ervin's piece of web

There’s some movement on the KDE/Maemo front. Lately we’ve seen more public announcements coming mainly thanks to the office viewer. But there’s also work under the hood cooking up. Most notably communication channels to provide feedback for the Qt 4.6/Maemo variant are open, hopefully we’ll soon see a few patches flying in. And also Jos posted some (large) patches to streamline kdelibs which are on the table for discussion and hopefully going toward a KDE wide solution.

Today though, I just wanted to let everybody know that I’ve been working on a virtual machine to help KDE developers easily get a Maemo SDK. I added some documentation so now we have a Qt/Maemo SDK VM page on techbase (download URL and installation procedure are there).

It should be relatively easy for anyone to have it working: download, boot, login, run a script, done you can know use Qt 4.6 in a fully setup Maemo SDK. Hopefully that will lower the bar to contributing for quite some people.

That’s it for now, don’t hesitate to drop me a mail if you have issues with it.

With Fremantle and the N900 almost out the door, it is time that we start a more coordinated effort within the KDE community to support Maemo as an official target system. In the past we had some scattered and not coordinated efforts, results got linked on techbase.

I attended the Maemo Summit 2009 in Amsterdam. Of course a few other KDE people were there. We sat down together, talking about how we could get the KDE platform working well on those devices. And we decided that if we want to see KDE succeed on such devices, we’d have to get more serious and coordinated about it.

That’s why shortly after coming back from the meeting, I asked for the creation of the kde-maemo mailing list, where we’ll be able to address Maemo as one of the official KDE target systems (like FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X are). It is time for us to make Maemo a first class citizen in our community.

Of course it is not wishful thinking we’re talking about here. The efforts already started, for instance Alexis has been working on a Plasma based shell for the N900. It is still rough, and a first experiment, but it at least shows that our platform is viable on this system. Parallel to that, there’s also efforts on how to make the deployment of a Maemo toolchain more convenient, or how to modularize our platform for such embedded systems.

It is just the beginning of the journey, let’s see where it leads us!