ELC2009 Europe
On the 15th and 16th of October 2009 around 200 people gathered together in the beautiful south-easten French city of Grenoble, situated at the foot of the French Alps, to talk about embedded Linux. Although there were many talks over the two days the underlying theme of the conference seemed to be boot-time reduction and android. Read the rest of this page »
Maemo Summit 2009
I’m sat in the wonderfully picturesque Grenoble, France, sipping a beer and gazing at the huge mountains around me (but that’s for another post). I’m also reminiscing about the Maemo Summit 2009 so I thought I would put a few comments down.
I’m not going to harp on about how great the summit was, or how cool Nokia are for giving away 300 loan devices to the attendees (although I know at least one person left theirs in the back of a taxi in Amsterdam 
) but instead I’ll just commend Nokia for their efforts with the N900. They have worked tirelessly to get a mainstream, Linux based phone to market that is both hugely configurable and extendable. One could harp on about the seeds of Linux based phones being sown with the likes of the LiMo initiative, Open Moko and more recently, Android, but I know of no other company that has advanced many core Linux components with a huge amount of effort and funding than Nokia.
The current device may not be to everyones taste and may not even be ready for mainstream just yet but I raise my glass to you, well done Nokia!
Testing Ubuntu Netbook Remix in a Virtual Machine
So you want to help test the Ubuntu distribution that is customised specifically for netbooks but don’t have a netbook to test it on? That’s not a problem. What you need is a virtual machine and an Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) image.
New Development Machine
Recently I decided to build a new PC which was to become my main development machine. Before I started looking at the price and performance of all the major parts I had a good idea what I wanted, fast CPU, lots of RAM, fairly large hard drive e.t.c. but what I ended up with wasn’t exactly what I first imagined.
New Ventures Ahead
As a follow-up to my work related post about me losing my job to the economic crisis, I though it would be only fitting to announce my new role, that of Ubuntu Mobile Developer for Canonical. I’m really looking forward to working with a hugely talented team and helping Ubuntu continue to be the first choice OS for Linux based machines.
The State of Android Development, the way I see it
The past couple of weeks I’ve been learning how to develop apps for Google’s Android platform. I’ve looked at it before but only at a high level, these past weeks I have actually been using it for real. So what do I think?
Maemo Summit registration is now open
Registration for the second Maemo Summit, to be held on the 9th, 10th and 11th of October at WesterGasFabriek, Amsterdam is now open. It promises to be a great event just like last year, so go register now!
On a related note, the schedule is filling up but there is still time for you to submit a talk proposal. If you have a cool subject to talk about, either in a lightning session or longer talk format then you should edit the wiki as soon as possible.
Launchpad is now Open Source!
Its been done to death already but it deserves more praise, Launchpad, the project hosting infrastructure (and so much more) utilising bazaar has been released as open source. Congratulations to the Launchpad Team!
The announcement can be found here and the new #launchpad-dev channel on freenode should be used for any Launchpad code questions.
This really is a massive move by Canonical and lets hope this furthers the adoption of Linux by making development so much easier.
Qt and Nokia, the bigger plan?
So, it has been announced that Nokia is to adopt Qt as its preferred toolkit for the next-but-one iteration of the Maemo platform, Harmattan. This has stirred up a little developer concern as GTK and C developers contemplate switching to Qt and C++ but is this really warranted? and what are Nokia’s reasons for the switch? Well, it seems that Nokia has no other choice if it wants to continue to compete in a very different world from the one it has dominated for the past several years and here’s why.
Call for Content, a Reminder
The 2009 Maemo Summit call for content has been open now for a few weeks and we have been receiving some good suggestions but we need more!
Currently Dave Neary, Valério Valério and myself have been going over the submissions, ironing out the details and approving (mostly) the talks but the schedule still has plenty room for more. If you have a suggestion for a cool talk, a lightning session or would like to speak but need help, then make yourself heard now!
Make a suggestion with your subject being pitched to either Users, App Developers, or Platform Developers. It doesn’t have to be a full 25 minute talk, it can also be a 5 minute Lightning session.
So what are you waiting for?
Hi, my name is Jamie Bennett. I'm a technologist, programmer, researcher, tech evangelist, open source monkey, Linux lover, Mac user and self confessed gadget freak.
