VMware demoed a Nokia N800 featuring its mobile hypervisor at its VMworld Europe conference, showing Windows CE and Google’s Android running at the same time.

In a keynote at VMworld Europe, chief technology officer (CTO) Stephen Herrod unveiled the firm’s mobile virutalisation platform, explaining that phones featuring hypervisors – the technology that allows virtualisation – will have two main functions.

The first enables users to back up their system and data on a virtual machine, so if they get a new phone they can easily transfer contacts and other information regardless of the operating system. “What data is on a device will outlive the device,” he said.

This will also make developing mobile applications much easier, as developers can embed it on a virtual machine with a thin operating system of its own, removing the need to ensure interoperability with different systems.

The second use involves running multiple virtual machines on a single phone. This will let users run two profiles at the same time. “People don’t want to carry two phones – one approved by IT, and one that’s a bit cooler,” said Herrod, who added that this move was another step towards “employee-owned IT.”

This sounds like a great idea….Now all we need is more powerful processors….We’re all looking at you Intel….The “Hz” race is on again

For all the Nokia N800 fans out there……this is what happens if Nokia was sponsoring your High school . Seriously though, this is a fantastic example of what kids (and adults) can do using the opensource N800 platform for robotics control. Now who’s gonna stick one of these things on a gas powered RC car…..Dibs on the Remote

Well today’s been full of good news for developers and users alike. Steve J. announced that the Ipod/Iphone SDK will be released in February 2008 and if that wasn’t enough Nokia announced their next generation Internet Tablet….the N810. It’s basically the N800 on steroids, a slider keyboard plus builtin GPS…..wohoo . From the Press Release….

The Nokia N810 is powered by maemo Linux based OS2008, updatable also on the Nokia N800, the previous internet tablet generation hardware. The Nokia N810 features a highly customizable user interface and contains various novelties such as a Mozilla based browser with Ajax and Adobe flash 9, Bluetooth headset support as well as enhanced video and audio features. The refreshed Video Gizmo, Skype and Rhapsody highlight some most popular downloads available while Boingo Wireless, Earthlink and The Cloud enable Wi-Fi connectivity, across thousands of different locations globally.

The Nokia N810 has an integrated GPS receiver which allows you to pinpoint your position and find a wide variety of points-of-interests using the pre-loaded maps. Upgrade to Wayfinder’s voice-guided navigation for turn-by-turn directions and explore the world on foot or in the car.

So get ready and start saving up. Ipod (or if Rogers gets it’s act together) and Iphone first, N810 with all the sweet tech inside plus the ISDK in Feb…..Next year will be a busy Dev. year

Well they said it can’t be done. They said the secret of the apple sauce was only known to Steve. Looks like Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri has it figured out. 1340 lines of code and you’ve got the Apple’s Ubercool keyboard on the N800…..gotta love open platforms.

Okay, so by now you all know that I kinda hate the iPhone. I think it’s gonna be the big wake up call for Apple/Steve. We’ll see, but in the meantime Nokia has beefed up the N800 with a simple software upgrade. New features include Skype (yehaaa), Flash 9 (wohoo) and SDHC support (upto 8GB), so run and grab it here. This means that you can grab two 8GB SDHC card and have a fully functional linux Computer w/ 16GB of Disk in your pocket. Get some skype-out minutes and you can leave your iPhone at home. All this and battery life improvement as well. My advice to Apple, stick to what you know, make better Computers/OS’s and let the phone makers make the phones .

Okay this was relatively simple…..

1. Make sure you can either ssh and become root and/or run xterm and become root on your N800.
2. Ssh to the N800 and become root (either through sudo grainroot or something similar)
3. Goto kbdd‘s website and download kbdd.tar.gz onto your N800.
4. Extract it to root’s home directory using tar -zvlf kbdd.tar.gz and cd to kbdd.
5. Unfold the keyboard/insert battries/press the button on top right corner and make sure the LED beside it starts blinking.
6. In Ssh client type hcitool scan to scan for bluetooth devices. If you have more than 1 device you might see multiple entries. Note the Bluetooth address in form of xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx . You will need this in the next step.
7. Use vi (in ssh session) to edit the file btkbd.conf and make it look as follows:

BDADDR="xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx"
KBTYPE=btfoldable
PORTNUM=2

8. Where xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx is the Bluetooth Address you got at step 6 and PORTNUM is the Bluetooth serial port number the script creates (2 should be safe, try not to use 0/1 as they are used for Cell phone connections).
9. Make sure your Keyboard and N800 are not paired before starting this process. If they are paired, delete the pairing first. Make keyboard discoverable (press the top right button beside the LED) and run btkbd command from ssh command line. Wait for a pop-up on your N800 and type 0000 as the pairing code.
10. If everything is working you should be able to type on the BT keyboard now. You can run btkbd again to stop the deamon.
11. If it works you can add menu shortcut. Just run the install_shortcut.sh script in kbdd directory.

Let me start by saying that I found the recipe for this on Josh Lifton’s website. So most of the credit really goes to him. I’ve just simplified (and expanded) his method to cover generic quicktime streaming.

So basically what we want to do is to connect the N800 to a network, setup a quicktime server (or darwin streaming server for people who don’t have access to OSX server) and get the N800 to create a H.263 stream (audio and video) and send it to our server. Sounds easy right?

Here are the bits you need:

• N800 Internet tablet
• Mac (or PC) with Quicktime 7 (or higher) installed
• A server box running OSX server (can be the same machine as above) or a PC running Darwin Streaming server.

