version 1.3.6 (Beta)
3. maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE version 0.1.7 (Beta)

Maemo PC connectivity packages are tools and other components developer needs to install into his Internet Tablet to enable connectivity between developer PC and Internet Tablet.

Maemo ESBox plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates maemo SDK Scratchbox based development environment to the Eclipse development environment. ESBox plugin supports application developers using C, C++ or Python programming language.
Developers are able to do all their development work inside Eclipse, from starting the project using template to packaging final application into maemo installation package.

Maemo Pluthon plugin for Eclipse IDE integrates Eclipse IDE development environment to the Internet Tablet so that maemo Python developers do not need to use maemo SDK and Scratchbox as development environment. Maemo Pluthon plugin fully supports application development process with Python where developer develops and tests his Python application directly with Internet Tablet.

You can find more informations on the official plugin websites:

ESbox: http://esbox.garage.maemo.org/
PluThon: http://pluthon.garage.maemo.org/

wxGTK working on Maemo

Reading the official WxWidget blog, I discovered that one of their developer was working to hildonize WxWidgets. I wanted to know if that was just a test or if this library could work in Maemo, so I followed his suggestion and I grabbed the latest SVN sources:

svn checkout http://svn.wxwidgets.org/svn/wx/wxWidgets/trunk wxWidgets

and I compiled it in this way:

cd wxWidgets
./configure --with-hildon
make
make install

then I grabbed a simple "HelloWorld" from the official documentation. You can find the complete source code here.

I compiled the source code in this way:

g++ hworld.cpp `wx-config --libs` `wx-config --cxxflags` -o hworld

then I ran it in the usual way:

run-standalone.sh ./hworld

The result? I think that a screenshoot is better than thousand words :)


N.b: I tested this inside Scratchbox, using CHINOOK_x86 target, so I think it will work fine on Os2008. This could be a good thing to help other developers porting some interesting applications (uhm... aMule for example ;) ) to Maemo.