Maemo DP team blog

A month ago, we offered a first tech preview of a new cross-compilation toolkit for Maemo5. Madde is a command line tool, which makes the development for Maemo much smoother. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, is easy to install and contains the Qt 4.5 libraries by default. Further there is a first preview of a client for the N900 available, which helps to transfer and test the code on the device.

Since then we received a lot of positive feedback. Especially Windows users like the idea of being able to develop and cross-compile applications within their native environment. The feedback helped us to improve the software further. Now there is an updated version of Madde tech preview (0.6.14) available for download. The biggest changes are the updated target to PR1.1 and the change of the toolchain, which matches now the Maemo5 SDK. Here are all the changes and improvements, compared to the “X-mas-edition”:

• Fremantle target updated to PR.1.1

• Toolchain changed for Fremantle. Now it matches with Maemo5 SDK. cc command fixed.

• Windows target creation performance improved.

• Maemo Desktop files added to Qt example and base64 command added to support that.

• Qt library example fixed.

• Following https://bugs.maemo.org/buglist.cgi?component=madde bugs fixed.
  • 8415 Cannot install MADDE to different directory than the default
  • 7637 pscreate writes a localized, invalid trailer line into de…7821 Library search path wrong
  • 7350 MADDE 0.5’s dpkg replacement does not work with –search …
  • 7774 Can’t run GLES applications under madde environment
  • 8623 hildon-1 pkg-config configuration broken.

• Minor buf fixes and improvements.

With this new preview, we want to keep you up-to-date on the development process. Please feel free to give it a try and to let us know, what you think. You can do that on different channels – Bugzilla has a component called Madde and there is a talk-thread, where Madde developer are active and open for your comments.

A request to DNS management has been sent to start pointing maemo.org to the new infrastructure tomorrow at 8:00 UTC and it was acknowledged and scheduled.

After the change there is about a 6-24 hour period in which the DNS change propagates all over the world.

To do things in a sensible way and to minimise downtime, the old site will go to read only (off-line for garage) mode tomorrow morning. Then the last changes are synced over to the new site and the new site will then be opened to public.

When you see the new site naturally depends on the DNS propagation speed, but 3-12 hours seems to be normal based on the smaller moves done earlier.

Things you will experience are:

• Read only on the site before and during the move
• Garage will show a ‘we are moving page’
• No wiki editing during the move
• No git and svn work during the move

Things you might experience are:

• Some data loss is possible, but we’ll try to avoid it
• The site will look strange for a while as the changes take place and the static content is pointing wrong for a while

Things you should not have problems with:

• talk.maemo.org Talk will be open to public all the time, it is on separate hardware and not moving
• bugs.maemo.org Bugs moved last week, it’s there waiting for the other services
• Mailing lists moved to the new hardware some weeks back

After the DNS change propagates the services will start appearing normally again, and naturally there will be notices posted.

When everything is done, please be patient with the service, and open bugs on anything that looks odd or doesn’t work. Raising issues on this post, the community mailing list and on talk will also help. But bugs are a sure way to make an issue known (also remember that more bugs is more work for Andre, so please check for duplicates before opening).

And then a huge thanks to the people who have been hard at work throughout the move! Ferenc and Niels have done the bulk of the work. Ed, Jeremiah, Eero and Bergie pitched in. Much appreciated everyone! Naturally not forgetting the people at the new ISP, it was a crash course into the infra needs of maemo.org for them

So tomorrow we’ll see how the site moves!

You, like I, may have noticed that PR 1.1 is out as of this morning!

It is a big update and if you get a complaint of too little space, you may need to uninstall some applications. If you run into issues, please post a comment here, ask for help on talk.maemo.org thread or the #maemo IRC channel on freenode.net.

You can find the proper change log in the wiki. The changelog includes a full list of fixed bugs that the community reported against the initial product release. A big thank you to everyone who opened a bug!

The flashable images will be available in the usual location, tablets-dev during today. So you can also flash your device, if the SSU update for some reason fails.

The SDK will also be updated today. If you don’t have the SDK and want to start coding, get it here. For MADDE users, we are looking at possibly updating the MADDE tech preview to PR 1.1 also.

Enjoy the new release!

P.S. it seems that talk.maemo.org got overrun by traffic. Need to get that back on-line again.

Sampo (sampp or sampppa on talk), the author of eCoach, has joined us in Maemo Developer Platform to write his master’s thesis for Maemo.

Sampo’s thesis will revolve around (surprise) writing and porting software for the Maemo platform. All details are still pretty firmly floating in the air, it’s his third workday, and he just got a desk to put his laptop on.

As eCoach was first implemented for Maemo 4 and has been available for Maemo 5 for some time now, it is natural that it will be used as the case for the thesis. And if anyone is wondering, this won’t affect Sampo’s work on eCoach, rather the opposite. We want to have eCoach out there as an open source project in the future too, it’s a popular application and a good example of what the N900 can do.

Good luck to Sampo for the thesis!

