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Thursday, August 19, 2010

"Beautiful Horizon"

That is the English name of Belo Horizonte, the city where my fellows from KDE-MG group and I celebrated the 4.5 releases of KDE software. At the release party for 4.4 we tried to bring a cake, but it did not work out. This time Tulio, KDE-MG's member, made a surprise for us and brought some fashion, and taste, honey breads:


It was a pleasure night in Belo Horizonte, "Frango Frito" was crowed of people, I have never seen it that crowed before. Not all members of KDE-MG could attend the release party this time, well, they lost the honey breads hehe:



The release party was also a meeting to finish the details for the 3th Free Software Festival Belo Horizonte (FSLBH), which happened last Saturday in Betim, a city close to Belo Horizonte. This year we had help from the Betim Opensource guys to organise the FSLBH/Betim and to talk to the Pitagoras university to hold the event and hand over the computer classrooms for the mini-courses. Many thanks to them.

During the event we had lectures about free software and some mini-courses, including mine of Qt programming. I used the material created by Sandro and Tomaz from Liveblue, thanks to them.




We also distributed some gifts during the event:



The event last one day and it was for free. This time we asked the participants to bring toys to be distributed to a charity institution in Belo Horizonte:


FSLBH is becoming a recurrent event in Belo Horizonte, one the biggest cities in Brazil with several information technology universities. The KDE community is also increasing :-)

More pictures of the FSLBH, release parties and other events are available at the KDE-BR's flicker homepage.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Hotkey buttons and udev

As many notebooks out there mine has some hotkey buttons for (de)activate the wifi card, bluetooth controller, webcam, etc. With the buttons sometimes the notebook also has leds to indicate which hardware is activated at the moment, unfortunately my notebook only has leds for wifi and bluetooth, not for the webcam. More unfortunately yet the leds for wifi and bluetooth is the same led but with different color to indicate when only one of them are activated, but I must say Clevo, the manufacturer of my notebooks' barebone, did not make a good choice selecting the colors orange and green :-( It is very difficult to distinguish between the states wifi on / bluetooth off and wifi off / bluetooth on. Even the state wifi on / bluetooth on is not easy to notice. To minimize that problem I created some udev rules and some scripts to open a KDE notification dialog every time they are activated or deactivated. Everybody in Linux "world" must have heard of udev, the system daemon which receives events from the kernel and run programs or scripts based on rules storared in /etc/udev/rules.d or /lib/udev/rules.d. In my case I added my rules to /etc/udev/rules.d:
File /etc/udev/rules.d/50-lvs-rfkill.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="rfkill", RUN+="lvs-rfkill.sh"
File /etc/udev/rules.d/50-lvs-webcam.rules
# Change the idProduct and idVendor attributes to your camera's.
# Use lsusb to find them.
SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0343", ATTRS{idVendor}=="5986", RUN+="lvs-webcam.sh"
Then run this to reload the rules:
Reload udev rules
udevadm control --reload-rules 
Now we need to create the scripts lvs-rfkill.sh and lvs-webcam.sh and give execution permission to them (chmod 755):
File /lib/udev/lvs-rfkill.sh
#!/bin/sh

find_display()
{
    if [ -r "/proc/$1/environ" ]
    then
        perl -ne 'if ( /DISPLAY=([^:]+){0,1}(:\d+)(.\d+){0,1}/ )
         { print "$1$2$3\n"; }' < /proc/$1/environ
    fi

    return 0
}

user_loop()
{
    OLD_DISPLAY=$DISPLAY
    ps -C kwrapper -C kwrapper4 h -o pid,user | while read pid user
    do
        grep -q ksmserver /proc/$pid/cmdline &> /dev/null || continue
        export DISPLAY=$(find_display $pid)
        su - $user -c "$1"
    done
    export DISPLAY=$OLD_DISPLAY
    unset OLD_DISPLAY
    sleep 1
}

title=
msg=
case $RFKILL_TYPE in
    wlan)
        title="Wireless"

        case $ACTION in
            add|change)
                case $RFKILL_STATE in
                    0)
                        msg="Wireless disabled"
                    ;;
                        
