Scratchbox-2 version 2.0 released !

On April Fools’ Day (1.4.2009) Scratchbox-2 version 2.0 was released. We are going to use this version in the next maemo SDK+ release that we are planning to release on week 15/2009. Scratchbox-2 is one of the core components of maemo SDK+ development environment.

SB2 home page: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/sbox2

Maemo SDK+ home page: http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org

Video: Maemo 5 alpha on BeagleBoard

Here’s a quick video I put together while learning to use the video cam (you’ll notice that pretty soon) This is just a basic demonstration of how the Maemo 5 alpha SDK runs on the BeagleBoard. Sorry about the video quality, I’ll make a better one from the eventual Maemo 5 Beta release.. promise!

Check out the Maemo on BeagleBoard site for more information.

Cheers,

Juha

Maemo 5 alpha on BeagleBoard

After the release of the Maemo 5 alpha SDK, I’ve been working between my other duties on getting it running on the BeagleBoard. The Maemo on BeagleBoard project site has today been updated to include instructions for anyone to do the same.

BeagleBoard running the Maemo 5 alpha Application manager

The alpha SDK has released some content in the form of closed binaries. You are required to accept an EULA to gain access to the closed content and that means a ready-made rootfilesystem cannot be offered as a part of this project.

Instead a full set of instructions on how to build your own rootfilesystem using the Scratchbox1 based SDK is provided. The kernel image and modules are available for download and the kernel build process is documented. I’m not entirely happy with not providing a ready-made rootfs, but the closed binaries prohibit me from doing so. I hope you can understand this.

The provided kernel is buildable from the Maemo 5 alpha kernel sources (2.6.28) plus a sizeable patch which reimplements the display subsystem for BeagleBoard. The dss2 patches originate from the Ångström distribution’s efforts available in the OpenEmbedded git, but within this project they are provided as one file.

The project’s default kernel configuration includes modules for USB HID, USB ethernet devices and USB mass storage devices. This means that you can use a mouse,  a keyboard, a USB-Ethernet plug or even a USB hard disk with your Maemo powered BeagleBoard — if you also have a powered USB hub, that is.

I was able to install packages from the Fremantle extras-devel repository directly to the BeagleBoard using apt-get. Someone had already uploaded a fun puzzle game Hex-a-Hop and it runs perfectly on this setup

Cheers,

Juha

Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps now available in SDK+

Maemo 5 Alpha SDK (also known as Fremantle Alpha SDK) was released in maemo.org on monday. We are happy to announce that the Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps are now also available for Maemo SDK+ development environment.

Those developers who are already using SDK+ to compile their source code can now start porting their code also to Fremantle without moving back to Scratchbox-1.

If you have installed SDK+ already to your machine you should run the command “$ maemo-sdk reload catalogue” to get the Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps visible to your SDK+ rootstrap menu. To install Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps just say “$ maemo-sdk install rootstrap” and a menu is provided to you where you can selected the rootstrap you want to start using. Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps that are made availabe  are:  “fremantle5.0alpha_armel” and “fremantle5.0alpha_i386″.

Maemo SDK+ project provides alternative cross-compiling environment for Maemo developers. SDK+ is based on Scratchbox-2 instead of Scratchbox-1. To learn more about the SDK+ itself,  how to use it and how to do software development in this environment please follow the link below.

More information about SDK+:

http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org
http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org/user-guide.html

More information about Maemo 5 Alpha SDK:

http://maemo.org/news/announcements/maemo_5_alpha_sdk_released/

Happy hacking !

- SDK+ team

Maemo and BeagleBoard

FOSDEM 2009

Brussels was foggy and cold, not much warmer than Helsinki at this time of the year. Luckily the tightly packed ULB campus provided plenty of interesting talks and lectures on open source projects in the form of FOSDEM 2009.

Maemo on BeagleBoard

I gave a speech in the Embedded track announcing a newly started project “Maemo on BeagleBoard“, whose idea is to run Maemo software on a BeagleBoard. The project is just taking its baby steps and requires a lot of work to grow up to something really useful.

My slides for the speech can be found from the docs section of:

http://garage.maemo.org/projects/maemo-beagle/

The project infrastructure has been established and for the time being it just provides instructions how to set up your BeagleBoard to run Maemo stuff using the provided rootfilesystem and kernel image. The current release is based on the Maemo 5 pre-alpha2 SDK, which allows only a very spartan environment because of yet unpublished major Maemo 5 components.

http://maemo-beagle.garage.maemo.org/

I have high hopes that the upcoming alpha release of the Maemo 5 SDK will have more useful content available. Among other goodies, it will give us a first look at what the new Maemo UI will look like and if everything goes as planned you’ll be able to run the new UI on a BeagleBoard.

Why BeagleBoard?

BeagleBoard is a promising platform to run the new Maemo 5 software since it is built around an OMAP3 processor from Texas Instruments. Maemo 5 supports it too and all the software in the Maemo 5 repository is built with options suitable for OMAP3’s ARM Cortex-A8 core.

