Nine years ago I bought Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 as my first Linux PDA. And due to this I am where I am.

I could say that it started two years earlier when I saw PalmOS devices at local geek meetings. But it took me over year before Palm m105… Then was Sony Clie SJ30 — gorgeous device. High resolution, memory card, 16bit colour. Too bad that applications did not make use of it.

So I went for Linux. There were two options: Zaurus or iPaq. Went for former one as it had keyboard. It was good choice.

Quickly started development of packages and joined OpenEmbedded team. Then became one of OpenZaurus developers. After year or something took over release maintenance and released few last versions. 3.5.4(.1) were the best tested releases of OZ ever — I had over hundred testers for each RC image and they provided installation reports, bug reports and fixes. And it had unified installer for whole range of devices (took me several months to get it polished and few guys added own tweaks). When Ångström distribution started I was the one who officially ended OpenZaurus development.

And all that was in free time. But in mean time I created my consulting company. CELF was my first customer ;)

One nice evening I got question on irc and due to that I left dark side of IT and went from PHP programming to embedded Linux full-time. OpenedHand had interesting projects and clients with many devices. Imagine operating system + kernel + Python + GStreamer in 16 megabytes of flash… And I managed to get it done. While working for them I used proper developer boards (not only customer devices) and there were funny moments…

When we worked with ST Microelectronics on NDK-15 (later replaced by NHK-15 from ST Ericsson) I had to merge two kernel trees from two separate teams. Took me 2 days of mangling 20-30MB diffs but got it done. There are people at ST-E which reminded me this during one of Linaro Connects ;D

Also on GUADEC 2007 when we presented new interface for Openmoko phones NDK-15 had to wait for me as no one at stand was able to get it running (U-Boot config needed changes).

But then Intel acquired OpenedHand… The craziest trip of my life was return from London to my parents place. For three months I even had @linux.intel.com email but never used it due to problems with Intel corporate network and Linux (do not ask).

Next was Bug Labs and their BUG device. I cleaned their Poky trees, migrated to latest version and later to use OpenEmbedded directly. Less challenges but I also had few other customers at that time to keep me busy. Some of them were OH customers before and went to me for help.

Time passed, 2010 came. One day Canonical made another attempt to seduce me and this time I decided that it looks like good opportunity so I accepted. Sent BUG 2.0 prototype back to NYC and few weeks later I made crazy train trip to small nowhere near Brussels to meet my new coworkers from NewCore. 1-2 weeks later we got our current name: Linaro.

Total change… From embedded devices to ‘Yes, it is ARM. So what?’ kind as we support(ed) devices powerful enough to run normal desktop software. Many changes for me — from OpenEmbedded where you can (cross) build everything in few hours to Ubuntu packaging where sending package for inclusion into archive meant few hours of buildd queue and then few of build. But I learnt a lot here and met another set of hackers including grey beards ones ;)

And all that because I bought Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 nine years ago…

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Nine years of embedded Linux was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Half year ago at UDS-O in Budapest Michael Opdenacker interviewed some people from Linaro. I remember that at the end of event Kiko asked him did he talked with me cause he thought that it could be interesting for someone.

Then we had another Linaro Connect (in Cambourne) and nothing happened. But in previous week I got an email that there will be interview with me in Orlando and that I should choose time slot for it. So I did and here is the result:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajNSrQfFcPA

What we were talking about? Check it yourself. And please comment did you enjoyed.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I got interviewed during Linaro Connect was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Last week there was Ubuntu platform sprint in Dublin, Ireland. I was there as one of invited Linaro guys (we got own room). What for we went there?

Work. Simple word but so much content in it. Sprints like this one allow to cooperate with other developers and this time I spent some time with Ubuntu ARM, Foundations and Kernel teams. But most of time I spent with Linaro guys as we had release of 11.06 to do.

My part was building cross toolchains for Ubuntu — including few already released ones. So I pushed several updates to ‘oneiric’, ‘natty’, ‘maverick’ and ‘lucid’ versions:

• binutils 2.21.52.20110606-1ubuntu1
• gcc 4.4.6-3ubuntu1
• gcc 4.5.3-1ubuntu2
• gcc 4.6.0-14ubuntu1
• eglibc 2.13-6ubuntu2
• linux 3.0-1.2

If you are running 11.10 ‘oneiric’ then all you need is just apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabi and will get cross compiler. For “armhf” compatible one apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf needs to be used. For those which run older releases there is Linaro toolchain backport PPA where packages are available for “amd64″ and “i386″ architectures.

Other part of my work was related with Star rating system which we plan to use to show status of boards supported by Linaro. I did some tests with PandaBoard connected to two monitors at same time and reported several bugs. Situation is nice but many things still need work.

At one moment I was creating “lucid” chroot on my “oneiric” system to be able to compile toolchain. And then I got a problem which ended in bug 802985 which needs fixing in all supported releases… Also debootstrap needs to be expanded to handle multiple suites at one time — otherwise there will be no way to populate chroots with older releases on any machine running 3.x kernels.

But work is not the only thing which we spent time on. Evenings were usually in pubs or similar places.

