Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: May 26, 2005

  • GKrellM on Maemo!

    GKrellM running in Maemo

    This totally rocks! I’ve been tinkering around with Maemo this evening and I’ve been hunting around for apps to run on it. After a few misses I decided to try GKrellM. I was amazed when it “just worked,” compiled and ran in my Maemo x86 scratchbox! If you’d like to play for yourself, grab the source (I used 2.2.7), unpack it, run make, then go to the src dir and run run-standalone.sh ./gkrellm

    I haven’t set up an Arm environment using QEMU yet to test it there, but that’s next.

    Update: Here are some more screenshots showing how maemo handles the configuration dialogs.

    GKrellM Config: right click
    When you right click on the top of the GKrellM window.
    GKrellM Config: main config menu
    The main configuration menu.
    GKrellM Config: license dialog
    License dialog.

    Update: GKrellM isn’t quite as happy running on ARM under QEMU:

    GKrellM on Arm: not so happy
    Not so happy.
    GKrellM on Arm: menus
    No fonts in the menus.
    GKrellM on Arm: after restarting
    After running af-sb-init.sh restart.

    I’m told that changing to the ARM target while still running the X session is just asking for trouble. Oops! I’m not sure if the display issue is due to QEMU or if it will be a problem on an actual device. If anyone gets a chance to run it on a real live device I’d love to hear how it goes. Here’s the error I get over and over when running GKrellM on SDK_ARM using QEMU 0.6.1:

    (gkrellm:4068): Pango-CRITICAL **: pango_context_load_font: assertion `pango_font_description_get_size (desc) != 0' failed

  • Agile Web Development with Rails

    Loud Thinking:

    Dave has released the Agile Web Development with Rails for beta consumption. The demand within the first hour has already been huge, so if your download takes a little longer than the 5 minutes, that’s why. I’m really proud to see this happen. Many thanks to Dave and the people who’ve contributed. End of brief transmission from Brazil.

    My beta book/dead tree combo pack has been ordered and little elves are preparing my PDF as we speak. Beta books rock! I have a copy of Thinking in C# that I picked up when it was being offered as a $5 PDF download. Good thing too, since it never made it to print.

    I have no problem paying cover price for a book if I can get near-instant access to it in beta form. Sure I could have waited till July and snagged it for $35 from Amazon, but what’s the fun in that? Kudos to the PragProg folk and the authors of the book for getting this Beta Book thing together.

  • Hello, Maemo!

    Hello, Maemo!

    Woohoo! After some help from the fine folks in #maemo on irc.freenode.net (special thanks to czr), I’m up and running the Maemo SDK. The biggest gotcha is that Maemo is expecting a 16 bit color depth and dies a horrible death if you try to run Xnest in 24 bit mode. This can be rectified by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf (if you’re running XOrg) and changing DefaultDepth to 16 under the Screen section. If you’re feeling adventurous, Xephyr allows you to run a 16 bit window in a 24 bit environment.

    Maemo still complains a bit when I run af-sb-init.sh start, but clicking on the title bar actually does stuff rather than crash. Next step is to get one of the sample apps to compile. Thanks again to the crew in #maemo for helping me out!