Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: May 31, 2005

  • More Maemo Madness

    Calcoo
    Calcoo, an RPN and algebraic calculator
    Gnuboy 3x zoom
    Gnuboy, zoomed 3x using xgnuboy.
    VTE
    VTE terminal emulator.

    More successful builds on Maemo x86 today. I’m still in the information gathering stage, trying to find projects that are worth spending more time on doing “proper” hildonization to. All of the above screenshots were derived from downloading a source tarball and running ./configure and make, nothing more. VTE was exciting because it didn’t fail out on dependencies that I can’t easily provide and with run-standalone.sh the soft keyboard just popped up. Having a decent usable terminal emulator is going to be a key item for a physical 770 device. The error-free build is encouraging.

    When I have some more time I would like to package some of the apps that I have been tinkering with up in .debs for distribution, but I’d like to stress that everything I’ve posted in the last few days builds on x86 with little or no modification. They’re far from well integrated Maemo apps and I’ve only tested a handful on an ARM target (I’m waiting for the next scratchbox/qemu release to do any real testing), but it’s definitely a start.

  • More Maemo Success

    I managed to get a few more things compiled and running on Maemo (mostly on x86) over the weekend. Proper Maemo ports are also starting to come in from new sources. This CPU/Memory usage meter is hildonized and designed to fit in the top statusbar. Great little hack! There are a bunch of gnome-applet style things that would do great in that status bar.

    Two of the best places for fully-featured Maemo apps are INDT’s Maemo Apps pageand the Kernel Concepts Maemo page.

    With that said, on to some more low-hanging fruit of apps that compiled with little or no modification (on most of these ./configure and make “just worked”):

    MPlayer playing Rocketboom in a window
    MPlayer windowed playing the intro to Rocketboom
    Fullscreen MPlayer
    MPlayer fullscreen, zoomed 2x.
    GView
    GView: A very lightweight image viewer.
    Glock
    Glock: an analog clock.

    The smaller apps, GView and Glock could really rock if they were ported with a basic hildonized interface. Over the weekend I also got XChat built and running on x86 (here’s a screenshot) with everything but in-channel text input working perfectly. I still think that a properly ported Gaim would be the best graphical IRC interface for Maemo right now.

    The weekend is over but I hope to do some proper maemo hacking during my downtime this week.

    Update: MPlayer chewed up a lot of CPU and as such is probably not going to run very well on the device itself, especially since so much time and effort has been put in to tweaking GStreamer for the platform. I’ve grown accustomed to the “throw anything at MPlyaer” approach to Linux multimedia, so I had to try…