Hi, If you are browsing this page you may be interested in adding additional codecs to the Harmattan GStreamer. Below you can find gstreamer-ffmpeg packages which allow your Qt app and the platform media player  to play more audio and video formats.

The packages here available are basically the Maemo ones: I’ve done only few changes in the debian files to let this package build on harmattan. Its source code has not been modified at all and it can be found in the Maemo extras repository: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/pool/fremantle-1.3/free/source/g/gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg/

The packages you need to install on the device are the following:

• gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg_0.10.9-2maemo2_armel.deb
• liboil0.3_0.3.17-1maemo3+0m6_armel.deb

If you are a developer and you found a bug you may want to install debug symbols on your device. If you are a normal user you don’t need this package at all!

If skype refuses to sign in showing an error message like this: “another skype instance may exist”, first check you don’t have any other skype instances running on your system (ps ax | grep skype) and then if it still doesn’t work, check to have the rights to read/write the .Skype directory in your home.

Today I spent some time to debianize Intel’s MeeGo Components for Maverick. Ville wrote a post about how to install them on your machine easily.

If interested on the debianization of these pacakages you may want to take a look at:

• https://meego.gitorious.org/+fn-meego/meego-ux/fn-meego-mlite
• https://gitorious.org/+fn-meego/meego-ux/fn-meego-meego-ux-components
• https://gitorious.org/+fn-meego/meego-ux/fn-meego-meego-ux-theme

Here is a video of MeeGo widget gallery application running on my linux box: MeeGo UX components

Here is the code to make a QDeclarativeView based application transparent.

#include
#include

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
QApplication a(argc, argv);

QDeclarativeView view;
view.setSource(QUrl::fromLocalFile(“myqmlfile.qml”));
view.setAttribute(Qt::WA_TranslucentBackground);
view.viewport()->setAutoFillBackground(false);

view.show();
return a.exec();
}

Today I’ve updated my linux box to the latest stable KUbuntu release. Everything went smooth except that flash plugin seems missing. YouTube as well as Google streetmap claim Flash plugin 10.x is not available. Adobe website says that the plugin has been integrated into the browser..
The point is I’m not able to see any flash content! So what the heck?
Looks that Chromium doesn’t have flash plugin at all (Maybe Chrome has it!), and flasher-installer package didn’t work during the upgrade.
Then to make it working, I did the following steps:
1) Download the flash plugin from adobe website (Linux 64bit version in my case) http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
2) Uncompress the downloaded tarball: tar xvzf flashplayer_square_p2_64bit_linux_092710.tar.gz
3) Move the shared object to the right dir: mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/
4) Restart your chromium

Maybe there are other ways like installing the flash plugin from some ubuntu unofficial repositories.. but I preferred this way.

Enjoy!

To have push access on your repository, you can clone a git repository over SSH or HTTPS.
Current git version, doesn’t ask for username then
git clone https://mydomain.org/project.git
will fail with this error:
error: The requested URL returned error: 401 while accessing https://mydomain.org/project.git
Error 401 means the client is not authorized to access to that resource.

The solution is to clone the repository putting the username in the URL:
git clone https://username@mydomain.org/project.git

The git command to use is “revert”. But before to use it we have to figure out the commit that contains the “merge” and that we want to revert.
For this purpose we use “git log HEAD~X -Y” where X = [0-N] and Y = [1-N].
Once you know X and Y, “revert” command rolls back changes: “git revert HEAD~X -mY”.
At the end the reverting commit can be pushed to the remote server with “git push”

Even if Forum Nokia gives public git repositories for free, in some cases coders want to keep their work in a “more secret” place. So I set up a git remote repository on my home server.

Here are the steps I followed to have it in place:

On the server side:

1. apt-get install apache2 git-core gitweb

2. mkdir  /var/cache/git

Now we can create our first remote repository:

1. cd /var/cache/git/repository-name.git

2. git –bare init

3. chown your _ssh_username /var/cache/git/repository-name.git -R

4. chgrp your _ssh_username /var/cache/git/repository-name.git -R

So we have initialized an empty git repository  and we are now ready to use it!

On your local machine:

1.  git clone ssh://your_ssh_username@remote_server/var/cache/git/repository-name.git

2. cd repository-name

Let’s now try to do a simple basic operation, like adding a file to the repository

1. touch HELLO

2. git add HELLO

3. git commit -a -m “Add HELLO”

4. git push origin master

Moreover, since we installed gitweb, it shows our commits. Gitweb is available at  http://remote_server/gitweb

So far this is the best way I know to translate PDFs using google translator without losing images and text formatting.
What you have to do is:
1) Upload the PDF to http://viewer.zoho.com/
2) Get the URL of the uploaded document
3) paste the URL in http://translate.google.com
Enjoy!

I’m back to Italy and I’m using an Alice Pirelli router as internet gateway. This kind of router is unfortunately pretty standard here although it’s very crappy.
The Pirelli wireless router is a very basic device and looks that its signal strength is not enough for my macbook pro.
The Pirelli device is placed in the living room and between me and the router there is just a wall. Despite all my devices (Phones/PCs) in this room are able to get a good signal strength, my macbook pro doesn’t.
One time more, I would like to know what makes this laptop cool.. except the brand..