Maemo

Maemo related projects

Learning OpenGL ES 2.0

tuomas

I got (again) interested on OpenGL ES 2.0 and bought OpenGL® ES 2.0 Programming Guide.

The examples on the book can be downloaded from http://www.opengles-book.com/. Those are meant to be compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio.

I made a small patch that adds initial support for Linux/X11. It doesn’t support texture loading (because I misplaced my png loader somewhere), the WinCreate() is copypaste code I don’t fully understand and the WinLoop() is missing some functionality. But at least the Chapter 1 Hello Triangle compiles and runs in Fremantle on Beagle board :)

Compile and install the libes in a normal autotools manner. Then you can compile the examples by exporting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH and running gcc:


gcc `pkg-config libes --cflags --libs` Hello_Triangle.c -o Hello_Triangle

As usual, patches are welcome :)

ALIP on n8x0

tuomas

ARM and Movial announced a second stable release of ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP) generic repository. ALIP got other updates as well, see a blog post about them in Movial’s Sandbox or the actual release notes.

The Kaze project for n8x0 devices was updated to use the generic-2 branch as well. There are no built images provided, but ALIP is relatively easy to compile if one is already familiar with Scratchbox. The ALIP rootfs works with the Maemo kernel and initfs and it can be booted nicely from an MMC/SD card, so no need to destroy the Maemo from the device just to test ALIP.


Kaze on n8x0

ALIP requires newer SB components (and specific toolchains) but the newer SB components should work just fine with Maemo targets and Maemo toolchains. Or the newer SB can be installed in a different directory from tarballs and used concurrently with the Maemo SB.

Follow the From scratch instructions but replace alip-project with kaze-project and don’t pass the -cbeagleboard. You should pass -c multimedia to include 3rd party provided (by me actually) gst-ffmpeg to the build.

If you want to include WebKit engine and Midori UI to it, add “midori” to the components file.

Unfortunately the X driver for OMAPs (xf86-video-omapfb) in the stable branch in omap-repository has a bug concerning n8x0 devices and you should use master branch of it if you want to test video playback. The easiest way to switch using master branch for this component is to clone the n8x0 configuration repository and switch the branch before running the matrix install.


git clone git://linux.onarm.com/git/n8x0/config/n8x0.git
vi n8x0/suite/n8x0-recommended
# Add the branch: Component("xf86-video-omapfb", branch="master")
matrix install -c multimedia

After the install you should include the binary DSP tasks from the device (they are proprietary and cannot be distributed). Use the helper script (get_nokia_binaries.sh) in src/platform-n8x0 that fetches them from the device over ssh and reinstall the component before creating the rootfs image:


matrix install-only -c multimedia platform-n8x0

Lots of things are still broken:

  • Power button tries to suspend, which fails and does nothing.
  • WLAN encryption keys are not stored succesfully.
  • WPA doesn’t work (WEP and unencrypted do work).
  • Midori should be started after networking.
  • There’s no ssh client (but dbclient as it’s dropbear).
  • Power management.
  • Default XFCE theme doesn’t look cool.
  • Etc.

But I believe that with some work Kaze on n8x0 will become decent enough for everyday use and will provide up to date components long after Nokia has dropped the n8x0 support.

If you have any questions, visit #alip @ freenode.

PS. If you want an open source media engine with D-Bus API checkout the Octopus. It’s a work in progress but handles basic audio and video playback on n8x0 just fine :)

Ogg-support: in Extras

tuomas

I promoted the ogg-support 0.9 to Extras repository. Feedback is welcome.

I’ve also managed to get the tags (except for the album) to show up in Metalayer Crawler. But that code isn’t even in SVN yet.

Kilikali shows all the tags properly and based on the GStreamer debug prints the MLC also gets the album tag but for some reason doesn’t write it to ~/.meta_storage SQL db.

Too bad the MLC is closed source so I can’t debug further why it rejects the album tag.

Ogg-support 0.9: Builder

tuomas

I added the Theora support back to ogg-support and uploaded the source packages to extras-devel builder.

I didn’t change the mimetypes though, so all *.ogg files are seen as audio files even though they may contain video streams as well. I quickly transcoded the Big Buck Bunny video to lower resolution ogg containing Theora video and vorbis audio. The Media Player was able to show it although I should have used even lower resolution (and lower audio bitrate).

Comments are welcome.

New UI for Kilikali

tuomas

Thanks to Movial Kilikali got a modern UI and looks quite nice now:

Kilikali UI

Kilikali development has moved to a GIT tree (branch generic-2) hosted by linux.onarm.com.

Although the UI got improved and the playback on n8x0 got fixes there are still some bigger task to be done. E.g. adding single files, adding directories recursively and skipping unknown media types. Integration with Light Media Scanner has also been discussed.

Ogg-support 0.8: Diablo

tuomas

I finally compiled ogg-support for Diablo too. It’s available through the maemo downloads page.

I don’t know why the Chinook version didn’t work in Diablo any more. And I didn’t really want to start debugging why the Maemo’s mime libraries and the closed source Metalayer Crawler don’t want to work with the mimetypes copied from a desktop system. So, now there’s only one mimetype: audio/x-vorbis and no support for speex or theora anymore. On the good side, e.g. File Manager can now start OGGs to Media Player.

New feature is a Control Panel plugin to ignore the OGGs from the Maps application. After installing ogg-support wait several minutes for the Metalayer Crawler to finish and then start the CP plugin. Metalayer Crawler seems to be much much slower if you have the Media Player open while it indexes the files.

