The MeeGo community is frustrated with the news of the MeeGo brand being abandoned. Some are understandably angry or otherwise not happy about how Linux Foundation, Intel handled the Tizen announcement and community in general - or more like how they didn't handle it at all. Last week Openmind 2011 happened to be arranged in Tampere on the very same day as Tizen announcement came alive. It was good in the way that it lead to the fact that Nomovok's CEO Pasi Nieminen was able to initiate the "Reigniting MeeGo" session not just by talking vague things about future, but actually about the process which led to Tizen and the unfortunately brief initial PR about it. Pasi is intense on emphasizing the quality and role of Qt in Tizen as well, even though officially Tizen is all about HTML5 and apparently from Samsung's part at least EFL is provided as a native toolkit. However, the promise of Tizen compared to MeeGo is reportedly that the toolkit is not specified in compliancy documents, so HTML5 with WAC is the main/only "3rd party apps" layer whereas others can be offered case-by-case. This means that unlike before, the underlying system can be built on top of practically any distribution (theoretically) and using whatever toolkits and other techniques wanted. Obviously the "Nordic System Integrators" are probably all very keen of using Qt to produce more of Nokia N9 quality user experiences in various products.

Taking the corporate hat off, I as a community member am also puzzled. The only reason I was not completely blown by the news was that I didn't yet manage to get involved in MeeGo community on a daily basis, since I'm involved with a dozen communities already. Instead I've been more like scratching the surface with MeeGo Network Finland meetings, IRC activity, OBS usage for building a few apps for MeeGo Harmattan and MeeGo proper etc. But I can somewhat understand how people like Jarkko Moilanen from meego-fi feel. They have given a _lot_ to the MeeGo community and brand, all taken away without hearing or pre-notice.

So where to now for MeeGo community? Tizen is one obvious choice. However, for all the talks that even I started this post with, Tizen is still vaporware today, and the dislike of how community is being treated might make it easy to consider other options. Also, if Tizen's reference implementation has lesser meaning, it might also mean less to actually be "in" the Tizen community than in MeeGo. I met Jos Poortvliet at Openmind, and he invited people to openSUSE. There is a lot of common ground with MeeGo and openSUSE - strong OBS usage, RPM packaging, community side focused on KDE and therefore Qt.

I would like to now point similarly to Debian! If one is tired about corporate interests and not listening to community, there is no match for Debian's 15+ years history, purely volunteer based, trust based organization, and first of all scope. While openSUSE has traditionally focused on desktop (even though like Jos pointed out they are open to all new contributions and projects), Debian has always had the "universal" scope, ie. no boundaries besides producing free software operating system for various purposes. There are over 10 architectures maintained at the moment, including the ARM (different ports for ARMv4 and hard-float ARMv7) and x86 from MeeGo world. There are even alternative kernels to Linux, mainly the GNU/kFreeBSD port. There are multiple relevant plans and projects like the Smartphones wiki area, most noticeably Debian on Neo FreeRunner. I have run Debian on my primary mobile phone for over 2.5 years, although now in the recent months I've had dual-SIM in my Nokia N950 as well (Debian not yet running on Nokia N950 or Nokia N9 - but it can and will be done!).

What Debian may lack in both good and bad is corporate funding, if you don't count the still quite respectful contributions from Ubuntu to Debian (it's in Ubuntu's interests to contribute as much possible back to Debian, so that the delta remains small). For each and every aspect, it needs a volunteer - there are a thousand volunteer Debian Developers, and at least a double of that of people without the official DD status but who still maintain a package or two among the 25000+ packages in Debian. That means also that one my find it more lucrative to join a project that has paid people to do some of the "boring parts", more of fancy web tools, including for bug handling and build systems like the OBS (which I do love by the way). On the other hand, there is no other project in my opinion where what you do really matters as much.

To find out more about Debian from MeeGo perspective, please see the recent mailing list post Mobile UXes - From the DebConf11 BoF to the stars where I wrote most of the MeeGo (CE) part when I was asked to and known of my MeeGo involvement.

