Toni Nikkanen's personal blog

What Is My Idea of Tomorrow?

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:49:14 +0300

I have not written anything new here for almost 4 months. I have been very busy with various things such as getting married, planning a honeymoon trip and lastly, I am going to start a new job in Berlin, Germany in October! This means I won't be able to concentrate on blog writing for at least two more months. Except maybe, given sufficient connectivity, I will be able to post brief greetings from our Australia-Singapore honeymoon trip.

I will arrive back in Finland with my lovely wife on 6th of October and my new job in Germany starts 18th of October, so it's going to be interesting until everything settles down....

The topic of this blog post is a hint towards what company is my new employer

Lastly, I did manage to release a fixed version of Luxus light meter application for the N900. It took a while since my development machine's motherboard and PSU were fried a while ago, and it took some time to get the replacement components - see here: http://maemo.org/packages/view/luxus/

See you at the Meego Conference in Dublin, November 2010!

Speed up of package (re)building in Scratchbox

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:54:35 +0300

..or why/how to install and use CCache 3.0pre0 in Scratchbox

A few days ago, I was building and rebuilding a Debian package in Scratchbox to see if it builds, installs and works properly after my modifications. To make sure it works, I had to do a full dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot rebuild, which of course does a full clean every time. Each rebuild took 10 minutes, and I started wondering how to make it go faster.

Exec summary

Use ccache 3.0 and make sure your regular build does not use compiler options incompatible with ccache! Read on for details.

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N900 running on Mac OS X

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:55:41 +0300

A while ago I experimented running various operating systems on the Nokia N900. Now with the availability of N900 hardware emulation in QEMU (see http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/Meego_on_Qemu ) I decided to try this the other way around. The result: Regular N900 Maemo software straight out of the phone boots in QEMU, but no GUI since there is no SGX graphics emulation in the Maemo QEMU yet.

(in soviet Russia, the computer boots YOU)

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Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:47:57 +0200

I attended a presentation given by Bjarne Stroustrup in Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland 18.3.2010. Bjarne was very down to earth and seemed to understand both the needs of the average C++ developer, and to have a very good idea on what is C++'s place in the modern world of programming. I was very inspired by all the new features of the soon-to-be finalized c++0x standard and I'm going to write about my thoughts on some of them soonish, so check back on this article in a few days if interested!

I took some pics of Bjarne, you can see them following the link below:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32856926@N06/sets/72157623541450607/

Bochs PC emulator packaged for N900

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:55:51 +0200

People have asked me to package the Bochs IA-32 PC emulator that I used for running Windows NT 4.0, and today I've done it. It is available from the Fremantle extras-devel repository: http://maemo.org/packages/view/bochs/

I have configured the package in the way that I found works best on the N900 and included a sample config file that works for running NT 4.0, as a starting point for others. Also the version is 2.3.7 and not the latest, since in my experience 2.3.7 was the most stable on the N900 - this might of course change or have already changed.

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Luxus Light Meter v0.2 for N900, as a real homescreen widget

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:50:52 +0200

A while ago, Qt Software released some helpful software and instructions on how to make real homescreen widgets on the N900 using Qt 4.6. As I had already previously implemented my Luxus light meter widget as a sort-of homescreen widget - as part of an experiment if it's possible to do a Qt app for N900 from scratch in one day and get it published too - I was of course intrigued in finding out how easy it would be to enable it as a full-blown homescreen widget. It turned out to be pretty easy!

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Mac OS X 10.3 running on the N900!

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:50:54 +0200

From the "just for fun!" department: Full version of Mac OS X 10.3 running on the N900! I believe this makes the N900 the first smartphone EVER to run the full version of Mac OS X (at any speed, slow or otherwise). Youtube video below.

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Luxus light meter desktop widget for N900

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:10:12 +0200

I thought to give it a try if one could make a Maemo 5/N900 app from scratch, and publish it on the Maemo.org extras-devel repository, all in just one day. Well, it was possible! The result is the Luxus 0.1 light meter desktop widget, and you can get it from extras-devel today.

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Maemo Community flyer

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:32:07 +0200

Randall Arnold has created an excellent Maemo Community outreach flyer, and I am especially happy about it since he has chosen to use my Maemo Summit 2009 pictures in it. Go and check it out at: http://maemo-daemons.org/maemo-org_community-flyer1_Maemo5.pdf !

How to install ScummVM in N900

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:16:42 +0200

People are asking me just exactly how does one install ScummVM? Well, the answer has changed. With my version, you pretty much had to know some basic Maemo hacking to get it installed. However, now as the official version of ScummVM is available from the Maemo Extras-devel repository, all you have to is:

Enable the extras-devel repository. Short version: Go to applications manager, select software catalogues, add a new entry for extras-devel. More detailed: See for example this web page: http://maemocentral.com/2009/12/29/how-to-enable-extras-extras-testing-extras-devel-repositories-on-the-n900-with-one-click/
Install scummvm from Application Manager: Select Download, then Games, then scroll until you see ScummVM. Click, follow instructions, and that should do it!

Windows NT 4.0 running on N900!

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:42:58 +0200

It was only a matter of time, after I got the Bochs PC emulator working on N900, I just had to try how slow Windows NT 4.0 would be inside it I'll post further details of how exactly I did it later, but for now, here it is:

Some N900 tips

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:25:31 +0200

I've received some questions and would like to post the answers right here in case others are wondering the same things about the N900:

Yes, the memory on the device is partitioned so that you have around 1.5GB or so for applications, and the rest for data (images, videos, music, maps, software you use with DOSBox, etc.)
To install Dosbox you have to add one or all of the extras repositories in your device App manager: extras, extras-devel, extras-testing. More instructions about that are available at: https://wiki.maemo.org/Extras

Faster version of running Windows 3.11 on N900

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:42:23 +0200

I did some tweaking and uploaded a faster Windows 3.11 running on N900-video to Youtube. The most important changes were setting frameskip=6 in dosbox preferences and installing of S3 video drivers in Windows, which had a huge difference in speed. I would have liked to test how well it would have worked with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, but I still don't have any to try it with.

Windows 3.11 running on the N900 :)

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:04:23 +0200

For laughs, I just had to try running Windows 3.11 using Dosbox on the N900.. worked ok except for the mouse cursor, which was simply all over the place, so I used X11VNC for controlling the mouse remotely..

UpdateI changed Dosbox settings to use Frameskip=2 and now it's running faster, though still not fast.

ScummVM for N900 / Fremantle updated!

nospam@example.com (Toni Nikkanen) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:32:45 +0300

Just a quick note, i have released ScummVM 1.0.0-rc1-fremantle3 containing the following enhancements:

full-screen mode can be entered and left with ctrl-f.
Global menu can be entered with ctrl-s
SCI games have been enabled. A brief test with Larry 6 and Quest for Glory 2 seemed promising!

Download it here: http://www.tuug.fi/~toni/blogitems/packages/scummvm_1.0.0~rc1-fremantle3_armel.deb

Download the patch against ScummVM 1.0.0rc1 here

Screenshot with Quest for Glory 2:

Things TODO left:

Come up with new keypresses for the essential features like saving and loading game
Upload the binary package to maemo.org Downloads and fremantle repositories
Submit things to the mainstream project in case I actually do any production-quality code changes, instead of random hacking around (though I'm not hiding anything, all my stuff is available upon request if someone really wants.)
Try to get the screen centered (already happens in fullscreen)
Display the mouse cursor (actually already seems to happen in AGI games like Larry 1)