Re: Corporate ownership of open source projects [LWN]
Am Sat, 03 May 2008 20:53:53 +0300 schrieb Igor Stoppa [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I disagree. Any closed part in a Linux system forces developers to implement stupid wrappers and workarounds somewhere. If I'm forced to use a certain kernel or glibc version, it's not an open system. Probably i was not clear: i'm just saying that if a new kernel comes out and the only impediment in using it is that the proprietary module is not compliant, a new module compiuled against the new kernel should be made available. Proprietary modules are a GPL violation (though this is sometimes tolerated) and taint the kernel. You loose the kernel community's support if you use them. That support is more important than Nokia's support. And I doubt you can supply modules for all the kernel flavors out there. Today, I might want to use 2.6.26-rc1 (came yesterday), Linus' git tree (changes every few hours), or linux-next (changes daily). And I think it would be only fair that, having Nokia enjoyed the benefits of taking these shortcuts (mostly can be summarized in not using better/more open HW), now it will take also the pain of providing continued support for the closed components. That is just additional cost caused by the closed components. Use open components and use the money for something more useful. And I thought that I was writing in good english. Poor me. I'm talking about the past and you want open components. Is Nokia supposed to go around and replace all the sold devices with open hw? No, certainly not. Please excuse _my_ bad English ;-) We all made our experiences with Linux devices entering the mass market in the last few years. Nokia played an important role here, and the internet tablet devices and the Maemo project are definitely very positive things I'm grateful for. On the other hand, the enthusiasm I had at the beginning has vanished. I found out that I cannot do whatever I like with the device because important parts are closed and proprietary. I will certainly never buy such a device again. I've an N770 and would be interested in the N810, but will not buy it for this reason. Of course I know that 99% of the internet tablet users don't want to do system programming for their devices. But even they should know that blocking programmers always means blocking (some) interesting software alternatives. This is my personal opinion - not to be taken as a promise or plan - but as an advice in what the community could do/demand to keep the old devices alive. I'll continue demanding open hardware. I'm really fed up with so-called Linux devices where I can't make the hardware work with free software. I've a similar problem ATM with the Eee PC's unsupported WLAN and its buggy BIOS... And that is good, but once certain things have happened, there is no way back. An I think I have explained what I think are the obstacles in opening specs of existing hw. Not that i wouldn't be happy to be proven wrong. OK, maybe you cannot open the specs for existing hardware, I don't know. But in general it is of course possible to design mass market hardware in a way that allows open specs. All I want to say is that I beg Nokia to actually do this the next time you design Linux compatible hardware. Hardware is Linux compatible if and only if there's a GPLed driver for it. Next time I'll check this _before_ I buy the device, I don't want to be disappointed again. Anyway note that in order to do proper low level kernel development, one needs also measuring tool and special boards that allow for precise measuring of what the sw is doing. Oh, please, leave that to the people who want to do kernel development. Yeah, I happen to be one of them, sorry for the personal point of view. OTOH the fact that you don't care doesn't mean others are not interested. If you talk about an open device, it's the whole stack that should be targeted, no? No. If someone wants to build a new kernel for a device, it's pretty clear that he should know what he's doing, that he might render the device unusable, and so on. And he should also be able to judge if he has all the skills and equipment he will need for this kind of work. That's the personal decision of each individual programmer. Your note about special boards sounded to me like an effort to keep people away from low-level programming. That would certainly be easier for you, because then nobody needed open hardware specs... Nobody in the community has such setup, How do you know that? I compile kernels for ARM devices almost every day and also build the bootloaders for them. But not our own boards, i guess. If you do it would be interesting to know how you have obtained one. Compiling for your custom or eval board means very little. To give you an example, every pad must be checked so that it has the right idle configuration depending on what is connected to it, or high currents can be
Re: silly question
Am Montag 28 Mai 2007 schrieb Carlos GP: Hi, here a newbie! I'm trying to develop a sort of chat/video software, and I think C doesn't give me what I need exactly... What is it that you need and cannot find? So my question is, can I develop in another languajes? Java, C++? Yes, you can. I wouldn't recommend Java, use Python instead. You could use C++, but with C your application will be smaller and have fewer dependencies. C is the native language of the N770 and N800, if something cannot be done in C, it cannot be done at all. So, does N800 support these ones? Do I have to prepare it for that? How? You just install support for the language you'd like to use. Like any other application. Have a look at the application catalog on maemo.org. Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: What's wrong with folder browsing?
Am Montag 21 Mai 2007 00:13 schrieb Karoliina Salminen: Now I could imagine a brilliant tool that would sort of solve this problem: A program or script that would run on linux and which would go and scan all the subfolders in the media folder and put the tags to the mp3-files on place so that the album name would be created from the folder name and the track name from the filename. Obviously it should do this without re-encoding the files (since re-encoding would degrade sound quality in lossy compression). If such tool already exists, I would love to hear where I can get it There are several commandline tools that do things like that, what about this one (you can find more with apt-cache search mp3 on a Debian system): $ apt-cache show mp3info Package: mp3info Priority: extra Section: sound Installed-Size: 76 Maintainer: Pawel Wiecek [EMAIL PROTECTED] Architecture: i386 Version: 0.8.4-9.2 Depends: libc6 (= 2.3.6-6), libncurses5 (= 5.4-5), debconf | debconf-2.0 Filename: pool/main/m/mp3info/mp3info_0.8.4-9.2_i386.deb Size: 30294 MD5sum: 1ba2865b321af42f089bb823b500671c SHA1: 1f459ae83736e9d00fb2af8f11061e7e50fe3053 SHA256: 38de501c7872d7c0078a6158da0ecd52d978da5badd36785cb6e4a906813e7d9 Description: An MP3 technical info viewer and ID3 1.x tag editor MP3Info has an interactive mode (using curses) and a command line mode. MP3Info can display ID3 tag information as well as various technical aspects of an MP3 file including playing time, bit-rate, sampling frequency and other attributes in a pre-defined or user-specifiable output format. . If you prefer GUI you should use mp3info-gtk package. Tag: interface::text-mode, role::program, scope::utility, uitoolkit::ncurses, use::checking, works-with::audio, works-with-format::mp3 HTH, Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: What's wrong with folder browsing?