On Monday I went to hotel bar, grabbed a beer and started discussing with some random people. At one moment (when we were talking about OpenZaurus) one of them asked who I am and then went and bought me beer — he was Zaurus user whom I helped in past ;) So never know who you can meet…

As I have few friends in Dublin area I contacted them and on Wednesday evening I went with one of them to Club Chonradh na Gaeilge Irish pub where speaking English is nearly forbidden (but we were using Polish so no problems :). There was one bard singing Irish songs. Nice place, nice event.

Thursday was team dinner — went to Rustic Stone. Nice place, awesome food:

Friday was a day when many of us started packing and some even left earlier to catch flights. As Wookey asked me week before sprint to take my N900 with me we made a deal and I got some Euros and he got phone with all accessories. So guys — now really no more Maemo support from me (not that I did anything in this area since move to Nexus S).

On Friday also other part of visit started for me — my wife Ania arrived and we went to our family to spend nice weekend in Ireland.

We drove to Howth, spent some time looking at area from highest(?) mountain:

Then beach in Portmarnock where my wife started collecting sea shells… Quickly we got lot of them but I managed to put them in luggage somehow ;)

Evening was funny as we had to meet with one of my old friends. The “problem” was that we never met in real life yet and I forgot how does he looks. When I told that to wife and rest of group they were really surprised that such thing can happen ;D But we found each other and went to the Church Bar which is made from old St. Mary’s Church of Ireland which is one of the earliest examples of a galleried church in Dublin. Built at the beginning of the 18th century and renovated in 21st century. Nice place to visit in Dublin.

On Sunday we went into Wiclow county. Upper Lake at Glendalough then Glenmacnass Waterfall and few stops during trip to watch landscapes:

Monday was different — we went to Dublin for normal sight-seeing. You know: buildings, churches, castle…

Then packed bags and went to airport. The good part of Aer Lingus is that there were no problems with checking-in two bags on my ticket (but queue to just drop bags was insanely long). 2h flight, then another 2h in a bus and we finally arrived home. This part of conferences trip I like most — arrival at destination (as in Europe trips can take even 9h for me).

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Dublin: Ubuntu sprint and more was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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I use Qt on my devices since my first LinuxPDA: Sharp Zaurus SL5000 on which I used OpenZaurus with OPIE as primary environment. It was based on Qt/Embedded 2.3.x and was looking ok. UI of most applications work properly in both portrait and landscape modes, adapted to size of fonts (I used smaller then default ones).

Then Zaurus c760 arrived at my place and I did some UI code tweaks to make everything looking better on VGA screen (not that it looked wrong — I just improved few things). At that time I had nearly every Zaurus model in hands and took care to make all looks proper in both orientations.

From time to time I was also playing with 3rdparty applications to adapt them to resolutions higher then QVGA (which was sort of standard in palmtops of that era). Usually loading UI files into Qt Designer and reordering them or adding layouts helped. One of them was Mileage which required adding huge amount of layout elements just to make it look properly (all elements were put as X,Y positions originally).

Some time later I moved to GTK/X11 based environments on portable devices and later my cellphones took PDA place.

But with Nokia N900 I decided to go back to programming with Qt – 4.6 version this time. First was my module player (which I probably never end) and some time later I decided to play a bit with Vexed released by
Paul Romanchenko (rmrfchik on #maemo) where I reorganized UI a bit, added portrait support and did few other tweaks.

But then I switched to ApMeFo and while idea of application is good the UI is disaster:

• tabs in main window
• lack of portrait support
• unusable UI when forced to portrait mode
• use of non standard button sizes
• use of non standard font sizes

And sources lacked UI files… So one day I decided that it will be good occasion to learn something new. Author was not responding to my sources request so I launched Qt Designer and started to recreate UI from scratch — using existing sources as information what kind of widgets were used. Took me some time but I got new, a bit improved UI which even worked in portrait mode:

But it still was not what I wanted. It still had tabs and small buttons… First I got rid of tabs:

Rest of functionality was moved to menu and separate window:

I was not too proud of it. OK, it looked better, I even changed some non-UI code but it still was not what I wanted to achieve. But at least I had something what I could give to users for testing.

How does it look now? Let me show not yet published version:

First main window — all buttons are finger friendly. I also grouped them a bit — it is visible in portrait mode which is also great when user want to re-order items.

Dialog to select applications to add got some changes too. It is maybe not conform with UI style guide (OK not under but on right) but it gave me extra line in list widget. Think of multi selection…

As you see (de)activation and folders are now in menu. (De)Activation has also Yes/No requesters :)

Folders window is place which needs lot of work. Only delete works now (also with Yes/No requester).

List of things to do is long as users suggested many things. I probably will not add most of them because so far I did not checked how exactly ApMeFo works but once I will read rest of source code I think that something good will come from it.

And is designing UI simple with Qt? I think that it is — developer does not have to worry what kind of paddings are needed to be used, how to place widgets to make UI conform to style guide rules etc. Once you do design with layout elements application adapts itself to what is available.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Is designing UI simple with Qt? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Related posts:

1. Switched from Catorise to ApMeFo
2. N900 — second day
3. Zaurus line officially ended