Mojo's Hasty distribution for use with qemu.

As part of a test I am doing, I started to use the Mojo distribution. This is a desktop distribution compiled for mobile and embedded devices. Currently they provide a Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) which is known as Hasty. Since the installation can be a little troubling at first, I will provide a full installation of the Mojo distribution I use. Hopefully it will encourage other to also use it.



You need the following files:
mojo-hasty.tar.bz2.00 [rapidshare] [dropbox] (100mb)
mojo-hasty.tar.bz2.01 [rapidshare] [dropbox] (100mb)
mojo-hasty.tar.bz2.02 [rapidshare] [dropbox] (100mb)
mojo-hasty.tar.bz2.03 [rapidshare] [dropbox] (32mb)

Mirrors are welcome... please post your locations in the comments of this article. After download you can extract the files using the command

$ cat mojo-hasty.tar.bz2.* | tar -xvj

Included are the scripts to install (will overwrite hasty.img) and to start the emulation environment.

Installed as described at Using the Debian Installer with QEMU
with all the missing bits added:

during the installtion it will ask you to provide a mirror location:
host: repository.handhelds.org
path: /hasty-armv5el

continue without installing the kernel and bootloader. Do not try to install the desktop environment; due to muine being missing it is not possible at the moment to do so. After installation of the base system, I installed xfce4 xfce4-terminal gdm and xserver-xorg with a configured fbdev device.

username: user
password: user
sudo password: user

It will start from the start script as a recovery console. This can be handy if you encounter unforeseen difficulties, else just continue normal boot. If you don't want this behaviour, just remove 'single' from the append command for qemu.

Additional actions I did to make the experience a little bit more enjoyable are:

$ mkdir /lib/modules/2.6.25.10/
$ depmod -a

xfce: changed panel to a fixed position (bottom, size 24)
xfce: changed terminal font to monospace 4
xfce: changed background color rgb(0, 112, 224)
gdm: enabled automatic login, User: user
gdm: changed local theme to 'Happy GNOME'
gdm: changed background color rgb(0, 112, 224)
user, root:

$ rm ~/.bash_history

Tested with the qemu installation as provided by CentOS 5.2, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04. Any comments are welcome at 'me+mojo-hasty [monkey] gbraad [dot] nl'.

Note:
In the published files I forgot to mention I also installed the xorg meta package. This is needed to install the fonts for the X server.

$ apt-get install xorg

This action does not need to be performed, since GDM starts. But for a reinstall, this is needed to run the X environment.

Links
Mojo Handhelds,
Qemu, processor emulator

Mono on ARM

At the moment I am 'experimenting' with Mono on ARM devices, like the Maemo (Nokia Internet Tablets), BeagleBoard, Linksys NSLU2, etc.




Banshee runs from within a Mojo installation (Ubuntu compiled for ARM) on the provided Mono. The screenshot shows a qemu session with XFCE4 and Banshee. Several other binaries do not work well yet... like IronPython, which aborts with an 'ERROR:inssel.c:3687):mono_burg_emit: code should not be reached'. Hmmm... still trying to find out why.


The Nokia Internet Tablets recently got a new release of Mono, version 2.0.1, from Everaldo. On the device this release runs IronPython 1.1.2. From within the Scratchbox environment it is @*s... it segfaults/aborts. This is related to the Nokia toolchain. At the moment I am trying to get qemu to emulate the Nokia N810 as described by Marcin. for now I only get to see a white Nokia bootloader screen... Marcin provided me his config.mtd to see if it results from a bad mtd.block, but I personally suspect it to be qemu. The build I made, also had issues with running the Mojo distribution :-/...


As you can see, the results are mixed. This is unrelated to Mono. Cross-compiling and emulation environments can always result in unexpected behaviour (as also on actual devices). Mono runs quite well on the N810. This can also be seen in the images posted by Everaldo.



More information will follow...

Links:
Mono:ARM,
Mojo Handhelds,
Qemu, processor emulator,
Mono on Maemo,
Maemo on qemu

Universal Generation – Fred Numf & Etienne Overdijk

officialreleaseparty: 6 december – Universal Generation - Poppodium Gigant

Maps for Maemo

An application developed to test OpenLayers and the JavaScript capatibilities of the MicroB browser (Maemo). The page is usable on other (mobile) browser. Different map layers are available: OpenStreetMap (Mapnik), Google Streets/Satellite/Hybrid, Virtual Earth Roads/Aerial/Hybrid and Yahoo Street/Satellite/Hybrid.