Marcelo Eduardo – "We are not the Users"

October 21st, 2008 Uncategorized

In this presentation from the Maemo Summit 2008, Marcelo Eduardo gives his views on producing custom user experiences and interfaces.

Marcelo is the user experience designer at Nokia’s Institute of Technology (INdT) and has been involved in projects such as Carman and the hugely popular Canola.

Marcelo gave a great and entertaining talk, well worth a watch so go do it now !.

Marcelo Eduardo – “We are not the Users” from Jamie Bennett on Vimeo.

Maemo Summit Lightning Sessions – Part 2

October 15th, 2008 Uncategorized

As promised, here are the recordings from the second half of the lightning sessions. I must apologize if I missed anyone (I think I missed one) as I had a technical fault in one of the talks.

Anyway here are the recordings.

Maemo Bug Jar – Stephen Gadsby

What I want from Maemo – Marius Gedminas

QEdje – Eduardo Lima

PyPy – Holger Krekel / Maciej Fijalkowsk

Illumination – Tim Teulings

Nokia´s Contribution to the Linux Kernel

October 14th, 2008 Uncategorized

Lately there has been a lot of talk about commercial contributions to the Linux kernel, specifically from distribution vendors.

At the Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland, Oregon, Greg Kroah-Hartman of Linux kernel fame recently took a swipe, specifically at Canonical (blog post – google video). Now this may (or may not) come as a shock to you but the most popular Linux distribution (number 1 at distrowatch for many a moon) doesn’t seem to ‘give back’. In retaliation people have come out to defend Ubuntu but this got me thinking, where does Maemo and Nokia stand with regards to Linux kernel contributions?

Well as a avid follower of the OMAP mailing list one can clearly see Nokia’s influence. Many of the major contributors are Nokia employee’s and regularly supply patches and discussion points.

To further solidify my opinion of Nokia’s contributions, this weeks Linux Weekly News (subscription required and highly encouraged) has an article showing the top contributors to the 2.6.27 kernel and right there, at number 5 (by lines changed) is, you guessed it, Nokia.

Now these kind of statistics can’t measure the quality of these patches or their usefulness but it does signal Nokia’s continued work in kernel space. Way to go Nokia.

So maybe this will keep Greg K-H off Nokia’s back, for now at least.

Maemo Summit Lightning Sessions – Part 1

October 7th, 2008 Uncategorized

Part 1 of the Maemo Summit lightning sessions has now been uploaded. Below you will find the first 7 videos, the others should come in the next day or two.

Debian in a chroot on the tablet – Alan Bruce (qole)

Developing Multilingual Multimodal Applications in Maemo – Nikos Tsourakis

Reality or Vision? The Nokia tablets for mobile and desktop use- Uwe Koch

Screencasting: x11vnc and pyvnc2swf – Eric Warnke

Maemo User Interface Issues Overview – Tim Samoff

ESBox and Pluthon Eclipse plugins – Andrea Grandi

Elisator for cow’s health analisys – Manrique Lopez

Enjoy.

The HSPA modem work has arrived

October 3rd, 2008 Uncategorized

For those people who don’t follow the linux-omap mailing list, a nice set of patches that begin to enable the HSPA modem of the new Nokia tablets, has just landed. These patches have yet to be reviewed but from a quick scan, they look in pretty good shape. They have been posted to the main kernel mailing list as well but as of this time, no comments have been made.

I wish the developers at Nokia would be more vocal about the development process, especially as there is a lot of anticipation for the Maemo 5 platform. I guess until we have them all blogging somewhere we will just have to piece together the parts of the puzzle ourselves.

Nokia’s Carlos Chinea has announced:


Hi guys !


I'm working on adding support for Nokia HSPA modems to OMAP.


Please consider integrating the following patch set into the
linux-omap tree. The patch set implements a generic device driver
for the OMAP Synchronous Serial Interface.


The Synchronous Serial Interface (SSI) is a high speed communication
interface that is used for connecting OMAP to a cellular modem engine.


The patch set is based on linux-omap 2.6.27-rc7.


Any comments will be appreciated.


Br,
Carlos


The patch set is quite large as it implements new functionality but it is a indication that the modem work is at a healthy stage. Lets hope we see it as part of the SDK come November’ish time.

A link to the original message can be found here</a.