We all know linux is cool, don't we? However these people at SuperFreddo make it supercool (freddo is the Italian word for cool/cold).

SuperFreddo is a frozen food chain here in Naples Italy, and the penguin in their logo has an interesting resemblance to Tux, the linux kernel mascot: the contour is not exact and it is wearing a hat and a scarf, but you just look at the feet -at their inclination- and you have no more doubts.

I am not on Facebook, so maybe some of you could point out to them where the designer of their logo could have taken inspiration from.
Could there be also a legal case here? I don't know.

I attach a couple of pictures of their shopping bags, just for the records, and to remind people that from 2011 plastic bags are banned in Italy.

20 Jul 2010 9:42am GMT

Since late May 2010 I've been given write access to the OpenEmbedded repository.

Thanks to the OE devs who supported me.

04 Jun 2010 3:02pm GMT

No matter how much careful we are when writing code, whatever changes we are making to a piece of software we must test them before production, even Donald Knuth once said: Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. :).

Moreover, if the software we are working on is targeting an embedded system and needs cross-compilation and depends on other software, then testing can be more tedious: we have to prepare patches/archives and instruct the target SDK to pick our latest code, or we could code directly in the SDK working tree, but that would not be very clean. If you use git and OpenEmbedded there is a very neat way to build directly from our own working directory on the filesystem. By developing with git from the start, your changes are ready to be sent upstream as soon as they are proven to be OK.

Git cloning from filesystem

I am not going to repeat how nice, sleek and whatnot git is, just let me show you again how flexible it is: you can easily "re-clone" from a git clone on the filesystem, no need to have any servers around:

$ cd /tmp
$ git clone file:///home/ao2/Proj/EZX/OE/framework

See? By only using the file:// URI scheme we fetch from a git (working) directory: a git directory is a valid git repository, there's some beauty in this regularity.

Fetching the latest code from our git working dir with OpenEmbedded

OpenEmbedded uses the bitbake task executor, .bb files (called recipes) are used to describe bitbake tasks, they are generally used to define packages for distributing some software, and the source code of the software can be fetched in many different ways; in this case we are editing a recipe which uses the git fetcher, let's take a look at the original recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb:

DESCRIPTION = "The reference implementation of the freesmartphone.org framework APIs"
HOMEPAGE = "http://www.freesmartphone.org"
AUTHOR = "FreeSmartphone.Org Development Team"
SECTION = "console/network"
DEPENDS = "python-cython-native python-pyrex-native"
LICENSE = "GPL"
SRCREV = "93673aa09cafc8fb5cfc3cb4055a73e25e595b70"
PV = "0.9.5.9+gitr${SRCPV}"
PR = "r3"
PE = "1"

inherit distutils update-rc.d python-dir

INITSCRIPT_NAME = "frameworkd"
INITSCRIPT_PARAMS = "defaults 29"

SRC_URI = "${FREESMARTPHONE_GIT}/framework.git;protocol=git;branch=master \
           file://frameworkd \
           file://frameworkd.conf \
           "
SRC_URI_append_shr = "file://oeventsd-use-opimd-signals.patch;patch=1"

S = "${WORKDIR}/git"
...
...

we can change the path in SRC_URI to a directory on the filesystem, and change the protocol to file so that git uses our working copy to fetch the code for the package, we can also specify our development branch here. Note that we still have to use the git:// scheme, because that's what tells bitbake which fetcher to use.

diff --git a/recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb b/recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb
index dac7fe9..ddae81d 100644
--- a/recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb
+++ b/recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb
@@ -4,9 +4,9 @@ AUTHOR = "FreeSmartphone.Org Development Team"
 SECTION = "console/network"
 DEPENDS = "python-cython-native python-pyrex-native"
 LICENSE = "GPL"
-SRCREV = "93673aa09cafc8fb5cfc3cb4055a73e25e595b70"
+SRCREV = "${AUTOREV}"
 PV = "0.9.5.9+gitr${SRCPV}"
-PR = "r3"
+PR = "r4"
 PE = "1"

 inherit distutils update-rc.d python-dir
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ inherit distutils update-rc.d python-dir
 INITSCRIPT_NAME = "frameworkd"
 INITSCRIPT_PARAMS = "defaults 29"

