I wanted to make sure all you know that maddog has started his own blog on Linux Magazine site. The same posts can be found in brazillian portuguese at Linux Magazine Brazil's site, at www.linuxmagazine.com.br.

Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded (UME) will be out soon, and Linux Magazine Brazil had a preview at Bossa Conference 2008, presented by Adilson Oliveira from Canonical. UME is targeted at connectivity devices, such as UMPCs and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices), but not at cell phones, as they are "too closed", according to Oliveira.

Canonical's UME tests are currently being undertaken on a Samsung Internet tablet device that originally had Windows running. The first stable version of UME will be out in May, and will be based on Hardy Heron, with packages directly derived from the official ones. At first it will be available only for x86 processors, which is why it needs notebook-like hardware. However, it is completely focused on touchscreen interfaces, with its current GUI roughly based on Nokia's Maemo.

The web browser is based on Firefox and all applications are displayed full screen by default. The test hardware sports many connectivity interfaces, with a video-out jack, multiple USB jacks, bluetooth and wireless, and is powered by a 900MHz Celeron processor with 1GB RAM.

Mozilla Foundation's Gecko used to be "the" choice for embedding a HTML renderer into any application. Having the very popular Firefox web browser as its main success case, the Gecko engine seems to provide quite efficient web content rendering times. However, what the KDE project started as their own web content rendering engine (KHTML and friends) was transformed by Apple into Webkit, the engine used in their Safari web browser.

After porting Safari (and also Webkit, consequently) to Windows, it is pretty clear that the engine released by Apple is actually extremely portable. Additionally, Alp Toker just showed in Bossa Conference 2008 that Webkit's performance is excellent, while also keeping a small memory footprint.

Web 2.0-ready

Toker stressed the point of asynchronous operation support, that must be available in future mobile devices. It is really a requirement, because users should be able to close (or lose) their connections at any time and keep working on the web apps they were using, eventually re-syncing when connection is restablished.

Webkit can play HTML5 videos without any proprietary plug-ins, with GStreamer. Also, it can reverse the current concept of GUIs with small web portions, into full GUIs designed with HTML5 forms. These GUIs would look exactly like the graphics toolkit used, as Alp showed in his speak at the event, with "perfectly native widget styling".

Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler, of Enlightenment fame, is trying to make this innovative desktop environment's graphic libraries take over GTK's throne in Nokia's mobile embedded devices. Speaking at Bossa Conference to a 100+ audience, Rasterman revealed he spent 3 hours last night coding the presentation application he just used (and it was actually pretty enough!).

Rasterman has been using the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) in the OpenMoko all-open-source handset for a while, and he seems to be taking interesting strides into Nokia's devices, too (Bossa Conference is a Nokia event). The creator of Enlightenment listed all the graphics hardware currently available in embedded devices, also showing their strengths and weaknesses. Framebuffer overlay planes, according to him, would offer the best trade-off between resource consumption and speed.

Enter the EFL. Evas, Ecore and Edje together are able to perform really well on even the cheapest hardware solutions. They abstract the rendering from the hardware and the OS, and can handle x11, xrender, framebuffer, OpenGL, Directfb and even – mind you – Directdraw and Direct3D rendering technologies. So, it basically "runs anywhere", as the Rasterman put it.

Reference at Linux Magazine

At 9:34 of an unusual cloudy morning in Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, Sandro Alves, Manager for New Businesses Development at Nokia Technology Institute (INdT) opened the 2008 edition of Bossa Conference. Sandro played a quick video detailing the history and attractions of Porto de Galinhas, Recife (where INdT is actually located) and the state of Pernambuco (where Recife is located).

Alves welcomed the 250 people attending the event with enthusiastic words about the last edition of Bossa Conference and how successful it was in achieving its goals. In a press conference right after the opening, the INdT manager explained what the institute does, how it does it, and most importantly, why the people in there do it.

Driven by design & concepts, not technology

Sandro characterizes INdT as "driven by design and concepts", not "driven by technology", although he makes it perfectly clear that this is not a criticism to Open Source developers. "When we started, we were driven by technology", he says, "but we gradually noticed that the 'driven by design and concepts' approach was much better, and it's been working very well ever since."

INdT's Recife unit employs only Open Source in the development of new applications and frameworks for Nokia mobile devices, and that's what Bossa Conference is all about: "the event is designed to promote interaction between developers", Sandro states. If you think this is just another nerdy conference, well, you might want to take a second look at it. "Bossa Conference is designed to maximize the time people can interact with each other." The program includes daily 'after hours' sessions, when participants are taken to any strictly social location in order to exchange ideas and concepts about programming for mobile embedded platforms - and sometimes to have a chance to meet their idols. "In these events, developers achieve much higher productivity than by remote collaboration", Alves tells us.

Reference at Linux Magazine site.