Ok,

Everyone has seen that the servers at maemo.org are not up to the task anymore. Yes we know and people, especially Ferenc, Niels, Jeremiah, Eero and Ed have been working on the new infrastructure for some time now.

Moving maemo.org has taken some time due to the interwoven nature of the services in maemo.org. Especially the core services for developers (main site, garage, git, builder, repositories) are tied to each other on various levels. These ties have been cleaned during the move to make things ready for the future too. Also those ties mean that moving one part at a time is hard.

Some background

The current server infra was taken into use several years ago, when Maemo was becoming something more than a cool idea in a lab at Nokia. Back in those days the visitor numbers were small and the site was much different. Many of the services did not exist and the ones that did weren’t so popular as they are now.

Then the site slowly grew and more people found it. To accommodate this, some changes were made to the hardware, the main maemo.org site got better servers and the database back-end was updated. This was ok for the majority of last year.

Then Nokia introduced the N900.

As plain statistic, in June 2009 only the main site maemo.org (not including talk, wiki or anything else, just the main site) got roughly 2.5 million page hits a month. This changed to 40 million a month by December 2009.

We expected a growth in traffic, but not a 15 fold increase. The site could have taken about half of that and still performed.

The plan to update the servers was in place early, but unfortunately it was not pushed into action early enough. That’s pretty much my fault, I made the decision to postpone the move until after the Maemo Summit. With 20/20 hindsight: bad decision.

As it happened the ISP that was chosen could not deliver everything in the schedule they optimistically promised. Again my mistake for not scrutinising their delivery capability.

The delays piled up and we ended up in the middle of a massive growth in usage, for which the hardware was not designed for. Services slowed to a crawl like everyone can see.

While things started crawling we had the additional problem of keeping the old system somehow going and building the new one at the same time. No one wants to do that. Double work is always useless.

When will this all be better?

Hopefully next week.

There are two things in the way anymore. The first one is ssh (scp) connections for git and dput. To make things cleaner, we need one more machine to handle incoming ssh traffic, and that is still in the works. The other thing is a complex issue involving a firewall, a load balancer, apache and ssl connections. There’s a solution for that, but it still needs a bit more problem solving to make all the pieces fit together.

Some things have moved already. You might have noticed the mails from Ferenc stating that the list servers are on the new infra. Yes, after some last minute changes (done after the dns change was put through) the mail and list servers are now in the new premises. You might have also noticed that the builder suddenly got faster and your packages don’t spend hours in queue any more. The builder is now a machine that is more up to the task. Also the maemo.org test environments are set up in the new hardware and in use there. Those just aren’t seen by the public, as they are used for testing changes to the site (no, you do not change the live site without testing first).

And of the things that have not moved, many are set up in the new environment. The thing is that moving services requires that the databases move too. And if the databases move, then the services depending on them need to move… Which leads to the situation where most things will move in one big dns change.

So this week you will still see slowness and crawling servers, but next week that should be gone.

I’ll inform when the big dns change is going to hit the site. During a period of roughly 3-12 hours after the change there may be some erratic behaviour, but after that things should calm down.

Thanks for your patience up till now. Hang on a bit longer and things will improve.

I’m happy to inform that Niels (X-Fade) will be taking on a bit more responsibility in the maemo.org team.

After thinking and discussing with people how to improve the paid work done on maemo.org, I came to the conclusion, suggested by several people, that the maemo.org paid contributors (Niels, Dave, Andre, Jeremiah, Carsten and Reggie) need to have a team lead.

The goal of this change is to make the maemo.org team more focused and work more toward shared goals.

As a team lead Niels will have more responsibility over the target setting of the maemo.org team and also implementation of work. This means more communication and talk between the team, which is a good thing.

This change does not affect the roles in maemo.org, the division of work is clear as it is. Also this should not effect the work of the council in setting the direction.

Congratulations to Niels on the new responsibility!

Tero

The holiday season is here, and we have a small present for you!

It’s a tech preview called Madde, a cross-compilation toolkit for Maemo5. Madde runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, choose your flavour.

It’s a tech preview, so be aware that it isn’t production quality yet. We have played with it a bit, so it definitely works. But as it is a tech preview, don’t expect support.

Madde is a command line tool, but the documentation should clarify how to get started and answer the most common questions.

We would like to hear what you think of it though! There is a component in the Developer platform product in Bugzilla called Madde for any bugs that come up. And we’ll be creating a thread on talk also, where you can give feedback. The team that made Madde is very interested in what you think about the tool.

You can fetch Madde from here. There’s also a .deb package in the downloads to provide a nice way to interface the N900 from Madde. It’s also in development, so don’t expect eye-candy yet.

The idea with Madde is to smooth the way for new developers to shift into Maemo.

The idea is that with Madde you can compile your stuff on your own machine without scratchbox, thus taking away the pain of setting scratchbox up in the first place. Not to mention that setup for Madde is simple, just run the installer and read the instructions while everything is put in place.

The toolkit contains the Qt 4.5 libraries by default. So you can work with Qt directly, no additional downloading needed.

Please tell us what you think.

So happy holidays and hacking to everyone!