                    1)
                        msg="Wireless enabled"
                    ;;

                    2)
                        msg="Wireless disabled by hardware"
                    ;;
                esac
            ;;

            remove)
                msg="Wireless disabled"
            ;;
        esac
    ;;

    bluetooth)
        title="Bluetooth"

        case $ACTION in
            add)
                msg="Bluetooth enabled"
                echo 1 > /sys/$DEVPATH/state
            ;;

            remove)
                msg="Bluetooth disabled"
            ;;
        esac
    ;;
esac

if [ "$msg" != "" ]
then
    user_loop "$(ls /usr/kde/*/bin/kdialog | tail -n 1) \
        --title \"$title\" --passivepopup \"$msg\" 3"
fi
File /lib/udev/lvs-webcam.sh
#!/bin/sh

find_display()
{
    if [ -r "/proc/$1/environ" ]
    then
        perl -ne 'if ( /DISPLAY=([^:]+){0,1}(:\d+)(.\d+){0,1}/ )
            { print "$1$2$3\n"; }' < /proc/$1/environ
    fi

    return 0
}

user_loop()
{
    OLD_DISPLAY=$DISPLAY
    ps -C kwrapper -C kwrapper4 h -o pid,user | while read pid user
    do
        grep -q ksmserver /proc/$pid/cmdline &> /dev/null || continue
        export DISPLAY=$(find_display $pid)
        su - $user -c "$1"
    done
    export DISPLAY=$OLD_DISPLAY
    unset OLD_DISPLAY
    sleep 1
}

title="Webcam"
msg="Webcam"

case $ACTION in
    add)
        msg="$msg enabled"
    ;;

    remove)
        msg="$msg disabled"
    ;;
esac

user_loop "$(ls /usr/kde/*/bin/kdialog | tail -n 1) \
    --title \"$title\" --passivepopup \"$msg\" 3"
Now every time you turn wifi/bluetooth/webcam on/off a notification will appear near KDE's notification tray icon:

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Samsung i8910: Interesting programs

Web



Symbian binaries

  • UC PLayer 2.2.2.10: finally a rmvb (and other formats) player that works.
  • I8910_R66.SISX: AKA Route66, GPS program that comes with i8910. It works good although many people seems to like Garmin and OviMaps better.
  • maps_installer_3.04_10wk11_b01_s60_5.0.Nocs.sis: maps takes less space than Route66 (190 MB vs 460 MB) and are easier to watch when zooming in and out.
  • TTPod s60v5 v3.71 (includes Portuguese version): good MP3 player, playlist support, sorting, lyrics and picture fetching, equalizer, skin support among other things.
  • Jbak.Taskman.v1.37: excelent task manager. This version is touch screen ready.
  • DataQuota.1.23.sisx
  • PNTools_S60v5_S603rd.sis: traceroute and ping utility.
  • PktPing.sis: ping utility.
  • uTalk: very good IM (Jabber, Gtalk, MSN, ICQ, Facebook, etc). Supports connecting to Jabber and GTalk at the same time. Unfortunately supports text message only, no VoIP or video conversation. It is supposed to support sending image and voice (as mp3 file), but it seems to do not work with non-utalk contacts, which comprises all my contacts. The location (GPS) feature also seems to work only with utalk contacts. I had to edit the 1.2.0 version .sis file using siscontents and remove the three files in !:/private/20025174/ directory to make the .sis file install. I copied the files to that directory after the installation.
  • fring94.sis: IM and VoIP client. I prefer to use the Nokia N97 version because it supports loudspeaker function, which the i8910 version does not. N97's fring does not let me input my fring id and password when using DayHand keyboard, so I had to disable DayHand (set AknFEP in the first option when opening DayHand app), enter the id and password and then reenable DayHand (set the other option in the first option when opening DayHand app).
  • talkonaut-s60.sisx (cliente jabber, GTalk, MSN, ICQ, Voip e SIP). Unfortunately it does not connect to Gtalk and Jabber at the same time, but uTalk does :-)
  • PhoNetInfo_v2.5.0.sis: shows complete phone information.
  • Nokia Connectivity Analyzer: handy program with lots of information about your Internet connection.
  • Mobile Info v0.2.0.sis: shows phone information.
  • Lock Screen 0.11.78.sisx: nice lock screen replacement. I needed to enable the keylock patch in ROMPatcher+ to make it to work properly.
  • DayHand_Input_by_Mr._Milk_19r4_unsigned.sis: nice virtual keyboard replacement. To make the % character available: copy the file C:/Data/dayhandinput/config/sym.ini to your computer, add the % symbol to the second line and copy the file back.
  • Mathiola Stopwatch: interesting stopwatch, supports laps and the time difference between the laps. OBS: Requires Qt libraries to run.
  • mConnection(005).sis: very simple (yet usefull) traffic monitor. When accessing the Internet it wil show two numbers at the screen's center top corner. The first is the amount of data transfered, the second is the current speed.
  • SisEditor.sisx: it is like a siscontents for Symbian, edits .sis files. Usually nobody needs to edit a .sis, I, for one, had to edit them in two ocasions only: to change the icons and colors in a S60v5 theme and to remove some files that prevent one program to install (I copied the files manually after instalation).
  • FinanzS60.sis: another finance (and scientifc) calculator. This is the one I use now.

