Licensing change requests queue open for Nokia-closed packages
Carsten Munk has succeeded in implementing his licensing change request process for opening the source of Nokia's closed source Maemo packages: My hope is that it will lead to more constructive discussion and more openness of the Maemo OS. There are some existing proposals open already, that I will be evaluating over the next couple of days in order to prioritize them. With the underlying changes that MeeGo will bring in the future, making the most of Maemo's legacy becomes more important and, hopefully, easier.
Getting started with Maemo development on Fedora
A series of articles guide Fedora users through the process of installing the Maemo SDK and writing apps. Yesterday I explained how to install the Maemo 5 SDK on Fedora 12 and launch the N900 phone emulator. Today we are going to configure the development environment for QT and deploy a “Hello World” application to the Nokia N900 emulator.
DirectUI (Harmattan's Qt-based toolkit) demos available in extras-devel for Maemo 5
The Harmattan team at Nokia have now open sourced all their work and even pushed some demos of the Qt-based DirectUI toolkit to extras-devel so that eager developers can see how Harmattan's UI could function. Andrea Grandi has taken some screenshots of the packages so you don't even need to enable extras-devel and install packages which are still in a very early stage of development. You can find more pictures in my Flickr album. Please note that installing this demo will also install Qt 4.6.2 on the N900 and about 52 MB is required.
In-depth coverage of Maemo 6 Security talk at FOSDEM
Concluding our coverage of Elena Reshetova's FOSDEM talk on Harmattan's security API, LWN has published an in-depth article on the topic and how it fits into the wider Linux environment: Security of a platform depends on a whole "stack" of solutions: at the bottom there are hardware enablers, such as a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip in PCs. On top of that, software implements integrity protection, layered above that is access control, and then privacy protection. On each of these levels, the platform needs key management for encryption and signing keys, and all this is coordinated by a particular security policy. For Maemo 6, Nokia is working on this whole security stack.
Vala 0.7.10 now in Fremantle auto-builder with Hildon & libconic APIs
Vala, a modern programming language (garbage collection, object orientation etc.) has had its version available to Maemo developers bumped to 0.7.10. This update, courtesy of Philipp Zabel includes up-to-date bindings for Hildon, libconic and hildon-desktop.
Rightware cross-platform 3D UI on Nokia N900
Rightware have a demo of their OEM-targetted 3D user interface running on the N900. The powerful hardware and open environment make it an ideal machine to demo their multi-mobile platform. Here is a video of the UI in action on a Nokia N900 running on the Maemo platform. There is even gesture detection using the front video calling camera . Watch the video to see it in action.