Some new packages for maemo bora
18. April 2007
There are new packages availible for maemo bora:
- Update: Packages for glibmm/gtkmm: These packages fix a nasty bug that will cause a crash when using Gtk::TextBuffer so everybody is encouraged to upgrade
- New: Package for libgda3 which brings the GNOME database power to maemo. Please note that this is not yet the final release of libgda and that the packages may have some rough edges.
Both packages are available from the bora-extras repository:
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ bora free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ bora free
Anjuta 2.1.2 (beta) released
29. March 2007
Yet another beta version with much improved plugin handling and better docking together with lots of bugfixes. Grab it at Anjuta.org.
There is still much to do but we are on a good way. I have been busy with exams for the last weeks and will be until 4th April so I did not contribute really much to this release. But expect more improvements from my side for the next.
Thanks to everything who contributed or submitted bugs.
More maemo-launcher improvements for 2.10
23. March 2007
So, I finally got to hacking on the cairo support for maemo-launcher. Thanks to Behdad and Owen for pointing me in the right direction.
My patch adds a method to booster_preinit which draws some demo text (“Maemo launcher”) to a image surface using pangocairo. Obviously this is enough to init most of the font stuff of pango and thus speeds up the application start-up for my test-case, the hello-world example from the GTK+ tutorial, by 50%. Again, I may be totally wrong with my results of course as times tend to be very small on a normal PC. I would be glad to hear from poeple using embedded devices if this is a real performance gain.
The only problem with the patch currently is that I use “Sans 10” as hardcoded value for the font. I have not yet figured out a good way to get the default font without opening a display.
Update: Obviously the font is totally irrelevant! I just removed the line and everything was as fast as before which means the upon layout drawing as font initialisation is done!
All this was done for Openismus in case anyone did not know!
maemo-launcher performance test
9. March 2007
Today was the time to get some results on the improvements that can be reached using maemo-launcher. Of course all this tests might be inaccurate and wrong…
At first, I needed a simple example so I took the Hello World! example from the Gtk+ Tutorial. The only code change was to add a GTimer and to print the elapsed time before gtk_main() is called. I now made some test runs (not enough for a statistical correct result…).
Result Gtk: maemo-launcher speeds up this example by about 25%. That could mean the Gtk initialisation takes about 25% of the start-up time. Of course in bigger applications this value will decrease as they do much more than just to init Gtk and create some widgets.
So, the next step was to test what happens to an application that uses Gtkmm instead of Gtk. Again, I used the simplest example from the tutorial, Hello World in gtkmm and modified it to install a timer before Gtk::Main::run(). This test did not give me that nice results as the above. The standard deviation was much higher so I assume caching has a much bigger influence here.
Result Gtkmm: The speed-up reached by the launcher using the gtk booster was about 22% in average but in a range from +54% to -59%. If I used the new gtkmm booster together with the gtk booster I gained 35% more speed and the range was only +65% to -11%.
Overall results: It seems like maemo-launcher does speed things up a bit. On my laptop this only means some milliseconds but maybe it is more important on embedded platforms. I still wonder why I have such a big standard deviation with the C++ code. You can have a look a the exact results (gnumeric sheet)
All this was done using gtk+ 2.10.9, gtkmm 2.10.8 and maemo-launcher from SVN TRUNK. I had to modify the Gtk booster to work with 2.10 which means that it does only init all the GTypes but avoids all the more advanced hacks that no longer work because many leaks in Gtk have been fixed.
Toolbars without bonobo?
7. March 2007
After Murray pointed out that bonobo will be deprecated in GNOME 2.18 (thanks!) I wonder how to implement this nice dockable toolbars in the future. Of course HIG-fetishists will say that they are overkill but in feature and UI monsters like Anjuta they are not really avoidable.
It depends very much on your workflow which toolbars you find useful and which not and how you want to arrange them especially on small screens. Without being able to dock them this is difficult to archive.
P.S: Some complained it’s difficult to contact me! It’s not: jhs(at)gnome.org
Quo vadis bonobo?
