Programme
Bossa Conference 2009 - ABSTRACTS
Andreas Aardal Hanssen
Using state machines in Qt for animated user interfaces
An introduction to Qt's upcoming API for state engines, how to create stateful forms and animated transitions.
Carsten Haitzler (Rasterman)
Elementary – small, scaleable touchscreen widget set for mobile devices.
There are many options for building a UI for a mobile device. Take an existing one and "cut it down". Likely these use GTK and Qt or another familiar widget set. The other is to specially build a new more minimal UI for the target (or similar devices). This is where often a custom UI is built by hand to specifically maximise the use of the small screen area on a device.
Elementary is a new widget set that is built on top of EFL specifically to address the area of small touchscreens (2" - 8" or so in size), which should be finger-driven, adjust to a wide range of DPI's easily. It also embodies the ability to totally customise the look and feel to be consistent with the kind of UI designs wanted for a particular project with smooth scaling, animations, alpha blending etc.
David Zeuthen
Plumbing the Desktop
This presentation will give an overview of the modern Linux desktop ecosystem, in particular how dynamic device configuration and privilege elevation is handled. The current (and future) software stack that propagates kernel created events through plumbing layers, message buses and into the desktop is described. The changes needed in applications and libraries for moving to this dynamic model, away from static system-wide configuration, are enumerated. The need for an
authorization system is outlined and various systems (including sudo and PolicyKit) for elevating privilege are examined.
Eduard Lima
The Maemo Community: Who, What, Why and How
Gustavo Barbieri
Python enabling mobile media centers
How python saved the
day of a small group of developers having to write a complex media
center software for a mobile system in less than 4 months.
Talk covers use of
Python in embedded systems, the nokia/maemo platform, using bindings
of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) to run fancy and fast
graphical "iphone-like" user applications on that platform,
proving that it is a viable platform for such low end systems. Final
software (http://openbossa.indt.org/canola2)
was delivered on time with excellent user experience, a real iPod
Touch contender!
Hadi Nahari
Distributed Mobile Security: A Security Model for Mobile Security Based on Cloud Computing
A Heterogeneous mobile cloud: open source's opportunity to establish standards for security.
The mobile security quintessential issue: establishing end-to-end trust.
Parallels to draw between mobile and distributed computing environments.
A holistic, loosely-coupled security model. Actors: user, application, stack, operating system, and network operator.
Harald Welte
Free Software for the GSM protocol side
As we see an increased use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in mobile devices, some of them with GSM or UMTS cellular network connection, this FOSS adoption exclusively happens on the "Application Processor" side. To the contrary, the GSM protocol stack on the 'digital baseband' CPU is typically treated like if it was the biggest invention since sliced bread, and a most valuable and proprietary one.
In fact, the entire GSM and UMTS protocol are specified in public documents, available free of cost to anyone from the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standardization Institute) or the 3GPP.
So there is no lacking information preventing any FOSS implementation of
those protocols. It is merely the fact how the cellular industry is currently structured. It's an oligopol, with very few players in the market, and artificial entry barriers for anyone who would want to compete with any part of the stack.
In 2007, the THC GSM project developed tools called gsm-tvoid, gssm and gsmsp as first humble attempts of an Open Source implementation of a GSM protocol analyzer, based on the USRP and gnuradio software defined radio (SDR) platform.
In 2008, two independent Free Software projects for the GSM network side have been release: OpenBTS and OpenBSC.
In 2009, Harald has been starting to work on the detailed hardware and software architecture of an open source GSM development board, capable of running both the MS (cellphone) and BTS (cell tower) side.
This presentation will give an overview about the existing FOSS efforts on the GSM protocol side, their current status and future directions.
Holger Krekel
PyPy Python status and mobile perspectives
This talk will discuss the new PyPy Python implementation with respect to RAM usage, startup time and speed. Numbers are taken from the recent port to the Maemo platform. We'll assess compliancy and features of the imminent 1.1 release, and about its unique sandboxing and OS-virtualization features. Eventually we present and discuss next steps for making it a replacement for CPython and for extending Python usage on mobile phones in general.
Iñaky Pérez- Gonzalez
WiMAX in Linux
Karen Sandler
Introduction to Licensing: The Basics
of FOSS Licensing and Compliance
This talk will include an introductory discussion of the key FOSS licenses. The main features of each license will be highlighted and common misconceptions will be debunked. The practical impact of many the provisions included in these licenses will be discussed, along with recommendations for best practice compliance.
Kate Alhola
Maemo 5 (Fremantle), mobile Linux platform and SDK
Overview of Maemo platform's fifth edition. Maemo 5 adds lots of new
unique features to popular Maemo platform, such as cellular connectivity, and enables accelerated animated UI graphics with technologies like Qt 4.5, OpenGL ES 2.0, Clutter, and Matchbox composite window manager. New Maemo alpha SDK and how to develop applications for Maemo 5. Running maemo Fremantle in Beagleboard development board.
Koen Kooi
Multimedia on omap cpus running linux
A deeper look into the ways of doing multimedia on omap cpus. The lecture will look at the DSP, the hardware engines and using things like the NEON SIMD instruction set.
