Posts tagged Maemo

Nokia kindly sponsored my trip to Maemo Summit in Berlin. Unexpectedly was asked to give my LinuxTag presentation during the lightning talks. It did not go very well. Note to self: advance preparation helps, at least if you know you're going to present something. Met PyPy folks (Maciej and Holger). Had a mutual "what on Earth are you doing here?" reaction. Learned a new quirk in the Python language (try: .

I unexpectedly acquired an Asus EeePC 900 last weekend. Lovely piece of hardware. The Xandros distro was okay at first (IceWM brought me fond memories of the year 2000, when I used it). Then I started longing for Firefox 3 and the aesthetics of GNOME applications. Finally, when apt-cache search told me there was no SSH server package available, I gave up and installed Ubuntu Eee from a SD card.

I used Windows at work until January 2002, when I changed jobs and went to Linux full-time. I barely remember what life was back then. Driver CDs you had to install before plugging in new hardware, shareware apps that you had to pay for and couldn't see how they worked, web pages full of blinking advertisements. Magic voodoo rituals you had to do to fix your IS when it broke down, that you had to do by rote without full understanding of how it all fit together.

The last day. Saw a bunch of interesting talks about freedesktop.org, Ekiga, GNOME and Ubuntu. Jono Bacon's talk was very interesting. I think if Nokia is interested in building a healthy developer community, they would do well to talk to Jono about it. Got a USB gender-bender from Kees Jongenburger -- now I can plug in USB devices to my N810, provided that they don't require too much power (extra software required: usbcontrol from Maemo Extras).

After getting my presentation out of the way, I was finally able to relax and really enjoy LinuxTag. I hadn't realised quite how stressed I was about the talk. I'm really happy now that I agreed to come. Watched an amazing demo in the LinuxMCE booth. I always though it was some kind of a media center app for watching movies, but it turns out to be a complete home automation system where you can control the lights, security cameras and, of course, multimedia, with a large variety of devices (remote controls, mobile phones, VoIP hardware phones, Nokia Internet tablets).