Category Archives: Maemo

9 years of Igalia

Last weekend almost all of us gathered together in what we call an Igalia Summit: a 2-day event where we discuss new ideas, relax, play music, and basically have fun and the opportunity to meet each other in person, something which is increasingly more difficult as Igalia becomes more and more global.

This time we also used the summit to invite some friends and celebrate our 9th anniversary dinner.

Although it sometimes feels like yesterday we started, 9 years is already a lot of time, and the feeling of looking back at our beginnings it not something that can be easily expressed with words. Of course things were very different back then and the company has changed a lot during all these years.

The core ideas, however, remain unchanged. One of them is our passion for free software, and that’s what we’re known for to most people. But there’s another key value that is equally important for us, and that is our flat structure.

For Igalia democracy is an essential value so we take it seriously. We think our people are the most important thing that we have, and thus deserve our highest respect. That’s why we not only like to hear their opinions: we also want them to propose, decide and participate in all affairs, so we give everyone a voice and a vote in all decisions.

If there’s something we have learnt during all these years is that when people can decide for themselves they are much happier and more committed to what they do. And when people are happy and committed we take the next logical step: we make them shareholders. Everyone who stays in the company long enough and is willing to continue can become a partner. We make no exceptions.

In November, 4 Igalians became partners of the company: Alejandro Piñeiro (API), Xabier Rodríguez Calvar (Calvaris), Javi Muñoz and Mario Sánchez. They’re all good friends and I’m very happy to have them with us.

2010 has been a good year for Igalia, and we’ll hopefully be celebrating our 10th anniversary soon. Free software has evolved a lot in these 9 years. We tried to make our contributions and we met lots of friends on the way.

We’re glad to be here for 9 years already and we’re also very proud to be part of this vibrant community.

Updates on Hildon and Vagalume

2 Replies

It’s been almost two months since my last blog post so here’s a quick update on the things I’ve been doing lately.

Vagalume 0.8.3

The first thing that I’d like to mention is the upcoming release of Vagalume 0.8.3 (which will probably happen during this weekend). The only changes in this version are that menus and dialogs have been fremantlized using the Hildon 2.2 style. It’s not an enourmous change, but it was about time 🙂

Here’s a screenshot of the new preferences dialog (click to enlarge):

Note that this release is only interesting for N900 users. There are no significant changes in v0.8.3 compared to v0.8.2 for other platforms.

Hildon development

There’s been quite a few changes in Hildon during the last weeks. The maemo.org Bugzilla has been working reasonably well and I’m glad to say that some important bugs that have been fixed lately were reported directly by end users.

Apart from tons of bug fixes and speed improvements, perhaps the most easily noticeable change in Hildon that you’ll see in the upcoming Maemo update is the new “live search” feature for tree views.

You’ve seen it in the “Contacts” application and Claudio talked about it some weeks ago. There’s been a lot of tuning since then (including the support for icon views) and now it’s essentially ready. I hope it’ll make the overall user experience of the N900 a bit better.

FOSDEM 2010

Last, but not least, tomorrow I’m flying to Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2010.

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Some fellow Igalians are giving talks there (Joaquim about OCRFeeder and SeriesFinale, Victor about the dspbridge for OMAP3 and Philippe about multimedia in WebKitGTK+ with GStreamer).

We’ll arrive soon so we’ll be at the beer event on Friday night.

See you there!

Remapping the N900 arrow keys

35 Replies

Here’s a tip for those of you using an N900 with an English keyboard.

For those who don’t know it, this is how arrow keys are arranged in (some) non-English layouts:

Compare to the English layout:

My N900 has an English keyboard, and I like it because I use the X terminal a lot so having separate keys for the arrows is good.

However I miss the accents (in particular ‘ and ~) as I usually write in Portuguese and Spanish, and using the additional on-screen keyboard is not that convenient for a Jabber conversation.

Fortunately, arrow keys can be re-mapped to add extra symbols by editing this file:

/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51

Just go to the end of the file and replace the ‘arrows_4btns‘ entry with this:

xkb_symbols "arrows_4btns" { key <UP> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Up, dead_circumflex ] }; key <LEFT> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Left, dead_acute ] }; key <DOWN> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Down, dead_tilde ] }; key <RGHT> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Right, dead_grave ] }; };

With this, Fn+Up/Down/Left/Right will produce a dead circumflex/tilde/acute accent/grave accent.

If you want these changes to take effect immediately just type ‘setxkbmap us‘.

Hope you find it useful.

Update 19 Dec 2009. Since some people have asked: of course even if you only write in English or another language that doesn’t need accents, you can still add useful symbols to the arrow keys such as ‘|‘, ‘<‘ or ‘>‘. You can use any of these keyboard layouts as an example. See also this thread and this other one.

Update 10 Jan 2010. The information on this post is now (in expanded form) in the Maemo wiki.

Vagalume 0.8 released, now with support for Libre.fm

25 Replies

Vagalume 0.8 has just been released. This is the first version to come with support for Libre.fm and the Nokia N900.

Here’s how it looks (click to enlarge):

We also have a new logo designed by Otto Krüja:

Many things have changed since the previous version. These are some of the highlights (read the full list here):

Implemented the Last.fm Web Services API v2.0
Support for Libre.fm and other Last.fm-compatible services
Support for Maemo 5 (Nokia N900)
New logo and other UI changes
Sleep timer (i.e. stop playback after X minutes)
New configuration setting to download free tracks automatically

If you are interested in Libre.fm or the support for multiple servers you should read the Vagalume FAQ.

