Teemu’s Blog

l just finished porting SER (SIP Express Router) for Maemo platform. Well, not much porting actually was needed. Just compile for ARM and create an application installer friendly .deb package.

You might be wondering that what is SER? A simple answer is that it is a very fast and configurable SlP proxy server. If you still do not know what I’m talking about, this application is probably not for you. It is also a valid question that what is the use of such application for a device like Nokia 770. Well, my intention was only to test if SER can be run on Nokia 770 and how well it works. Seems like it was easier task than what I thought. The .deb package can be downloaded from here.

The application can be used without root privileges. By default the users are not authenticated, since I’ve not yet had time to configure it with the dbtext module. That might come later… It is quite fun to experiment with this using SIP enabled WLAN devices and ad-hoc WLAN connections.

Today I participated in a day long seminar and I knew that the location would not have a open WLAN access so I didn’t even bother to bring my laptop with me. For the first time I decided to take my 770 with me, since I could check my RSS feeds and read my personal email with it using 3G. I thought that it would be better than nothing. It turned out to be a lot more.

While others were struggling with their Windows XPs and bluetooth modem connections, I already had checked my emails and was reading through today’s new blog posts via Bloglines. 3G connectivity with the 770 hasn’t failed me once and the device is instantly ready to be used. I like it… I like it alot.

I had also read about the application called Xournal and decided to give it a try. It is still rather slow, but somewhat usable for taking quick notes. I can’t wait for it to develop a bit further. This is definitely the kind of application that Nokia should have included in 770, not just the stupid and useless sketch and notes utilities.

So far I’ve just been hacking around with 770 at home or office, but this experience encouraged me to carry it along with me all the time. The day got a really nice ending when I was travelling home from the seminar and was able to write some emails in the train. And the battery lasted all day long. Well, battery indicator had one bar left when I arrived home… but hey, that was enough.

In my previous post to this blog I was experimenting with Pygame and found out that a game called Nannoid worked almost fully on the Nokia 770 without modifications. Well, I decided to modify it a bit and now it should be fully playable.

It requires you to have Pymaemo runtime installed. Also, since Python for Maemo does not yet fully support LibOsso (or something?) you wont be able to switch back to another application during the game and you don’t see the “loading…” sign when launching the application from the menu. After clicking the menu item, just wait a couple of seconds and the game will launch. You can play the game using the stylus or the keys.

Download the installer package from here. I hope you enjoy the game. Here are some screenshots…

It’s been a while since my last post to my blog and yesterday, while watching OC and lying on the couch, I thought I gotta post something. Then I started to browse through the Pygame site since I thought there might be something cool stuff that I could try on my Nokia 770.

First I started at the Gamelets section. I thought that these should be simple enough and work without any editing on the device. To be honest, that was not the case, but at least I got this small game called Spacepong working. It worked really nice and I could control the ball on the screen using the stylus. The game itself is not the coolest kind, but might offer a good example on how to develop games using Pygame. Here are some screenies from the game taken from Nokia 770.

Now, encouraged from this nice experience with Pygame gamelets, I decided to go for the actual games. Since I’ve always liked Arkanoid I immediately wanted to try Pygame version of that called Nannoid. To my surprise, it also worked right out of the package. Well not fully. As you can see from the screenshots below, the game didn’t quite fit to the screen. Anyhow, this seems like something that would be really cool with some modifying.

And remember people, this was all done while watching OC. All you need to do is to install Python for Maemo. Then download the .tar.gz packages of the games, for example, to your memory card. Then go to the directory where you downloaded them using Xterm (MMC is found in /media/mmc1) and type “tar xzvf the_name_of_the_package.tar.gz”. Change to the directory that was extracted and start the game by typing “/var/lib/install/usr/bin/python2.4 the_name_of_the_file_that_starts_the_game”. If you have errors, you might have tried to start the wrong file or it just doesn’t work. If you find more games that would be cool for Nokia 770, I’d like to hear about it. That was all this time… happy gaming.