-SRC_URI = "${FREESMARTPHONE_GIT}/framework.git;protocol=git;branch=master \
+SRC_URI = "git:///home/ao2/Proj/EZX/OE/framework;protocol=file;branch=freescale_neptune \
            file://frameworkd \
            file://frameworkd.conf \
           "          

Now we are set, we can build packages as usual and test our local changes on the target system:

$ bitbake -c clean recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb
$ bitbake recipes/freesmartphone/frameworkd_git.bb

27 May 2010 8:46am GMT

I'm now on twitter. I'll use that for small status updates on the various open source related work I'm doing, e.g. FSO, OpenEmbedded, Vala, and the like.

Follow me, if you can

04 Apr 2010 2:59pm GMT

After Trolltech dropping the ball with the community back in the old days of Opie, I pretty much gave up on Qt (and C++) apart from accepting some contract work, so my C++/Qt skills would not get too rusty. Since my nightmares with getting something fluid out of Gtk+ (back in the Openmoko days), I did not have the chance to do much UI work - the freesmartphone.org middleware kept me busy enough.

I have been watching Qt progressing though, and ever since they introduced Qt Kinetic and QML it became very interesting for me again. QML looks like EFL's Edje been thought through - don't get me wrong, Edje was groundbreaking (as most of Rasterman's work) when it made its debut, however in my opinion it got stuck in the middle and never lived up to what I was expecting from it.

Once QML ships with Qt - hopefully in the next minor or at least major version of Qt, I will get back on doing some FOSS work on application level to complete creating a smart phone stack. That's going to be fun!

27 Feb 2010 3:44pm GMT

Just came back from FOSDEM 2010, which - after skipping the last incarnation - was a great inspiring and productive event. The Openmoko devroom we originally requested was declined, however thanks to the initiative of Serdar Dere, it turned out we could snatch a last minute 3 hours timeslot that was left open by the Xorg guys. Very shortly we prepared a schedule and managed to get a nice program which was very well received.

Due to the short notice, we could not manage to create a video recording infrastructure, so I'm afraid this year we can only provide the slides - which are a notoriously bad substitute for real talks though. We try to improve for next year - if we can get a devroom again. The pictures you are seeing are courtesy Dr. Nikolaus Schaller from Goldelico, btw. - thanks!

The FOSDEM team did certainly improve its organization over the last years, I was very pleased to see some of my criticism being taken into account. Apart from the lack of good coffee in Brussels (which the FOSDEM team probably is unguilty for), I can't complain about anything. Even WiFi worked tremendously well on saturday. I still think due to the size of the ever growing interest in this conference that the ULB as location should seriously be reconsidered though. The special service transport on sunday to the main station is a great idea, folks - thanks a lot! Funnily enough, half of the ICE that took me to/from Frankfurt/Main to Brussels Zuid was filled with hackers, btw.

I have met some interesting people working on mobile devices, such as dcordes, leviathan, GNUtoo, cr2, larsc, heinervdm, etc. It's great to see there is still momentum in real mobile FOSS architectures (i.e. something besides the Android, Maemo, or WebOS systems). I'm glad to tell you that this year we will see an exciting breakthrough in freesmartphone.org middleware supporting new platforms, i.e. progress on the HTC Dream and the Palm Pre is looking _very_ well. Stay tuned for more details appearing here soon.

I wish every conference would be like that. The only slightly disappointing thing was the cross-buildsystem-session in the embedded room. Just when I was expecting the discussion about the problems and potential collaboration to start, the time for the session was over. Rather than wasting time watching Andy Green telling us that our projects will die soon and we should all start using Fedora/Embedded now, we could have had some progress… Oh well, perhaps next year.

08 Feb 2010 7:56pm GMT

Due to some lucky coincidences, we got a devroom at this year's FOSDEM. I'll be there, presenting a short overview about the history of the Openmoko project as well as a wrap-up of the latest work on the freesmartphone.org mobile devices middleware.

