Can't stop the signal.

Lately I’ve been working on Ltib (Linux Target Image Builder) in order to have Enjoy running on a demo iMX31 board here in ProFUSION. We’ve already published a few videos on youtube demoing our work here and here (more to follow soon), but so far the packages were scattered through different e-mails on the Ltib mailing list. But as of yesterday, Stuart Hughes merged those packages upstream and now it’s publicly available for all users of Ltib. Also, I’ve been given access to Ltib’s CVS and will be uploading more packages there soon (Enjoy and Illume are next on the list, already packaged and just in need of a few clean-ups).

If you are using Ltib and wish to test E17 (or just X.Org), here are the steps necessary (if you find anything missing from this guide or have any other suggestions, please do leave a comment here since this guide will probably be posted later on Ltib’s homepage) :

1) Update to the latest CVS version if you haven’t already.

2) If you’re going to install the Enlightenment packages, you’re going to need a few packages to be available on your host. Luckily you can just use Ltib to install them :

$ ./ltib –hostcf -p eet.spec
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p embryo.spec
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p evas.spec
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p ecore.spec
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p edje.spec

3) Run ‘./ltib –configure’, and inside Package List, there should be two new submenus, one for Enlightenment and one for X11. Choose the packages you wish to install. One package worth mentioning is Expedite, which can be easily used to benchmark your device and see if the installation was OK.

4) If you are going to run X.Org, you might need to patch xorg-server depending on your device’s supported display resolution (on CVS there is already a patch to add support for vga-portrait mode which is the default resolution for our test board, and I’m sending another patch soon to add support for WVGA).

5) Example of how to start X :

$ Xfbdev -screen 480×640 -mouse tslib,,device=/dev/input/ts0

6) Example of how to start Enlightenment :

$ DISPLAY=:0 enlightenment_start

Try it out and tell us if it worked well for you. Cheers.

Last week I gave a course on Python for S60 as part of the Mobility Week event in São Carlos, held on the USP (University of São Paulo) campus there. It was a 12 hour course, divided in three 4 hour sessions. Gustavo had already blogged about the event before here, so I’ll just add a few comments about how my course went.

The first day was just an introduction to development on cellphones, and since some of the people who were attending had never worked with Python before, I also gave a really fast Python introduction. We finished this first day with a few examples of software that were developed using pys60. When preparing the course, I wanted to find some really nice examples to show that Python enables people to quickly develop applications that were probably going to take at least a few weeks with C++ or JavaME. One really nice example I found was Cellphabet, a software that uses the Cell Tower information your cell phone provides to transform a path you walked into an english word (his post explains the design alot better than I possibly could in one sentence). Since the source code wasn’t available (it was hosted on a wiki that had to be taken offline due to spam), I contacted the author and he was quite happy that I was planning on using it as an example. We started talking and he asked me what I was going to tell them Cellphabet could be used for. When I replied that it could probably be used for security (which is one of the reasons he listed on his original post), he gave me an answer that completely took me by surprise :

Yes, that was one of my prime concerns, the other was romantic. If a
lover wrote his partner a message by walking for a few hours non-stop,
it would be saying a lot. So the message becomes ‘the medium’. It is
no longer a short message, it becomes a long message.

After ending the first day with this most romantic example, we spent the following session going over the Symbian API and doing small examples. Unfortunately we did not have test cellphones available, so people had to work with emulators.

The final day was open for each student to develop their own project. One of them has already been published, an wordpress tool for S60 devices (blog post in pt_BR here). Hopefully more will follow.