Linux on ARM

tuomas

ARM (and Movial) has published a new site that provides Open Source components, middleware and utilities used to build a Linux Mobile software stack on ARM.

All components (applications, libraries, etc) are in GIT repositories. The build tool is called Matrix. Matrix clones all components under one directory and compiles them with a single command. With another command you get JFFS2 image although that’s not as simple as it should be.

ARM would like to get all contributions directly to upstream instead of providing large code dumps and states that developers are encouraged to participate in discussion forums and developer community of respective components used on this site. That’s why there are no new mailing lists nor forums available for the platform. There is #matrixhelp (#matrix was taken) on irc.ipv6.oftc.net for Matrix related issues though. Developing the components is convenient if you are familiar with GIT. It’s easy to test if your patch works and send it to the upstream project.

One of the supported hardware platforms is n8x0 which is nice as it’s commonly available. The downside is the closed source nature of it. There are two projects, example-project and Kaze that has n8x0 configured as one target platform. Kaze has XFCE desktop instead of Matchbox desktop that the example-project uses.

Kaze boots but most features need still work. WLAN works without encryption but WEP and WPA encryptions need to be fixed. ALSA works with alsa plugins through the DSP but the closed source DSP tasks need to be copied to the build system. Kaze has normal X.Org instead of Xomap, so there’s no XV extension, only stubs.

GCC options and floating point

tuomas

There was (again) some discussion on #maemo about gcc options regarding VFP usage so I decided to make a simple test with different gcc options using the Maemo’s cs2005q3.2-glibc2.5-arm toolchain. Nothing new here for people already familiar with the floating point stuff.

In the test I compiled a very simple test code with different -mfpu and -mfloat-abi options, -O2 and -march=armv6 were given in all cases. The asm code is linked in the table. The code is a simple for loop which could be optimized to one round but based on the results it looks like the gcc didn’t do this kind of tricks.

Although you can ask the default options from the gcc I decided to test also without the options. The test was run on n810 and results are in the table below.

GCC none hard soft softfp
none 0m 31.11s
0m 31.01s
0m 0.00s
asm		 –
–
–
asm		 0m 31.24s
0m 31.00s
0m 0.00s
asm		 0m 4.38s
0m 4.37s
0m 0.00s
asm
fpa 0m 30.64s
0m 30.54s
0m 0.00s
asm		 5m 52.53s
0m 21.25s
5m 30.66s
asm		 0m 30.57s
0m 30.55s
0m 0.00s
asm		 5m 52.56s
0m 21.06s
5m 30.69s
asm
vfp 0m 31.09s
0m 30.99s
0m 0.00s
asm		 –
–
–
asm		 0m 31.08s
0m 31.00s
0m 0.00s
asm		 0m 4.40s
0m 4.39s
0m 0.00s
asm

Looks like the default for -mfpu is vfp and the default for -mfloat-abi is soft.

There are three different values, one takes some seconds, one takes some tens of seconds and one takes some minutes.

This was expected as there are three different ways to do floating point math. In the slowest one the kernel emulates the fpu after cpu has run into undefined floating point opcode. This is extremely slow as there are a lot of context switches. A faster way to do the floating point math without the hardware is to let the gcc to compile the floating point math to the binary itself (and something in libgcc?). The fastest way is to use the VFP hardware.

Ogg-support 0.7: Canola interoperability

tuomas

Light Media Scanner now uses libivorbis (Tremor) instead of floating point libvorbis. Ogg-support now depends on newer build of libivorbis that exports the symbols needed by LMS.

There’s now ogg-support-lightmediascanner meta package which depends on lightmediascanner0-ogg for easier installation with the Application Manager.

Unfortunately all other issues with ogg-support still remain.

Ogg-support: Issues

tuomas

The ogg-support is listed as the The Pearl for OS2008, thanks! :)

Even though the ogg-support has got nice ratings in the download page, it doesn’t work perfectly on the OS2008. Most of the issues has some sort of workaround so I decided to make a summary post of them.

Ogg-support breaks VOIP calls

Ogg-support adds Speex voice codec to the system and it seems that the VOIP client advertises it as the first choice. If both parties have it installed, it’s selected. But. The VOIP engine (or whatever) doesn’t know or just refuses to use Speex, so the VOIP stream is not actually sent, properly at least.

If you delete the Speex’ GStreamer plugin, the calls seems to work nicely.

Bug report (#2811).

All Oggs from Map are listed in Media Player

The Metalayer Crawler adds all known media files to the Media Player’s Library. With ogg-support also Ogg files are recognized and added to the Library. Problem is that the Map application includes almost 2000 Oggs with N810 so they are added to the Library too.

A workaround is mentioned in the ogg-support’s help forum. It requires editing the SQL database after the files are added to the Library.

Bug report (#2772).

File Manager doesn’t launch Media Player for Oggs

I had to modify the mime type XML a bit to get File Manager to recognize videos and audios in Ogg container separately instead of just showing all *.ogg files as e.g. audio/x-vorbis. To be specific I had to remove the *.ogg pattern from the XML file.

It seems that the hildon_mime_open_file() in libhildonmime doesn’t launch the file without the *.ogg pattern tag in XML.

No workaround for this one.

Bug report (#2521).

PS. Many problems are reported in the Internet Tablet Talk’s forums. I don’t follow those frequently so please notify me in the garage’s forums about possible bugs, issues or workarounds. I do get a instant mail notification about those. Thanks.