Hope to see you there!

03 Feb 2010 12:14pm GMT

I'm fed up with booting my Linux-based smartphones like desktop-systems. Two major developments will help me accomplish enormous improvements in boot speed:

• devtmpfs - kernel support for the /dev file system
• dbus system activation - on-demand launching of dbus-based services

I'm going to carry out the following two tasks in OE:

1. Writing fso-boot, a small executable written in C, which mounts the filesystems, brings up DBus and (optionally) launches X11
2. Setting fso-boot as new init process, that way you still have sysvinit and udev in your root file system, but they're not active unless explicitly asked for

I'll do that for the freesmartphone.org adaptation for the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1, Google ADP-1), which I'm running on 2.6.32 (necessary for devtmpfs) - stay tuned for the first benchmarks.

01 Feb 2010 11:59pm GMT

In linux kernel development there are informal, and yet quite solid, conventions which apply when sharing patches and collaborating during the -public and undisclosed- phase of code peer-review.

As some of you may know, all the communications about kernel development happen via e-mail, and there are some tools to ease the task of preparing and sending patches; these tools allow some degree of customization, or "branding" like I am calling it in this case. Let's see how to decorate our patches so that their author is more easily recognizable (and acknowledgeable). Obviously all this doesn't apply only to linux, that's just where my experience come from.

Let's step back to summarize a common work-flow used when preparing patches with the git SCM:

# clone some repository
git clone git://git.example.com/repo.git
cd repo.git

# create a new development branch and work on it
git branch new-dev-branch
git checkout new-dev-branch

# Commit operation is inexpensive in git, use it
$EDITOR fileA
$EDITOR fileB
git commit fileA fileB
$EDITOR fileA
git commit fileA

# Prepare patches to be sent
git format-patch -s --cover-letter master..new-dev-branch

# Edit patches to:
#   - add Cc recipients
#   - add annotations after the '---' separator,
#      this does not interfere with commit messages
$EDITOR *.patch
git send-email --to "Some MailingList <some@mailinglist>" *.patch

# When the patches are accepted upstream we can delete
# our local development branch
git checkout master
git branch -D new-dev-branch

Now, the patches we are producing this way have the author figuring as the sender, and are signed off according to the Developer Certificate of Origin, but we can still make them more "personal", for instance we can:

• Add some custom email headers, like Organization or X-Face.
• Appending a signature to the cover letter.

Adding custom headers

Using the format.headers option in git you can add any header conforming to RFC2822 into the patches you generate with git format-patch.

I am adding an X-Face header (the source image is attached at the end of the post):

X-Face: z*RaLf`X<@C75u6Ig9}{oW$H;1_\2t5)({*|jhM<pyWR#k60!#=#>/Vb;]yA5<GWI5`6u&+
 ;6b'@y|8w"wB;4/e!7wYYrcqdJFY,~%Gk_4]cq$Ei/7<j&N3ah(m`ku?pX.&+~:_/wC~dwn^)MizBG
 !pE^+iDQQ1yC6^,)YDKkxDd!T>\I~93>J<_`<4)A{':UrE

To set this you can do:

git config --global --add format.headers ''
git config --global --edit

and then add the string in double quotes, remembering to escape characters in the X-Face as git-config(1) Manual Page says:

Double quote " and backslash \ characters in variable values must be escaped: use \" for " and \\ for \.

The following escape sequences (beside \" and \\) are recognized: \n for newline character (NL), \t for horizontal tabulation (HT, TAB) and \b for backspace (BS). No other char escape sequence, nor octal char sequences are valid.

Which in my case gives:

[format]
        headers = "X-Face: z*RaLf`X<@C75u6Ig9}{oW$H;1_\\2t5)({*|jhM<pyWR#k60!#=#>/Vb;]yA5<GWI5`6u&+\n ;6b'@y|8w\"wB;4/e!7wYYrcqdJFY,~%Gk_4]cq$Ei/7<j&N3ah(m`ku?pX.&+~:_/wC~dwn^)MizBG\n !pE^+iDQQ1yC6^,)YDKkxDd!T>\\I~93>J<_`<4)A{':UrE\n"

Now the recipients can see my X-Face in my patches, provided that their MUA can decode it...