Shareware or Commercial Programs
LCG.X-plore.v1.42.sisx: powerfull file manager.
Symsmb.v4.zip: implements SMB protocol in Symbian, in other words you can navigate on a Windows network (or Linux with Samba) and access directories or export a directory from i8910 to the network.
Smartphoneware.Best.Birthday.v2.0.S60v3.S60v5.SymbianOS9.x.Unsigned.sis: scans contact list and shows the anniversary for each contact. It can also add a reminder in the calender apps so a alarm will sound at the anniversary date. It also show the zodiac sign for each contact and can sort contacts by remain days to the anniversary.
MobiFunSoft.SmartSettings.v3.03: let change the first icon on Finger Use theme to a sub-menu with as many shorcuts as we want, very handy in my oppinion. There is other features too.
PhoneTorch 2.0.2: flash light (uses camera LED)
FinanzS60.sis: very good finance and scientific calculator.

Games
meteorbeta_nokia5800_01.sis: this one is fun, but takes a lot of battery joice.
solitaire_s60_5_0_v_1_1_0_selfs.sis: Solitaire :-)
Offscreen Freecell.sis: Freecell :-)
Offscreen_Checkers_touch.sis: Checkers :-)
touchpiano_s60_5_0_v_1_0_0_signed.sis: to play piano with i8910. Well, it has only octave and there are a lot of lag between pressing the key and the actual sound, so it is not that fun :-/
mirror.sis: activate the front camera.

Flash
QuickInfo.wgz: shows several information about the phone.
FlashLight v7 FINAL By Azzam Mouawad.rar: flash light (does not use LED camera)
appuidlist.wgz: shows Symbian app uids, QuickInfo also list apps uids and Jbak Taskman show app uid for a given process.

Java
SoftTouchStopWatch.zip: very good stop watch, supports laps.
Unite.Bank.Finance.Calc.v1.00.S60.Java.rar: finance calculator
ScratchPad.zip: blackboard
anyRemote-48b.jar: client program to control a Linux computer from i8910 using bluetooth

Python
s60_as_bt_gps.py: program to transform i8910 into a bluetooth GPS. You can import GPS data in real-time into GoogleEarth too.
Birthdays-for-S60: program similar to Best Birthdays, it is free software, although this one lacks many Best Birthdays features.