Last but not certainly least, there is the Mer project - originally "maemo reconstructed", ie. making Nokia's "not really distro" into a real distro by filling in the void places. Now it's obviously MeeGo reconstructed, and they aim to be the MeeGo they always wanted MeeGo to be! Read the post for details from Carsten Munk and other key Mer people. They share the love for Qt, and want the core to be as lean as possible. They also aim to incorporate the most community like aspect from MeeGo - MeeGo CE - as the reference vendor in Mer. They also aim to be Tizen compliant - and when Tizen comes alive, I wouldn't see why the Tizen reference implementation couldn't be used for saving resources. Maybe Nomovok and/or others could offer the Qt maintaining part.

So, it might be that Tizen itself is enough for most people's needs. The key point however in this post is not to fall in agony if one corporate based project takes big turns - it has happened before, it will happen in the future. There are always enough political and business reasons from some points of view to do Big Changes. But the wider community is out there, always, and it's bigger than you think. You should consider where you want to contribute by asking yourself why you are/were part of for example the MeeGo community. Aaron Seigo from KDE asked us all this question in the Openmind MeeGo Reignited session, and I think it's good to repeat.

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Encuentro es un simple programa que permite buscar, descargar y ver contenido del Canal Encuentro.

Notar que este programa no distribuye contenido de Canal Encuentro, sino que permite un mejor uso personal de esos contenidos. Por favor, referirse al sitio web de Canal Encuentro para saber qué se puede y qué no se puede hacer con los contenidos de ese sitio.



La versión 0.2 (que es la primera que anuncio) es una versión pre-alfa... se puede usar, descargar y ver videos, y debería funcionar todo correctamente, pero le falta mucha funcionalidad (por ejemplo, buscar).

- Se pueden encolar descargas de episodios, que luego irán bajando uno por uno.

- Permite una visualización directa de los episodios desde el programa.

- Se mantiene y muestra el estado de cada episodio.

- La lista e información de los episodios se descarga automáticamente del server, para un mejor arranque.

- Tenemos un sitio web 3.0! Pasen y vean: http://encuentro.taniquetil.com.ar/ (con botón de Donaciones y todo)

- Configuración de parámetros, con un wizard para realizar más fácilmente la configuración necesaria.

- Descargable como tarball (multiplataforma), con un instalador para Debian/Ubuntu, e incluso con un PPA para suscribirse.


La forma más fácil de instalarlo, si tienen un Debian o Ubuntu, es usando este instalador:

    http://launchpad.net/encuentro/trunk/0.2/+download/encuentro-0.2.deb

Si quieren obtener automaticamente las nuevas actualizaciones, pueden suscribirse al PPA; en una linea de comandos hagan:
en
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:facundo/encuentro

En cualquier otro caso, pueden usar el tarball para instalarlo:

    http://edge.launchpad.net/encuentro/trunk/0.2/+download/encuentro-0.2.tar.gz


Recuerden revisar el archivo AYUDA.txt si tienen alguna duda de cómo usar el programa.

¡Que lo disfruten!

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Enjuewemela es aún otro juego similar a los populares "Bejeweled" o "Diamond Mine". El juego se basa en alinear 3 o más gemas, tanto verticalmente como horizontalmente, intercambiando gemas adyacentes. Está (por supuesto) escrito en Python, usando el framework para juegos cocos2d.



La versión 0.4.1 trae un montón de nuevas características, y muchos bugs corregidos. Lo más relevante es:

- Hay un nuevo estilo de juego! Se llama Maluco! No dejen de probarlo.

- Tenemos un sitio web 3.0! Pasen y vean (con botón de Dnoaciones y todo)

- Rehice la parte de audio del juego, ahora es más portable, rápida, y debería funcionar sin que tengan que saber nada sobre eso.

- Ahora se instala de forma que pueden ejecutar el juego desde el menu de Aplicaciones.

- Puse un botón de Donaciones en la página web.

La forma más fácil de instalarlo, si tienen un Debian o Ubuntu, es usando este instalador. Si quieren obtener automaticamente las nuevas actualizaciones, pueden suscribirse al PPA; en una linea de comandos hagan:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:facundo/enjuewemela

En cualquier otro caso, pueden usar el tarball para instalarlo.