Note: please don't copy and paste this X-Face blindly, this is my X-Face, you want to have your very own.

Appending a signature to the cover letter

If you are using the Vim editor to compose the cover letter and annotate patches it is very easy to make it add your signature to the first mail in your patchset.

Download my signature_block.vim into ~/.vim/plugin/ and add these lines to your ~/.vimrc:

  " Append a signature block to cover letters generated with git-format-patch
  autocmd BufRead 0000-cover-letter.patch silent call AddSignature('~/.signature') | w
  autocmd BufRead 0000-cover-letter.patch autocmd! BufRead 0000-cover-letter.patch

Now the first time you open a file named 0000-cover-letter.patch your signature (any text in ~/.signature, in this case) will be appended automatically.

05 Jan 2010 10:53pm GMT

As mentioned, the freesmartphone.org team and community has taken the challenge to put the FSO stack on the Palm Pre which is out next month. The goal is to manage a voice call with the FSO stack within four weeks.

The idea behind this is a very important one. With only the Openmoko FreeRunner as a platform, the FSO stack is doomed into oblivion sooner or later, since its a very limited hardware platform - in quantity, but considering the closed alternatives also in quality. Hence, we need to proof that FSO can run on current, competitive hardware - to embrace companies that want to adopt FSO in their niche.

The Palm Pre is currently our major hope - all other hardware being either too closed (yes, this includes the Nokia N900) or already outdated.

25 Sep 2009 5:18pm GMT

Something wonderful has happened! Jürg Billeter - mastermind of Vala - pushed support for server-side async dbus into Vala. I hope I didn't annoy him too much (having continuesly pestered for almost a year now), but the net effect is that we can now continue working on fsogsmd, the Vala implementation of our dbus GSM server (see http://docs.freesmartphone.org for an overview of the API). Yay!

13 Sep 2009 5:44pm GMT

I'm on my way to LinuxTag 2009. Instead of a "real booth" like last year, we settled on a developer table in the hacking area - there we can present our Linux on mobile projects such as

• GPE
• FSO
• OpenEZX
• OpenMoko
• Gnufiish

in a more relaxed way - giving room to dive into some technical issues, when interested folks come around.

Find me there, if you're interested in any of the aforementioned projects. I'll be there until Friday afternoon.

24 Jun 2009 5:34am GMT

I felt it's time to recap the stuff that kept me busy the last months and give you an overview over the achievements planned for this year - always focusing the free software movement, of course.

freesmartphone.org

Let's start with the major project I've been working on, the freesmartphone.org project, funded by Openmoko, Inc. FSO grows, and it grows in the right directions. We get more API customers - notably the SHR project and the Paroli project - and refine our API and the reference implementation. The 5th milestone has just been released and apart from a major foobar with read-only partitions, it's pretty good. We are going to fix this OE-inheritance and release a milestone 5.1 in a couple of days.

fso-abyss (GSM 07.10 Multiplexing)

For some modems - e.g. the TI Calypso (see my previous post on ogsmd and its modems) - until now we have relied on pyneo's gsm0710muxd. Over the last weeks we found some severe problems (race conditions, buffer overflows) with this though, so I thought I have a shot at developing my own GSM 07.10 Multiplexer.

The result is called fso-abyss and is - as with all our software - available at git.freesmartphone.org under a free software license. The major difference to gsm0710muxd is the architecture (and maintainability). While gsm0710muxd combines talking to the serial ports, the pty's, handling dbus queries, and doing modem specific things, fso-abyss went a different route.

At the heart there is a minimal protocol engine implementing GSM 07.10. Since there was already something available in Qtopia - even nicely seperated without any external dependencies - I took that one and factored it out in a dedicated project called libgsm0710 (available in git as well). The idea here is that different interest groups can collaborate on getting the protocol engine right, since not everyone wants a DBus frontend such as implemented in fso-abyss. The next step was writing a VAPI file for glueing the protocol engine to Vala (more about that one in a bit), which has been used to develop the upper layers of fso-abyss.