Very important for N900 users: as you may already know, Last.fm does not allow streaming music to mobile phones. If you are Last.fm user and you have a Nokia N900 then you should really read the FAQ (and also this post).

N900 users will also notice that the UI hasn’t been completely adapted to the Maemo 5 style. That is going to happen soon, but since I didn’t want to delay this release even more, this version uses the classic UI.

A Moblin version is also in the works. Expect a release soon.

Updated 15 Dec 2009: Some users are experiencing connection problems after upgrading to Vagalume 0.8. This problem has already been fixed, so expect a new version soon.

Updated 16 Dec 2009: I’ve just released Vagalume 0.8.1 with the aforementioned fix (see changes here).

Updated 21 Dec 2009: And Vagalume 0.8.2 is out, with one more fix for another connection problem (see changes here).

Amost ready for the next Vagalume release

8 Replies

Now that the N900 is (almost) here, many people ask me if I’m going to release a new version of Vagalume for Maemo 5.

Progress in Vagalume has been very slow this year, partly because of all the work we’ve been doing in Hildon Widgets.

Fortunately, the next Vagalume release will be out very soon. And yes, I know I had already said back in May that it would only take a few weeks, but this time it’s true 😉 This version is already working (you can grab the code from the GIT repository and compile it) and here’s a screenshot to prove it (click to enlarge):

And, as I promised back in May, this time it comes with support for Libre.fm.

On another note, this weekend I’m flying to Barcelona for the Maemo-Barcelona Long Weekend.

I’ll talk about GTK and the Maemo 5 UI, and my fellow Igalian Felipe will also be there, explaining how to port GNOME applications to Maemo.

In principle all training sessions are going to be in Spanish, but we’ll be around the whole weekend in case you want to talk to us.

You can see the agenda for the weekend here.

And that’s it for the moment. See you in Barcelona!

Out in the street

12 Replies

We don’t see many products running an OS based on Linux and GNOME advertised on bus stops around here, but look at this one … 🙂

N900: a great milestone for the free software community

11 Replies

With all the fuss that’s going on around the announcement of the Nokia N900, I honestly didn’t want to write yet another post about it.

But I can’t resist 🙂

I’m not going to talk about its features or its specs. I just want to say that it’s really exciting for me to see the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones releasing a high-end handset with a GNU/Linux-based operating system.

I think that this is a great milestone for the free software movement as a whole, because none of this could have been possible without all the work that Linux, GNOME, Debian and other projects have been doing before this.

Being part of the N900 team, of course I want this new device to hit the big time; but what I really want to see is not just the success of this particular model, but the proof that free software has entered the mobile phone market to stay. For good.

Let’s make it happen.

Did I say I’m excited? 🙂

Back from Gran Canaria

9 Replies

So many things happened during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit that it’s impossible to summarize them all, but here’s a list of the ones that come to my mind now:

Alfredo Kraus auditorium is a great venue, and its location couldn’t be better.
The University was less spectacular, but from a functional point of view I think it was more suited to this kind of conference than the auditorium (to begin with, Internet connection worked better). Its main problems: distance to the city center and lack of places to have lunch.
When Jos van den Oever said: we not only share specifications, we also share code, and everyone in the room started to applaud.
Despite that, and at least for me due to the packed schedule, I couldn’t attend any of the KDE talks. I don’t know if other people had the same feeling, but I left Gran Canaria a bit skeptical about the actual usefulness of having both conferences together.
All keynotes were good.
Moblin 2 looks promising.
GNOME Shell, Zeitgeist, Clutter, WebkitGTK+, client side windows.
The hacking sessions at the hotel lobby.
Nokia’s announcement that Maemo will switch away from GTK+. While this is a complex decision with a lot of causes (probably some of them political and some of them technical), I think it’s fair to say that this is (at least party) a failure of GNOME/GTK+, and deserves some debate inside the GNOME community.
Few women giving talks. I hope there comes a day when the number of women in free software conferences is not a matter of mention.
The weather was too hot for me (although at night it was fantastic).
The beach at night.
Canarian food at the dinner with the GNOME Hispano team.
Fernando and Xan’s GNOME 1, 2, 3 show.
The GNOME band.
Kimmo using a whiteboard for his talk.

Ready for the Desktop Summit

3 Replies

Following our traditions, last Tuesday we had a very big party on the beach where we set everything on fire (this pic is not from this year, though).

That means one thing: Summer is finally here!

That also means that in less than 10 days I’m flying to Gran Canaria, along with many other Igalians, for the Desktop Summit. We have a few talks there this year, I’ll give two: an introduction to the new Hildon 2.2 and a Git workshop (this one at the Spanish GUADEC).

I’ve already been to Gran Canaria once some years ago, and I keep very good memories of that trip. The island is not very big and has some amazing landscapes, specially in the central part. The Maspalomas Dunes in the south are worth a visit too (a trip is being arranged by the organisation, see here, and hurry up if you’re interested), although that part of the island is full of hotels and I didn’t find it particularly beautiful.

I was in Las Palmas for less than a day and I remember it as a nice city. I think it’s going to be a great place for the Summit. I’m looking forward to seeing many people that I haven’t seen for a long time, and I hope that grouping together the GNOME and KDE teams in the same place for such an important event bears fruit sooner or later.

See you in Gran Canaria!

The world won't listen

Alberto Garcia's blog