¡Que lo disfruten!

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Cuando se hizo público el proyecto Ubuntu One, el único servicio que se presentó fue el de sincronización de archivos.

La comparación con Dropbox fue obvia... Dropbox era (y sigue siendo) el servicio de sincronización de archivos con más usuarios.

Si uno leía blogs y reviews del producto, una pregunta se repetía muchísimo: ¿cual era el punto de sacar otro servicio de sincronización de archivos? La respuesta era sencilla, eso era sólo el primer servicio de Ubuntu One, muchos más vendrían luego.

Hoy, Ubuntu One sigue teniendo sincronización de archivos en Linux y tiene un cliente en beta para Windows, y otro para Android (salido de beta hace unos días!), tiene servicio de venta de música, y la posibilidad de escuchar tu música en tu teléfono (la hayas comprado por Ubuntu One o no) sin tener que descargarla previamente (por streaming, digamos), sincronización de contactos, una base de datos en tu escritorio de Ubuntu que se sincroniza automáticamente y que se puede usar para lo que quieras, etc...

Pero lo que quiero resaltar es una característica pequeña pero que me fue muy útil hace un rato... resulta que hicimos los posavasos de PyAr, y como del último PyCamp sobraron unas monedas, decidimos regalarles un par a cada asistente a dicho evento.

La cámara de fotos estaba abajo, así que agarré el teléfono y le saqué una fotito a un posavasos que tenía a mano. Al toque, el cliente de sincronización de archivos de Ubuntu One empezó a subir la foto "a la nube" y bajó en la compu de escritorio, ví la notificación que había descargado un nuevo archivo, fuí a la carpeta, botón derecho sobre el archivo, "Publicar", lo cual me entregó esta dirección pública. Usé esa URL para mandar por mail a los asistentes del PyCamp (y de pasó la tuité). Ya que estamos, el posavasos es:



Esta suma de pequeñas características es lo que le terminan dando un valor interesante a un servicio, lo que hace que valga la pena y marque una diferencia a nivel de productividad cuando estás acostumbrado a usarlos.

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Python Argentina (PyAr) se enorgullece de anunciar la versión 0.7 de la CDPedia.  Esta versión fue entregada a Educ.ar para ser distribuida en escuelas del todo el país, y ya está disponible para la descarga pública.

La CDPedia es un proyecto del grupo de usuarios de Python Argentina que permite acceder a la información de la Wikipedia en castellano sin necesidad de una conexión a Internet.  Se puede descargar libremente de la red y grabar a CDs o DVDs para repartirlos sin restricciones.  La CDPedia funciona en cualquier computadora, ya sea que tenga Linux, MacOS o Windows como sistema operativo.



La versión 0.7 de CDPedia en DVD fue recientemente entregada para su evaluación a Educ.ar quien, por medio de un acuerdo con Wikimedia Argentina y PyAr, está por distribuir esta enciclopedia libre en todas las escuelas de Argentina.

Esta misma versión, con contenido de Wikipedia a Febrero de 2011, ya está publicada para descargas libremente en versiones CD y DVD, se puede bajar directamente o usando un torrente. Y planeamos hacer una tirada de mil DVDs para tratar de iniciar algo viral y que llegue a toda la gente posible... te recomiendo (y te agradezco) que copies estos discos y los regales a tus amigos, familia y conocidos. La información debe ser libre, así mejoramos la calidad de nuestra educación. 

Para mayor información e instrucciones para la descarga, visitar la página de CDPedia.

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We added Family Farm to the Software Center last week and I took a few hours (of non-work time!) to have a look at it. Summary is that it’s a fun simulation game for the whole family where your job is to build up your farm.

You start with a small farm and two workers, who carry out all the tasks on the farm. For each season there’s various things you need to accomplish from looking after the animals, clearing land, planting, fishing and harvesting. At the end of the season you sell all your produce and see if you’ve accomplished the goals that were set at the start.

You also have to keep the workers happy by feeding them and making your farm look pretty – all of which costs money. As you progress through the game the number of workers, size of your farm and number of goals you have to achieve increases.