Lennart Poettering
What YOU need to know about Practical Real-Time Programming
Today's Linux kernels have out-of-the-box very good support for
real-time computing. On embedded/mobile devices and on the desktop the
availability of real-time is much underused. For tasks like multimedia
playback, animations and audio interfacing it brings great benefits,
reliability and a smoother user experience. However it can sometimes
be very tricky to use properly -- especially since in most
applications you need to make compromises all over the place and it is
hard to know where and how to start. In this talk Lennart will focus
on how to develop real-life applications with the Linux real-time APIs
from a decidedly practical userspace perspective.
If you do media playback, animations or audio interfacing on
embedded/mobile devices or on the desktop make sure to drop by to
learn a thing or two about how to make your applications perform well
and smoothly under all circumstances.
Marcel Holtmann
New Connection Manager for embedded Linux systems
The new Connection Manager for Linux is an attempt to establish a generic infrastructure for creating networking connections. Main goal is to make the new solution ready for embedded systems. The whole design is modeled to be slim and flexible. This is achieved via a fully plugin and policy based architecture. Connection Manager is the perfect solution for embedded system like phones and tablets that are running Linux and where Network Manager would be too big and complex.
The plugin based architecture provides the most flexible way of
integrating it into existing solution. Support for PolicyKit, OSPM and other standard desktop components has been abstracted into a generic framework and are optional. It is possible to replace them with vendor specific plugins to deal with certain special embedded devices. All the hardware access is done via technology specific plugins. This allows a quick adaption of new technologies without changing the entire
framework.
The initial release has been made public as part of Moblin.org and includes support for Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth. Future releases will add support for Ultra-Wideband, GSM/UMTS and WiMAX.
Marius Bugge Monsen
The Next Generation Qt Item Views
The Qt Kinetic project is an initiative to provide a powerful framework to create dynamic, beautiful graphical user interfaces in Qt.
As an extension of this effort, the next generation of Qt's item views framework is being redesigned with animated user interfaces in mind.
This talk will give an introduction to the Item Views NG project and the new architecture that is being proposed.
Olivier Crête
Making videoconferencing easy, also in your application
Farsight 2, the next generation of Farsight, the GStreamer based VoIP and videoconferencing framework not only provides media handling to communication applications such as Empathy, Pidgin, aMSN and the Nokia Internet Tablets, but can also be used to integrate videoconferencing into everyday applications.
I will explain what Farsight 2 is, what is can do, how it works, and I will also give a brief overview of how it can be used with Telepathy to integrate video-calling into various applications.
Patrícia Montenegro
Raul Herbster
Are you still developing maemo applications such that: "echo
stdio.h >> hello_world.c" ?
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) positively impacts
on the development process of maemo applications, increasing
productivity, improving standardization and reducing coding error. In addition, IDEs definitely help maemo newbies getting started a lot quicker on technologies by providing templates and useful tools under a consistent and integrated graphical interface. IDE Integration project consists of IDEs (ESbox and PluThon), development environments for different languages (Python and C/C++) and PC-Connectivity, a tool to simplify setting up of communication between the Internet Tablet and the host PC.Sebastian Kügler
Bringing the Free Desktop onto Mobile Devices
Plasma, KDE's new desktop shell that was first released with KDE 4.0 is one of the central elements of the traditional desktop interfaces people have been using on their computers since the mid-eighties. To the user, Plasma is what you start your applications with, and what helps you managing your tasks.
Technically speaking, Plasma is a high-level toolkit that allows it to easily build user interfaces. The first product that has been built with Plasma is the KDE 4 desktop. With portability not as an afterthought, one of the design principles of Plasma was to not make assumptions about user interactions deep down in the software stack, but make it as easy as possible to build plasmoids, small plugins that take care of the user's interaction with the device. For using Plasma on mobile internet devices such as the Maemo platform on an N810, developers are working on integrating QEdje, a technology that is used to build 'fingerable' and visually appealing user interfaces with Plasma which in turn provides the shell and plumbing to run and combine these interfaces. KDE technology in general provides the underlying infastructure to integrate hardware, multimedia and the ultimately "The Cloud" into the user experience.
Simon Hausmann
QtWebKit
The WebKit project aims to develop a fast, standard compliant browser engine. Its thin platform abstraction makes it extremely portable. Hence, millions of users browse the web every day via their mobile phones and desktop computers – without even realizing it. The Qt toolkit recaptures the fun in software development by focusing on intuitive APIs and cross-platform availability. A cocktail of these two technologies, QtWebKit, provide an even more powerful framework, without compromising portability or ease of use. Today it is possible for web technologies to seamlessly integrate into applications and web content can interact with Qt components. This presentation introduces the QtWebKit APIs and the underlying engine, including new features in Qt 4.5 as well as a sneak preview into future extensions.
Stefan Seefeld
Thiago Macieira
The Future of Qt: Desktop and Embedded
Qt is a first-class development toolkit for both Desktop and Embedded environments, but so far most of its focus was on Desktop. Since the Nokia acquisition, Embedded and Mobile platforms are being given more attention. The presentation will focus on recent developments in Qt and what is to come, like Qt for S60.
Check the last editions:
