Have you ever wanted to get a lot of info from your car ? Have you ever wanted to know things that were not shown on the car´s panel ? This is what you want =)

Carman is an amazing software that runs on maemo platform with your n770 or n800 device. You can monitor live data (e.g. Engine RPM, Calculated Load Value, Vehicle Speed, Coolant Temperature, and many others), check trouble codes, record data values, performance, etc..

Here are some screenshots. It´s good to remember that Carman is LGPL 😉

Links: Carman, n800, INdT

Some nice screenshots:

Ow, two days working hard to make this work ! N800 does not have an useful mpeg1 or mpeg2 decoder+demuxer. If the decoder works, the demuxer doesn’t. It was really frustrating ! So I finally started to think: well, I need a free format to encode, decode, mux and demux: OGG is the answer! =)

So, let me explain from the beggining…We are developing a lib to make the use of Mythtv (http://www.mythtv.org) easier on gtk applications. This way you can use a lot of features of Mythtv in your application. What is the relation of this with transcoding and Vlc ?

The device N800 can’t play MPEG2 files by default and if you’re using Mythtv on Europe and have a DVB tv card you’ll see that it will record your programs in MPEG2. This way it’s not possible to watch LiveTV or recorded programs on N800. But with our lib it will be possible! =) Just use our lib + vlc and it will make all the hard work for you! (http://gmyth.sf.net). I expect that at most at the end of the next week we’ll have all these commited to svn.

By the way, if you want to know the “magic” line for transcode, this is it:

• #transcode{fps=25.0,height=240,width=144,vcodec=theo,\
  vb=256,scale=1,acodec=vorb,ab=64,\
  channels=1}:duplicate{dst=std{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=:8080}}

And you can download the gstreamer plugins for Ogg from here: http://people.bath.ac.uk/enpsgp/temp/vorbis-stuff.tar.gz (please, report if the link is broken).

• gst-launch-0.10 gnomevfssrc location=http://192.168.3.137:8080 ! \
  oggdemux name=demuxer ! {queue ! theoradec ! xvimagesink} | \
  {demuxer.! queue ! vorbisdec ! audioconvert ! dsppcmsink}

After a whole day I finally was able to stream videos to N800 through VLC (videolan). The problem was not at my VLC command line but in fact, it was at N800’s Video Player (that one that comes pre-installed). That player does not support any “usable” formats and it was really difficult to find a configuration of VLC to work on it (actually I couldn’t find it…).

So, I installed Mplayer on N800 (http://mplayer.garage.maemo.org/) and found the best configuration for VLC. So, for you guys that want to stream video to N800, here is the line…any update, please, post a comment…

• #transcode{vcodec=mp1v,vb=384,fps=25.0,scale=0.5,acodec=mpga,
  ab=64,channels=1}:duplicate{dst=std{access=http,mux=mpeg1,
  dst=:8080}}

it’s at least funny hehe…and let’s celebrate the first remote xploit for Windows Vista, that was confirmed yesterday by Microsoft (Iloost the link…)

I’m starting to think that I like novel’s ;-P . I received a Macbook Pro from my company to work on and started a big trip to understand the details of a Macbook…starting from it’s unusual partition table until it’s wireless card that doesn’t have a native driver yet (madwifi should support it).

As soon as I have time to write the details I’ll put them here to you can use a Macbook Pro with Linux in a easy way with everything working on it. I also learned somethings regarding disk’s cryptography.
I didn’t have time to install Slackware on it yet, so just installed Kubuntu so I could start working!! (Here comes another promess haha: I’ll install Slack on it as soon as I have time also haha – I probably need a 72 hour’s day to do everything that I promess here hehe)…

The ACPI team is still working on this. Len Brown (if I’m not wrong) wrote a real patch in order to use this instead of the old workaround. Still no cpufreq for the second core.