This trailer is a good overview:

Hammerware have done a great job of making the game easy to pick-up and the stories element quickly draws you into trying to improve the farm! If you’re looking for a fun simulation game, or something that the whole family can enjoy together then check out Family Farm.

Family Farm is available through the Ubuntu Software Center, just follow this link. As the game uses 3D Ubuntu users should check if their video drivers are compatible and test first with the demo. If you buy it please review it for the developers in the Software Center, and leave a comment below I’d love to hear what you thought.

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It was good that I didn't hold up my blog post in November until the videos from FSCONS 2010 (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) are out, but now they finally are:


Timo Jyrinki - Tuning an old but free phone (pt 1/2)
Timo Jyrinki - Tuning an old but free phone (pt 2/2)

Definitely see also all videos and since Vimeo doesn't work in Gnash, use a script to download.

ps. As a related item to the talk's future oriented aspects, while waiting for GTA04A3 boards to arrive, GTA04A2 has been patched to run Debian/LXDE.

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MeeGo Summit FI is now nearing completion, with several keynotes and other presentations, Meegathon 24h contest just coming to an end and a lot of interesting discussions had. See full program for details. Yesterday was a hugely energetic day, but today the lack of sleep starts to kick in a bit at least for me.

Some highlights via photos:



Keynote venue was a movie theater




MeeGo status update by Valtteri Halla / Intel - talking among else about tablets, IVI, and the 20 person team at Nokia doing MeeGo(.com) for N900 phone





Mikko Terho / Nokia - "Internet for the next billion => Qt good candidate", "code wins politics and standards"




Carsten Munk / Nomovok - "Hacking your existence: the importance of open-ended devices in the MeeGo world"




In addition to MeeGo tablet demonstrations a Wayland compositor was demoed by a Nomovok employee.



One of the many Qt / QML related talks was held by Tapani Mikola / Nokia



Evening party




Day 2 started with a few more presentations and Finhack event launching in the Protomo room as well

Still remaining for the day are Meegathon demonstrations (well actually I'm right now already following those while finishing this - cool demos!) , Meegathon awards, a panel discussion on "MeeGo, Nokia, Finns - finished? Can MeeGo be important in Finland without being inside Nokia's core?", BoF sessions and finally Intel AppUp Application Lab including some MeeGo table give-outs.

Thanks to organizers, many of whom were volunteers. The event has been running completely smoothly, coming not as a big surprise after the hugely successful last summer's Akademy 2010 also held in Tampere.

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I'm participating in the MeeGo Summit FI that starts tomorrow, and I'm already in Tampere now, as you can see. The summit is at an interesting time, given that there is a huge amount of stuff happening around MeeGo while at the same time Nokia is balancing on what do both in the far future and what to do to ship the MeeGo device they've already promised. The summit is fully and overly booked for >300 attendees. There is also Finhack free software event happening alongside on Saturday at the same venue.


The company I work for, Nomovok's CEO illustrated the MeeGo situation extraordinarily well a little less than two months ago. I think it's one of the best insights you can get from anywhere in public at the moment. Now things are starting to really heat up. Of course the Big thing is the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in the end of May, but it takes nothing away from this being the major event both in the country formerly known as NokiaLandia, and also globally given the amount of MeeGo related talent here. Nomovok is teasing people with the SteelRat - a launchpad for MeeGo tablet creation and an UX, based on latest MeeGo Core - a beta of which will be available now in Tampere and first version in San Fransisco. Meanwhile we and others are investing in also the MeeGo IVI and MeeGo TV platforms, not forgetting about the handset industry that is more visible to many tech savvy consumers.


At the same time there is a lot of exciting stuff going on in the Ubuntu project (Ubuntu 11.04 upcoming, I'm already using it and reporting bugs), together with Linaro and other ARM players. As a founder of Ubuntu Finland I'm always eager to see if I can work there also on work time, not only on free time. And regarding ARM, Nomovok is the key player in having ARM on MeeGo as well.