Recipe for N800

Assuming you have the N800 powered up and setup for Network usage (wireless), here are the steps I followed to get the N800 prepped:

Put the application manager in “redpill” mode. Go to “Tools > Application catalogue”, click “New”, enter “matrix” into the “Web Address” field, click “Cancel”. Choosing the red pill will activate the red pill mode, obviously, and chosing the blue one will deactivate it.

Install Dropbear SSH Server and Client software onto your N800. Now ssh from the Mac (or PC) to your N800 and login as root (password is rootme by default). Change the password and make a note of it. On the N800 (through ssh and vi) edit /etc/apt/source.list file and either add the differences or replace the content with the following:

#maemo:name Nokia Catalogue
#maemo:essential
deb http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/certified/ bora user
#maemo:name Nokia Catalogue (3rd party software)
deb http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/non-certified/ bora user
#maemo:name Canola
deb http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/repository-beta2/bora bora user
#maemo:name Maemo Repository
deb http://repository.maemo.org/ bora free non-free extras
#maemo:name Maemo Extras
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras bora free non-free
#maemo:name Tuomas Kulve - Maemo - Bora
deb http://tuomas.kulve.fi/debian bora maemo
#maemo:name Kernel Concepts
deb http://downloads.kernelconcepts.de/maemo3 bora free
#maemo:name MUlliNER.ORG Repository
deb http://www.mulliner.org/nokia770/repository/ bora free
#maemo:name eko.one.pl Catalogue
deb http://eko.one.pl/maemo/ bora user
#maemo:name Nokia Research Centre Cambridge
deb http://repository.nrcc.noklab.com/ bora extras
#maemo:name tortoise catalogue
#deb http://www.users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~cej105/maemo.html bora user
#maemo:name quiver
deb http://mike.yi.org/packages/maemo/ bora main
#maemo:name maemo-hackers
deb http://maemo-hackers.org/apt bora main
#maemo:name FBReader repository
deb http://www.fbreader.org/maemo bora user
#maemo:name mg
deb http://mg.pov.lt/770 bora user other

At this point reboot your N800 by issuing the reboot command from ssh window. Okay you’ve made it this far, good that means you have not bricked your machine yet . SSH back to your N800 and login with the new root password (remember we changed the password earlier). Now use the Application Manager and install the following packages (this is up-to-date as of May, 25, 2007):

osso-xterm
gst-plugins-farsight
gstreamer-tools
gstreamer0.10-3gp-osso
gstreamer0.10-adpcm-osso
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg-osso
gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
gstreamer0.10-hantro
gstreamer0.10-id3lib-osso
gstreamer0.10-mpeg1demux-osso
gstreamer0.10-mpegstream-osso
gstreamer0.10-plugins-base
gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-extra
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-dbg
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-extra
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-extra-dbg
gstreamer0.10-tools
gstreamer0.10-wma

Recipe for Streaming Server (QTSS)

The procedure described in this document was tested with the Apple QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS) running on a Mac OS X 10.4.9 Server machine. Similar results are most likely possible with the open source Darwin Streaming Server (DSS). You have to find out where the streaming directory of the server is. By default on QTSS it is /Library/QuickTimeStreaming/Movies/ folder. We now need to create an SDP file that point our quicktime client at the stream. Think of the .sdp file as a stub file on the server that tells the client all the relevant information about the stream. I’ve succesfully used the following sdp file, just copy and paste the text using a text editor and save it in the Movies directory as a text file (ie: n800.sdp):

v=0
o=- 37 614155991 IN IP4 127.0.0.0
s=QuickTime
t=0 0
a=range:npt=now-
m=audio 5432 RTP/AVP 0
c=IN IP4 XX.XX.XX.XX
b=AS:63
m=video 5434 RTP/AVP 96
c=IN IP4 XX.XX.XX.XX
a=rtpmap:96 H263-2000/90000
a=fmtp:96
a=cliprect:0,0,288,352
a=framesize:96 352-288

This SDP file can be used once the XX.XX.XX.XX address listed in the file (in two places) is replaced with the IP address at which the streaming server is located.

Soups Ready!

Be sure the default camera application is not running before the GStreamer pipeline is started. Once the N800 and QTSS have been configured as above, the only thing left to do is start the audio and video streaming from the N800 by running the following command from the terminal (either via SSH session or xterm application on N800):

gst-launch-0.10 gconfv4l2src ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=352,height=288,framerate=\(fraction\)15/1 ! hantro4200enc stream-type=1 profile-and-level=1001 ! video/x-h263,framerate=\(fraction\)15/1 ! rtph263ppay mtu=1438 ! udpsink host=XX.XX.XX.XX port=5434 dsppcmsrc ! queue ! audio/x-raw-int,channels=1,rate=8000 ! mulawenc ! rtppcmupay mtu=1438 ! udpsink host=XX.XX.XX.XX port=5432

This command (all one line) creates and starts playing a GStreamer pipeline that encodes the raw audio and video streams, stuffs them into RTP packets, and sends them to the streaming server (change the XX.XX.XX.XX addresses in two places to server IP address). Once the GStreamer pipeline has been started, the N800′s camera can be popped out without the default camera application starting up.

Now goto your quicktime client and choose File/Open URL from the menu and type the following: rtsp://XX.XX.XX.XX/n800.sdp (change the XX.XX.XX.XX to server IP address).

Enjoy!!