Summit is over, a huge thanks to everyone who attended and made the event memorable!

Now that (almost) everyone has gotten home, it’s time to tell you how Soumya, Daniel, Quim, Lasse and me spent our Thursday.

The story begins back home at 4:45 in the morning. I connected to the Nokia intranet over vpn to fetch the nightly images from the repository. Then jumped in a taxi, collected Daniel on the way to the airport where we met Quim and Soumya for the early morning flight to Amsterdam!

So when Peter talked about fresh software the next morning, he really meant it!

During the flight both me and Daniel went through the list of participants name by name to count the geographical distribution. Thanks for including that information in the registration form, and to remove the Nokia employed people from the list. In Amsterdam we compered the results and decided on amounts of devices per region. The Benelux countries took home the prize of most attendees.

8:25 a taxi to WestergasFabriek, where we located the batch of well packaged N900s, all covered in DHL a tape, fresh from the factory. If the software was fresh, so where the devices!

Half an hour later we had gotten the boxes moved to the Community Hall with a fork lifter where we set up a flashing line.

Two tables and benches next to the wall, four laptops connected to flashing stations, enough power cables for everything, and we were ready to rock. Quim did unpacking and fed us devices for flashing and picking up and reboxing the flashed devices. For the sake of speed we had decided to flash the devices so that each one of us took one geographical area. That way Quim had an easier time putting the devices back in boxes and marking the boxes with the regions.

Our ‘official’ way to open a device for flashing is to slide a shop bonus card in through the crack for opening the back cover and then turn the card. This really is the only way to do it to hundreds of devices. Then put the device on the flashing jig and run flasher. Pop the device off after four minutes (we were doing a full reflash, and the internal memory card is big…) and put it back in the box and make everything look untouched

And all this needs to happen with a pair of gloves on. No-one likes greasy finger prints on their brand new device!

The hotel cleaning lady must have looked twice when cleaning Daniels room on Friday morning. He forgot the pair of black gloves and two knives laying on the table…

At the same time as we were flashing devices the crew at WesterGasFabriek were setting the stage for the summit. The crew literally built the Community Hall around us! At some point the noise got so bad that they brought us earplugs.

After a few hours we kept a short coffee break and continued to go through the batch. The break served as lunch too. Only later did we learn that lunch in the Netherlands apparently consists of sandwitches and something small.

Lasse arrived some time around noon, and got straight into the job. Flying in from Oulu takes more time with the necessary transfer at Helsinki.

Quim and I had to leave for some pre-arranged meetings after two. We felt pretty bad leaving the others to finish the job, but it was clear that things could be done in time to hide all evidence of our work before the Summit registration was opened. And sure enough Soumya, Daniel and Lasse cleaned the place in good time and went to the hotel to check-in. The preparations were done and we could relax for the evening and meet everyone at the evening get-together.

Friday morning the feeling of seeing the faces of people when Ari broke the news was in itself worth the early morning wake up on Thursday. The short moment of silent disbelief and the applause. it just feels good to know that we were part of making that happen.

But we weren’t there yet. We had the grateful task of handing the devices out to people. So we slipped out after Ari’s keynote and met at the info desk and started transforming it to the N900 delivery point! Lasse was already setting up the infra and support for the N900 demo area.

After watching Peter give the instructions in the N900 hall over the live tv stream, we braced for the rush. And sure enough, the first people practically came running over! And the big wave of people right after them! The whole info point desk turned into a bar with an N900 happy hour going on. The frenzy of papers, id-cards, summit badges and N900s was wild.

At the end of the day we had given out 280 devices, 20 left to the people who for one reason or another couldn’t make it to the summit on Friday.

The news spread fast through the Internet And as we welcomed the first people at the registration desk on Saturday morning, they knew to ask about the devices as they got their badges.

The Saturday special was flashing the devices live at the desk. The flash jig got the interest it deserved, those little things saved our Thursday (Thanks Lasse, for getting them!).

With the last device out of our hands on Saturday, it was time to get together and congratulate each other for the mission accomplished. The whole operation went smoothly with no surprises.

A huge thanks to Anna-Marja, Henrietta and Satu for manning the info desk and letting us slip off occasionally for short breaks. Not forgetting Olli and Peter and everyone else for the fight to make this happen. It was worth it!

I would really like to thank Soumya, Daniel, Lasse and Quim for an unforgettable Thursday! I’ll do it again any time.

The brand new http://maemo.gitorious.org/ has been getting new content at a good rate!
That trend should continue in the future too.

A really interesting addition to the different Maemo projects is the technical preview of the Maemo 6 UI. And that is hosted o the Qt side

Go see http://qt.gitorious.org/maemo-6-ui-framework !

Hi all,

We have had an issue with updating the autobuiler used for the maemo.org repository queues to use the final SDK.

As some libraries have been moved out from the SDK repository, it has taken a while to  figure out how to provide the necessary libraries to the builder in a future-proof way. It looks like we now have a good solution for the issue.

Really sorry for the inconvenience, hope you all understand the situation. This definitely was an “oops” from our side.

Tero