Then on the completely other end of spectrum, I'm eagerly waiting for the GTA04 project to have my Neo FreeRunner(s) bumped up to modern specs. At the end of the day I'm still using over 2,5 year old phone myself, since I want to run the software that is both free and completely selected (and if I want, done) by me. With GTA04, I could choose between MeeGo armv7hl port, Debian armhf port or Ubuntu as the base distribution to use my software.

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Just a note that the slides are available (non-slideshare link) for my presentation ”Tuning an old but free phone” (description) that I held in the tremendously great event FSCONS 2010. It could be described as a smaller scale FOSDEM, but that would be actually down-playing it since the free software effects on society are something that I've actually never seen elsewhere on such a scale. My talk was among the purely technical ones, though.

I was planning to hold on with this blog post until the recorded videos arrive, but since it seems it might not be during this year I will just post this now that slides are available.

I've shared a few photos as well at Flickr...


Keynote: Karin Kosina, The Inanna Project. A tech + art workshop for female artists in Damascus, Syria. An experiment in art, technology, and the transformative power of Free Hardware and Software.


Erik de Bruijn, The Future of RepRap, a self-replicating open source 3D printer that fabricates arbitrary objects including parts of itself.


Social event at the Berg 211.


Malin Nilsson on Gender, class and global flows. Using free software to fuel a revolution in home based industrial work.


Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies.


Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies (audience).

A few summaries available on a Qaiku seminar channel.

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I'm writing a blog entry instead of just replying to myself on a mailing list, since this subject might be interesting to a largish portion of the community. Most people assume things just magically work out by themselves and then after a release wonder why it wasn't so.

So, I raised a question on ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list about whether usb-modeswitch should be included in the default Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation instead of it only being in the universe repository. Reason was simply that firstly, I've read some general wonderings from the community about why it isn't already so. Secondly, without it my 3G modem (Huawei E1552) was first not functional, but right after installing usb-modeswitch package Network Manager worked smoothly with it.

Since I didn't get much discussion going on besides some statements that it doesn't work for everybody and even has caused extra problems for some others (in 9.10), I asked for a small round of comments on the subject on IRC. The channels are logged so I believe I can quote those a bit.

Colin Watson said among else:

"surely we just want the kernel to DTRT [do the right thing] by default ... this is the upstream trend ... it already DTRT for quite a few devices"
"I'd be very concerned about advertising that it's the Way to get things to work, and thus undermining getting things fixed in the kernel"
"I agree that usb-modeswitch is often a way to get otherwise non-working hardware to work ... I'm just not very convinced it's a real properly supportable option"
"but I'm just another user from this point of view, albeit one who ended up in quite a few discussions with various appropriate upstreams last time round :)"

Later on Paul Sladen continued a bit, among else:

"usb-modeswitch is a very long-winded way of sending a single usb-mass-storage command to the device's first profile"
"grep -hr MessageContent usb_modeswitch.d/ | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -rn shows the level of duplication in the configuration files"
"...I do like that it is done in userspace though, as so easy to disable if you wanted something else".

Meanwhile I also IM:d a bit with Antti Kaijanmäki from whom I probably originally coined the idea of following whether usb-modeswitch is integrated into Ubuntu or not. He mainly said that he doubts the feasibility of updating kernel's USB storage quirks in a stable release, compared to having stable release upgrades about the usb-modeswitch-data udev rules. He also proposed discussing maintainability and usability by distros with the Debian maintainer and upstream, although it sounds like Colin might have had some talks already.

So there we are now. Apparently at this point it is hoped that as many quirks as possible are inserted in the kernel, see for example drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h in the kernel. But if you have concerns about if 10.04 LTS will be kept up-to-date regarding 3G modems and want to somehow participate in bringing usb-modeswitch into Ubuntu default installation or simply discuss how to handle the kernel SRUs properly, it's time to stand up and do something.

Should there perhaps be a process with which the usb-modeswitch developers would get the information they are gathering more easily to the upstream kernel _and_ (older) distribution kernels? Is this simply a case of being easier to address an issue with a "hackish" approach, or is the usb-modeswitch actually the right way to go?

Note that I'm no expert in this area, I simply become interested in various subject from time to time :)

-Timo, going to figure out a kernel quirk for his 3G modem

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