5. March 2007
Recently I hacked on the Anjuta toolbar system to split the big toolbars into several smaller ones. Of course the layout of those toolbars needs to be saved across sessions. This is not really difficult but I soon found me in the situation where I just scrolled around svn.gnome.org to find out what the methods in libbonoboui do because there is no real documentation.
The code is mostly clean and the functionality is also great but this seems one of the parts of GNOME that are not really maintained. I never found any notice that bonobo is deprecated so I guess other also find this useful. At least this is the easiest way to get plugable toolbars which are really useful for applications that provide a lot of toolbar buttons. Of course libbonoboui might be able to do much more, I just did not hit other parts yet.
So, what is the status of bonobo? Is there some roadmap and will it survive project ridley?
More gtkmm-booster for Maemo
5. March 2007
Today, I hacked a bit on maemo-launcher to add support for multiple boosters. It was not very difficult but quite annoying because string handling and lists without Glib are a real mess!
The gtkmm-booster seems to work good now and I had no problems to launch the complete maemo-desktop and the maemomm-helloworld example. There are some instructions in the README to set up the launcher correctly.
Anyway, I still miss a real-life test-case and good ideas how to measure the performance. My laptop might be about 10 times faster as the N800 so I can’t “feel” any performance changes. I also have no real idea how to get objective results.
maemo gtkmm booster
1. March 2007
To speed up application start-up the clever people at Nokia wrote Maemo launcher. It is a quite dirty hack that tries to keep many things in memory and to fork to main() once an application is started.
Of course something like this would be nice for gtkmm/maemomm too. maemo-launcher supports different booster modules and thus we can add a gtkmm booster modules. I spent most of the day figuring out how all this works and finally finished a very simple booster. The gtkmm booster currently simply calls the methods from the gtk booster (as we need all the stuff from gtk anyway) but in the future it will also do some gtkmm specific stuff.
If you are interested you can have a look at the sources (you will also need the patch from this bug against maemo-launcher). It is still broken in many places but at least you should be able to start some apps. Start the launcher using maemo-launcher --daemon --send-app-died --booster gtkmm.
MySQL on Maemo
28. February 2007
I recently tried to build mysql packages to be able to access the client libs from libgda(mm) on maemo bora. I figured out how to build them on SDK_X86 by cutting down depencies as much as possible but failed to build them on SDK_ARMEL because of this internal compiler error:
if arm-linux-gnueabi-g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DNDEBUG -I. -I. -I../../../../.. -I. -I../../../../../include -I../../../../../ndb/include -I../../../../../ndb/src/kernel/vm -I../../../../../ndb/src/kernel/error -I../../../../../ndb/src/kernel -I../../../../../ndb/include/kernel -I../../../../../ndb/include/transporter -I../../../../../ndb/include/debugger -I../../../../../ndb/include/mgmapi -I../../../../../ndb/include/mgmcommon -I../../../../../ndb/include/ndbapi -I../../../../../ndb/include/util -I../../../../../ndb/include/portlib -I../../../../../ndb/include/logger -O3 -DDBUG_OFF -fno-implicit-templates -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti -MT Cmvmi.o -MD -MP -MF ".deps/Cmvmi.Tpo" -c -o Cmvmi.o Cmvmi.cpp; \
then mv -f ".deps/Cmvmi.Tpo" ".deps/Cmvmi.Po"; else rm -f ".deps/Cmvmi.Tpo"; exit 1; fi
Cmvmi.cpp: In member function `void Cmvmi::execTESTSIG(Signal*)':
Cmvmi.cpp:1463: internal compiler error: in verify_local_live_at_start, at flow.c:546
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
Send email to arm-gnu@codesourcery.com for instructions.
It’s not a major issue as I was able to build PostgreSQL packages and one database is enough in the moment but if someone has an idea what I could do about it I would be glad to hear.
In the meantime a have put up a small howto for installing an SDK for C++ development on the Nokia N800.
Bad ideas!
19. February 2007
It was a real bad idea to fix the anjuta .desktop file recently to allow proper bugs reports in bugzilla. People just file to many crash bugs now…