Last but not least, there was the pty implementation, the serial port communications abstraction, and finally the dbus server. The DBus API originally designed in cooperation with pyneo has been enhanced to feature the additional features (only) present in fso-abyss. Apart from the architecture, fso-abyss also can handle virtual serial port signalling, 07.10 test commands, automatic session handling, has a wakeup service, and more. Next up is adding support for the Cinterion mc75i which has some proprietary extensions to GSM 07.10 Basic Multiplexing.

dbus-hlid (DBus High Level Introspection Daemon

Modern DBus APIs are pretty dynamic, i.e. objects can come and go at any time. Depending on the hardware, you may find more or less objects of a certain kind. You can now add infrastructure to query the objects (essentially a duplication of what DBus should provide), or just rely on the existing DBus introspection API. Unfortunately this API is missing some critical features to make it really usable, such as querying objects that implement a certain interface.

So I took the plunge and factored this out of the freesmartphone.org frameworkd, since it has broader use. This is the API for it (as introspected by mdbus):

root@om-gta02:~# mdbus -s org.freesmartphone.DBus /org/freesmartphone/DBus
[METHOD] org.freesmartphone.DBus.ListBusNames() -> ( as:result )
[METHOD] org.freesmartphone.DBus.ListObjectPaths( s:busname ) -> ( ao:result )
[METHOD] org.freesmartphone.DBus.ListObjectsByInterface( s:busname, s:iface ) -> ( ao:result )


Here are examples of how you can use it (demonstrated within a Python shell):

>>> hlid.ListBusNames()
[ 'org.freedesktop.DBus',
'org.freesmartphone.omuxerd',
':1.21',
'org.bluez',
'org.tichy.launcher',
':1.13',
':1.0',
'org.freesmartphone.frameworkd',
':1.14',
':1.1',
':1.2',
':1.3',
':1.4',
'org.freesmartphone.ogsmd',
':1.6',
'org.freesmartphone.DBus']

>>> hlid.ListObjectPaths("org.freesmartphone.ogsmd")
['/org/freesmartphone/GSM/Device', '/org/freesmartphone/GSM/Server']

>>> hlid.ListObjectPaths("org.freesmartphone.odeviced")
[ '/org/freesmartphone/Device/Audio',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/CPU',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/Display',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/Display/0',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/Display/gta02_bl',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/IdleNotifier/0',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/Info',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/Input',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_aux_red',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_power_blue',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_power_orange',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/neo1973_vibrator',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerControl/Bluetooth',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerControl/UsbHost',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerControl/WiFi',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/ac',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/adapter',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/apm',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/battery',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/usb',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/RealTimeClock/0',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/RealTimeClock/rtc0']

>>> hlid.ListObjectsByInterface("org.freesmartphone.odeviced", "org.freesmartphone.Device.LED")
[ '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_aux_red',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_power_blue',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_power_orange',
'/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/neo1973_vibrator']


fso-monitord

While working on implementing GSM time(zone) support for ogsmd, we found we had too few samples, especially since time(zone) information are only sent by few providers all over the world. Moreoever, we missed a generic means to record all the data the frameworkd is sending out via its signals, such as:

• Usage statistics
• Location Updates
• Diagnostic Data

To support this (and more), we came up with fso-monitord, which is available from git as well. fso-monitord logs its data to a flat file format that you can send to us to improve our databases or for debugging. We also figured this would be the best place to add a generic frameworkd watchdog - monitoring all fso components - shutting down or restarting components as necessary and also logging incidents such as API violations.

What's next in FSO?

For milestone 5.5 (due end of march), we have two major features on the roadmap, namely bluetooth networking (headset profile) and extended PIM support. Milestone 6 will then sport full-fledged networking.

