Thomas Wood

Applying the GPL to Artwork

thos — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:31:41 +0000

As art.gnome.org contact, I often get questions about whether someone can use GNOME some icons in their project. Most of the time I have said please contact the author, but I would like to try and work out an agreed interpretation of the GPL for artwork.

I’ve started a thread on gnome-themes-list, and would be grateful if people (especially any lawyer types) could give any more insight.

N800 + 160GB hard drive

thos — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 13:05:37 +0000

My bother recently told me he had connected his 160GB external hard drive to his N800, and now he’s written a short tutorial on how to do it.

I’ve always wanted to try a USB keyboard on my n800, so looks like I need to get him to make me one of those cables. Yes, I’m sure you can buy them somewhere, but I love Heath Robinson style electronics

OpenMoko Wifi Driver

thos — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:20:33 +0000

I totally missed this until now, but my colleague, Samuel Ortiz, wrote up some information about implementing the Wifi driver for OpenMoko:

http://labs.o-hand.com/2008/02/05/openmoko-wifi-driver/

I’m pleased to say that during my own testing I had no problems and it even works with WPA encryption. Good job Samuel!

New Wallpapers for GNOME 2.24

thos — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:07:03 +0000

I was hoping to refresh the set of wallpapers in gnome-backgrounds for GNOME 2.24. Cimi thought this was such an excellent idea, he jumped the gun and set up a contest: http://www.cimitan.com/contest/. I’m not such a big fan of contests, since the “issues” we had with the splash screen contests in the past. However, I think this time we may have hit on a good solution to the past issues.

I want to keep the quality and usability of gnome-backgrounds high, so please do read the style rules if you are thinking of submitting an entry. We’ve had some great submissions so far, but definitely could do with more options!

The runners up will take pride of place on the new art-hub, which will replace art.gnome.org.

OpenMoko FreeRunner LEDs, etc.

thos — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:32:51 +0000

Before I took my FreeRunner prototype along to Ole’s OpenMoko talk in London yesterday, I hacked up a little demo application in python/pygtk to display various new features in the FreeRunner (Wifi, accellerometers, LEDs). If you where there yesterday, you probably saw this live in action:

On my previous post OpenMoko post, someone asked about the LEDs on the FreeRunner. Obviously, you can’t see any proof of the LEDs in screenshots, so I took some very quick photographs:

History Meme

thos — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:02:52 +0000

Desktop:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head 91 cd 75 ls 49 svn 45 ssh 37 vim 37 make 13 ./test-notes 11 svn-prepare-ChangeLog.pl 11 ./openmoko-messages 11 ./openmoko-dialer
Laptop:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head 91 vim 53 sh 52 svn 47 cd 40 ls 31 find 21 git 18 ssh 11 su 11 make

More Moko GTK+ Theme

thos — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:08:41 +0000

Spurred on by the positive comments in my last little theme experiment for the OpenMoko, I have made a few adjustments based on some of the comments. It’s also now available in OpenMoko svn.

If you have a OpenMoko build set up, you can try it out. Firstly you need to build the package and then rebuild the package index:

bitbake moko-gtk-engine && bitbake package-index

You may have issues if you have built this before, because I did made some changes to the repository that svn can’t handle very cleanly, so if you have problems, wipe your svn checkout and start again.

Then you need to ssh into your neo and run the following commands:

opkg upgrade
opkg install moko-gtk-engine
dbus-launch gconftool-2 –t string -s /desktop/poky/interface/theme “Moko”
/etc/init.d/xserver-nodm restart

Here are some more screenshots of the theme running on the device. There are still some bugs with colours in a few places, so testing would be much appreciated.

I think the GPS icon is green because the GPS chip was on when I took the screenshots. I’ve been testing a couple of the peripherals on my GTA02 lately and I’m happy to report so far Wifi, GPS, accellerometers and the LEDs all seem to be working correctly. I got a fix from the GPS today which according to Google maps, was within 1 meter of my actual location.

Brand New Moko Theme (Idea)

thos — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:55:23 +0000

Inspired by ScaredyCat’s discovery that the default GTK+ theme was much faster on the Neo1973 than the current pixbuf based theme (well, no real suprises there…), I set to work stealing his colour scheme and completely redesigning my Moko theme engine. This time totally optimised for speed and simplicity. It’s still a work in progress, but here are some screenshots to give a general idea:

Lines and other visual distractions are kept to a complete minimum. Although it doesn’t look that great on a desktop display, when it is on a 2.8″ 285dpi touch screen, it feels a lot better.

OpenMoko Presentation in London

thos — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:13:16 +0000

UKUUG is hosting a talk by Ole Tange about OpenMoko next week in London (9th April). I’m planning to go along and take the latest GTA02 (FreeRunner) prototype if anyone is interested in seeing it in action. I’ll probably stick around afterwards to chat and grab some dinner.

More details here: http://www.ukuug.org/events/openmoko/