Well, here we have a big fight =) . I’ll give my opinion based on things that I read on the Internet and based on my experience. When I first looked at the IPhone I just thought: “It’s amazing!!!”…and it really is… Thinking more carefully and after reading a text called “10 Things to hate about IPhone” and another one called “10 Things to love about IPhone” I realized that there are some big issues with this device. The first issue is about the need to sign for a 2-year service from Cingular. I don’t like the idea of having to be a customer from a company just because someone wants to. That’s terrible =( . Another point is about Apple philosophy: they don’t like to open their SDK for developers and that’s a problem when you are used to work with things that are free software and anyone can contribute with that. It’s not good to be a slave waiting for Apple’s applications for IPhone (for geeks, it’ll not be good to not write code for their own device). On the other hand we have a powerfull device with a lot of graphical features and so on. Ipod also have all these restrictions and is a success (I have an Ipod also). And if Apple really planned to just reach 1% of the cell phone’s market, I think they will get this portion of the market. About the N800 device: it’s amazing also and a lot of people (including me hehe) are working for applications for this platform. It’s a device different from the Apple’s one: it’s not a cell phone, and it doesn’t want to be one. It’s idea is to be a personal computer and regarding this aspect, it’s much better than the IPhone. So, just to reach the end of this post: if you want a cell phone N800 is not the device you’re looking for…but if you want a personal computer, if you want to have a powerfull handheld, N800 is the device you are looking for !

After a long time I’m writing again in this wiki. Right now I’m flying from Ribeirão Preto-SP to Recife-PE.
I didn’t have so much time these days to write about the news and some other stuff that I would like to write.
So, let’s start telling you the news =)…
Now I’m working for INdT (Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia – Nokia Institute of Tecnology) at Recife city. I’m helping to develop a library called GMyth (http://gmyth.sf.net). This library is meant to help developers writing applications for MAEMO platform (http://www.maemo.org) for both Nokia N770 and Nokia N800 (http://www.nokia.com/n800), regarding the use of these mobile devices (wich are NOT cell phones) with an application called MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org).
I just started so I don’t have too much to tell about these, but as soon as I have something to write about this I’ll post here!
See you…

Today I was taking a look at a store called Colombo, inside D. Pedro’s Shopping. Then I just got surprised!!! =P There was a notebook from a manufacturer called Positivo that has Linux as it’s primary OS…

I’ll be honest: I really don’t know about the quality of the hardware and support that Positivo gives to it’s customers but the idea of having the same model of laptop but one with Linux and another one with Windows is great ! I know that some big manufacturers already do that but this was the first time I saw with “my own eyes” (and in Brazil! =) ).
I forgot to see wich distro it runs but anyway, it’s very cool. I’m posting the photos I took. Just to compare, the price of the Linux one is R$ 1.999,00 (~ US$929,00 ) and the one with Windows R$ 2.499,00 (~ US$ 1.162,00). The last photos are from another laptop at a store called Fnac. The message says: “This copy of Microsoft’s Windows must be activated by Microsoft in order to let you log on. Do you want to do that now ?” hehe =P

Well, it finally ended. =) Today I was able to use ipw3945 + wpa + slack and everything worked fine.

During last month I couldn’t understand why it worked perfectly on Kubuntu and it was not working under Slackware 11 as I was installing everything perfectly, no errors, etc…

The problem is that if something is not working it’s due to errors. If you can’t find them, it doesn’t mean that they do not exist 😉 . Here I will list all the errors that I had so if someone is using Google to search for a solution, it’ll find this page hehe.

• IPW3945: Warning about undefined symbols

• ieee80211_crypt_tkip: could not allocate crypto API arc4

• WPA: Failed to set GTK to the driver

• Driver did not support SIOCSIWENCODEEXT

Well, let’s comment about the errors now.

1. IPW3945: Warning about undefined symbolsThis was a silly mistake while compiling the last ipw3945 driver. At the end of the compilation, if it displays some warnings about undefined symbols, regarding ieee80211* symbols you just need to copy a file called “Module.symvers” from ieee80211 directory to the ipw3945’s directory.
   Doing this will make ipw3945 “understand” the ieee80211 symbols as they are not in the kernel.
2. ieee80211_crypt_tkip: could not allocate crypto API arc4 Well, this happen because it couldn’t find the “arc4” module (ARC4 cipher algorithm). This can happen with another crypt module called “MICHAEL MIC” or “AES” too. To detect this problem just take a look at “dmesg”.To solve this just load these modules at the same time you load ipw3945 (you can modify the file /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945 to load these modules) or you can put them built-in the kernel. This will solve this problem!

   
   

3. “WPA: Failed to set GTK to the driver” and “Driver did not support SIOCSIWENCODEEXT”

You will receive this two messages at wpa_supplicant (running it with -ddd) if you didn’t load ieee80211_crypt_tkip and ieee80211_crypt_ccmp. So to solve this, just load these two modules at the time you load ipw3945 (put it inside /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945 also).

After doing all the stuff above, everything worked fine! Now I’ll try to configure kvaio and find some cool network manager =).