Beyond milestone 6 - apart from one major thing, which I'll cover in a second - we only have some rough plans, such as revamping or refining the subsystems we're not perfectly happy with (oeventsd and opreferencesd come to mind). Also, alsa audio scenario handling is broken by design, but this is something we have to take up with upstream.

The freesmartphone.org reference implementation has been progressing incredibly fast. This is partly due to choosing Python as the implementation language (which has been a wise choice) of our DBus APIs. Now you all know that although I truely love Python (I even wrote a book about it) and try to use it everywhere it fits, I'm very well aware that for the future of the freesmartphone.org project, it might be important to come up with a frameworkd reimplementation in a compiled language - to reduce the footprint and squeak every possible bit of performance out of the (embedded) system.

This is why I have decided to encourage a second reference implementation. This one will be written in Vala (I might have mentioned it before, did I?) which is an incredible combination of elegance and performance, featuring a complete lack of any runtime penalties and additional dependencies. It's simply amazing and I'm seriously thinking about writing an introductionary book about Vala later this year.

Anyways, back to the topic, the first bits of this Vala implementation has landed in the freesmartphone.org git in the form of the very successful GSoC project odeviced, written by Sudarshan S. Stay tuned for some amazing FSO runtime speedups coming in autumn and winter this year to your device.

XeTex

Next to writing software for the freesmartphone.org project, I also found some time to pick up working with my favourite writing tool LyX. LyX, which could be described as a LaTeX frontend, nowadays features integration with the new LaTeX variant XeTex. In contrast to other incarnations such as pdfLaTeX, XeTeX can utilize system fonts such as AAT or OpenType, which are the latest technology in computer-assisted typesetting.

I can now use my "corporate" fonts FF Meta and FF Meta Serif from LyX - amazing!

Conferences

Although still working on cutting down my travelling, I can't miss some conferences this year. I managed to skip FOSDEM, which made me a bit sad, but I'll be compensated by attending

• Chemnitzer Linux-Tage
• FOSS Aalborg
• OpenExpo 2009
• LinuxTag 2009

and possible some more… This year my main topics will be OpenEmbedded and freesmartphone.org - both dedicated to reducing the fragmentation of Linux-based embedded systems and to ease writing software for mobile devices running free and open source software. I hope we'll bump into each other at one of these occasions.

Stay tuned!

17 Feb 2009 6:36pm GMT

Although traditionally the Chaos Computer Congress' schedule is slightly suboptimal for me (12/26th is my birthday), I'm going to be in Berlin from 12/28th to 12/30th and will visit CCC on the 3th day (12/29th). I'm going to attend Harald's talk about GSM base stations, so if you want to talk to me, just pick me up afterwards.

27 Dec 2008 1:29am GMT

Over the last week, directly after LinuxTag, I was in Vachdorf. If you like to know more about this small village take a look at OSM. Of course we mapped the whole village while being there.

The reason for being there was the TechWeek from Pengutronix, a company from my area doing a lot linux embedded projects for the industry. I already known some of the people working there privately. While being there I got known to the other ones. I must admit that it is a nice bunch of smart people loving what they are doing. What I actually appreciate a lot is their work to get their patches into mainline, even if it costs a lot of time and money. This is a not-so-common practice in the industry linux embedded world.

While hanging out there and having good talks about git, patch handling and submission workflows I spend most of my time working on geting some of the EZX patches mainline ready. We now have a svn branch that contains patches sitting directly on top of the arm git tree pxa branch. While working on this I also started to submit three one-line fixes upstream to get used to the arm-linux workflow. 2 Are already in the git tree, one is acked and waiting in incoming.

I enjoyed the week. Smart people, good food and hacking on stuff you like. Life could be that easy...

12 Jun 2008 3:28pm GMT

Next tuesday I'll be on my way to Berlin for the LinuxTag. It will be some busy days between giving a talk, an interview for Radio Tux and hanging out at the booth of my ex-employer.

Still I'm looking forward to it. This time I hopefully have some time to attend the technically talks. I look at you kernel track. And let Harald de-mystify the security of the micro waves around us.

22 May 2008 10:37pm GMT