Am Sonntag 20 Mai 2007 16:25 schrieb Laurent GUERBY: Today I installed canola. Removed it after 10 minutes. Why are developpers of media application using the scan+database based approach instead of just letting user browse folders to open the media they want? I fully agree. Thanks for your hint, you saved me some time. I find this database approach questionable on a desktop PC, and it's certainly complete crap on a device like the 770/800. Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: [maemo-developers] xskat and maemo fonts
Am Mittwoch, 15. November 2006 09:02 schrieb Ed Bartosh: On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 00:26, ext Hans J. Koch wrote: Am Dienstag, 14. November 2006 20:42 schrieb Holger: Hi Hans, i would very like to use xskat on my Nokia 770 too. It is my favorit game. Can you tell me where can i get xskat? I used the binary from Debian unstable xskat package. Download the package for ARM platform. A Debian .deb is in fact a tar archive. Untar it, all you need is the binary called xskat. Copy it to your 770. It will not work this way. Maemo applications aren't binary compatible with Debian from OS 2006 edition. Package should be rebuilt in Maemo development environment at least. Well, I have to admit I didn't try it with OS2006. Can you give a short explanation why that is? xskat is a simple dialog-based X app which I thought should run with any X server. Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: [maemo-developers] xskat and maemo fonts
Am Dienstag, 14. November 2006 20:42 schrieb Holger: Hi Hans, i would very like to use xskat on my Nokia 770 too. It is my favorit game. Can you tell me where can i get xskat? I used the binary from Debian unstable xskat package. Download the package for ARM platform. A Debian .deb is in fact a tar archive. Untar it, all you need is the binary called xskat. Copy it to your 770. Or how can i make it work. I copied on my 770 and it dosn´t work. I always get a failure xskat not found. I started it from xterm. If you've got it in your home directory or some other non-standard place, you need to give the full path. Probably, you'll get an error that xskat doesn't find a suitable font. In that case, get the xlsfont binary from the xlsfont Debian package, and run it on your 770. It will print a list of fonts available on your 770. Choose one and call xskat with the option -font like this: xskat -font name_of_your_font That should work. See the xskat manpage for details. Cheers, Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: [maemo-developers] Re: 802.11g Ad-Hoc Link?
Am Freitag, 7. Juli 2006 21:04 schrieb Michael P. Lococo: This doesn't answer your question in the least, but it may be that the reason for this limitation in the 770 is that the hardware can't effectively move data around any faster than 11Mbps. That's certainly not the bottleneck. 1 MByte/sec are no problem at all for a 200MHz ARM. As long as there's no floating point arithmetics involved, the CPU is quite fast. Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: [maemo-developers] xskat and maemo fonts
Am Donnerstag, 25. Mai 2006 10:01 schrieb Neil Jerram: Hans J. Koch [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The program can be started (from xterm), but immediately exits displaying a message Font 9x15 not found. xskat has a commandline option -font font_name which seems to expect a pixel size like 9x15 or 10x20. On my laptop, several different sizes work. How can I find out which values are possible on the 770? You could run xlsfonts, if it's already there. Alternatively you could compile and run the xlsfonts code in scratchbox, or write your own little program to call XListFonts and display the results. Hi Neil, thanks for that hint, that did the trick. The xlsfonts arm binary from Debian sarge runs well on the 770. Using one of the fonts it lists, xskat works without problems. Greetings, Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
[maemo-developers] xskat and maemo fonts
Hi, I just noticed that my favourite card game xskat (probably only played in Germany) could possibly run on the 770 without modifications. I extracted the xskat binary from the -arm Debian package and copied it to the 770. The program can be started (from xterm), but immediately exits displaying a message Font 9x15 not found. xskat has a commandline option -font font_name which seems to expect a pixel size like 9x15 or 10x20. On my laptop, several different sizes work. How can I find out which values are possible on the 770? Cheers, Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: [maemo-developers] libcairo in maemo
Am Montag, 15. Mai 2006 07:37 schrieb Kalle Vahlman: On 5/14/06, Hans J. Koch [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I'd like to write an application that uses libcairo. To make it clearer, I want to use libcairo directly, I don't need GTK with libcairo support! Did anybody compile libcairo for the 770? Is it possible? Any other hints? Cairo can be compiled in the SDK quite well. It just doesn't perform all that well on the device. I tested it a bit some time ago, and didn't get too engouraging results. Hi Kalle, thanks for your report. Yes, I didn't expect much. The 770 has no FPU, and libcairo seems to do lots of floating point arithmetics. But my app will render an image in the background and is not time critical, so this is not my major concern. I'll give it a try. My benchmarking app was not too optimized though, and I now am pretty sure it didn't relfect the actual Cairo performance so I think it's worth a shot to try it. I'm mainly interested in cairo's quality and abilities, and I want my app to be portable. Specially since the latest Cairo should perform much better than the one I tested it with. Well, I'll see... It all depends how performance-critical your app is really. Not at all, as I said. Thanks again for your hints. Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
[maemo-developers] libcairo in maemo
Hi, I'd like to write an application that uses libcairo. To make it clearer, I want to use libcairo directly, I don't need GTK with libcairo support! Did anybody compile libcairo for the 770? Is it possible? Any other hints? Cheers, Hans ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