With all the fuss about BeagleBoard, you should keep in mind that in the end it is not an official target hardware for Maemo 5. It’s just something that’s low-cost, fun to hack with and processor-wise related to Maemo 5.

More information about the BeagleBoard can be found in:

http://www.beagleboard.org/

What next?

As mentioned, I’m putting high hopes on the Maemo 5 alpha SDK release to boost this project further. There’s a lot to improve on the web site and a good action plan is needed to see how to change the packages published in the SDK to better server the BeagleBoard environment.

Cheers,

Juha

Maemo SDK+ RC2 released

Maemo SDK+ team is happy to announce our Release Candidate 2 (RC2).

This RC2 release includes bug fixes and provides better tools to setup the CPU-transparency method when working with the device. In addition, the “maemo-sdk-installer.py” script has also been improved and it now also provides a GUI option.

RC2 is available for Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10, Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 and also for Debian Lenny, Debian Etch/i386 GNU/Linux distributions.

The core components and their version are: maemo-sdk 0.9.99.13, Scratchbox2 1.99.00.30, Q-EMU 0.9.1-9 (This is the “SB2″ version with patches), Libtool 1.5.26-2, sbrsh 7.6 and Anjuta IDE plugin 0.4.3.

More information is available in the SDK+ page:

http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org

Happy hacking !

SDK+ team

Maemo SDK+ RC1 released

Maemo SDK+ team is happy to announce our Release Candidate 1 (RC1).

This RC1 release has better support for debugging with gdb and valgrind tools. We have also made several improvements mostly to the maemo-sdk tool and Scratchbox-2 core components and also fixed a number of issues that were in the previous release.

In this release we also provide a separate easy-to-use installer script that installs the whole SDK+ environment with minimal hassle. For first time users we recommend to use this installer over manual installation. The installer conveniently installs the required toolchains, rootstraps, Etch-tools and other SDK+ components that previously might have required a manual installation or other additional steps to get a working SDK+ environment fully configured.

RC-1 is available for Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10, Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 and also for Debian Lenny, Debian Etch/i386 GNU/Linux distributions.

The core components and their version are: maemo-sdk 0.9.99.3, Scratchbox2 1.99.00.27-lta57, Q-EMU 0.9.1-6 (This is the “SB2″ version with patches), Libtool 1.5.26-2, sbrsh 7.6 and Anjuta IDE plugin 0.4.2.

This release also includes the newly announced rootstraps of Fremantle SDK Alpha-release.

More information is available in the SDK+ page:

http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org

- Maemo SDK+ team

Now the site really feels faster!

Bergie beat me to the post

A big thank you to everyone involved in the push! Especially X-Fade and Bergie.

I was happy when I read my mails this morning, X-Fade telling that the upgrade went well. And I was really smiling when I logged onto the site.

The site is just faster. The new Midgard version feels good and support just got better. And still some small tweaks on the way, great!

Now I think the main pages are technically ready for the community to keep growing

Excellent job, thank you!

Technorati Tags: maemo.org, Maemo, Midgard

maemo SDK+ Beta-2.5 released

We are happy to report that the maemo SDK+ Beta-2.5 is released. Click yourself to http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org to learn more how to develop maemo applications without Scratchbox-1.

Maemo SDK+ is an alternative (and currently unofficial) way to develop software for Nokia Internet Tablets.

This release has lots of bug fixes and much better support for X86 architecture than the previous release. We also introduced  new command line tool called “maemo-sdk” that acts as a wrapper to the multitude of services the SDK+ offers. We now recommend using this new maemo-sdk command line tool for all SDK+ related maintenance work (like installing rootstraps, tools, compilers, starting the Hildon UI etc) instead of using the separate maemo scripts and tools. This tools frees the developer from doing many mundane daily tasks manually. It also takes care of the many configuration and initialization steps that previously you had to do manually.

After releasing the previous beta we were contacted by many  people who requested wider distro support than just Ubuntu Hardy so this release is available for the following distros:

- Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10

- Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04

- Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10

- Debian Lenny

- Debian Etch / i386.

The new versions of core packages are: maemo-sdk 0.9.98.5 core package, Scratchbox2 version 1.99.0.27-lta51, Q-Emu 0.9.1-4 (SB2 version with patches), Libtool 1.5.26, sbrsh 7.6, and Anjuta IDE plugin 0.4.2.

For those who are currently using beta-2 we recommend to upgrade to beta-2.5 version.

Happy Hacking !

-the maemo SDK+ team

The short service break that you just experienced…

Was performed to add another cpu to the SQL server, which was task switching like crazy. Lost lots of cycles for no good reason. Now the server should have an easier time, but I’ll wait for the statistics to arrive to see what and how much has changed.

Anyway this is again a step in the correct direction. I want to make the site feel fast.

And I am really happy to see the importance of simplicity in the discussion about the maemo.org redesign. Simple elegant design usually means that it is faster to run.