Ruby port for Nokia 770 Wireless Internet Tablet

[ruby770]

Greetings Fellow Ruby Enthusiasts,

I recently purchased a Nokia 770 wireless Internet Tablet
(http://europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,,75023,00.html) and a few days ago I
successfully ported Ruby 1.8.4 to it. For those of you who are
unfamiliar w/the 770, it's Nokia's first such non-phone product (or so
they claim): a very nifty hand-held "PC" that among other things runs a
pared down version of Linux (from kernel.org, debian package), has
built in wifi and bluetooth, includes email client, Opera browser, RSS
client, audio and video, all displayed on an 800x480x16bpp display.
The 770 will sense any available wifi connection and jack in
effortlessly. And, if you have a bluetooth-ready cell phone, the 770
can jack into that too and provide an internet connection via GPRS
anywhere your cell has a signal (very cool indeed.) Before porting
Ruby to it, it was love at first sight. Now I'm ecstatic.

Anyway, the port itself wasn't rocket science, but a bit more than
trial given the learning curve and quirks of the 770's "Maemo" cross
compiling development environment (http://maemo.org/). At this point,
I'm calling the port an alpha because (a) its not heavily tested on the
target device (although Ruby passes its self-test in the Maemo ARM
runtime simulator), (b) because there are no Ruby extensions compiled
in yet (ext/dl.c is having problems w/the cross compiler), and (c) its
just a tar ball w/out the convenience of a Debian compatible
installable package. If there's any significant interest in this port
of Ruby, I'd be more than happy to invest the time to clear up these
issues so we have a respectable RC.

Lastly, my question to the community is this: would such a port of Ruby
be appropriately placed in the RAA or simply distributed to interested
parties say via a wiki or my personal web site?

For those interested in the port, for the moment, you can email me at
(e-mail address removed) and I can sent you the distribution and instructions.
And should you have a Nokia 770 and want to run Ruby on it, here are a
few applications you'll need to download from Maemo.org and install on
your 770 to get going with Ruby
(http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog):

Download and install: xterm, bash and vim. You'll need an xterm in
which to run bash, from which, in turn, to install the tar ball and run
Ruby.

Kind Regards to all,

Ken Hilton

PS. At the time of this posting, it appears there has been some other
Ruby/Nokia 770 effort going on. In this case, my "port" does not
require root access to the device which can be problematic as Nokia
does not supply the root password (although I'm told it can be
cracked.)

 

[julian.kamil]

Excellent! Let me know if you need a Wiki, I can set up a Pandora site
for your use (http://pandora.rubyveil.com/) if you don't mind using an
early beta version...

Julian I. Kamil

 

[ssmoot]

I have a few off-topic questions about the 770 if you have a sec:

I checked one out at CompUSA, but there were 2 things that bugged me:

1: I didn't see a way to swap orientation in the browser. It'd be nice
if I could assign a button to do that for web-browsing and ebook
reading.

2: The directional pad just jumped to linked, when I was expecting to
scroll the webpage. I'd love a jog-dial for scrolling, but short of
that, is there a way to scroll without the stylus?

Thanks, -Sam

PS: Oh yeah, I'd be very interested in this port. My (useless) idea was
to use it as a pocket webserver with Webrick. Don't ask me what that's
good for, I don't know. I just thought it'd be cool.

 

[Kenosis]

1. Too funny. Everyone I've shown my 770 too, more or less, pointed
out how much they liked the browser in "landscape" mode and you want to
swap it. To each their own, eh? Anyway, I see no way to make it swap,
although the manual is pretty spotty. We could ask on the Maeom wiki.
Perhaps there is a way.

2. Well, if the web page is tall enough and there are links more or
less from top to bottom, the browser does scroll to move the link
cursor to the next link down. Otherwise, it appears Opera only scrolls
via the stylus. Perhaps one of the other browsers you can download for
the 700 would behave the way you desire.

So, I'm attempting to post the port for public consumption but I don't
have a host to store the tar ball on (I didn't realize the RAA only
provides links to packages and doesn't offer storage of the package.)
Any ideas about where I could host the tar ball?

Ken

 

[tsuraan]

2: The directional pad just jumped to linked, when I was expecting to

scroll the webpage. I'd love a jog-dial for scrolling, but short of
that, is there a way to scroll without the stylus?

If you just hold down the direction arrow the browser will scroll that
direction. Tapping the direction goes to the next link.

 

[ssmoot]

Rubyforge? They host the Windows One-Click Installer, so this seems
like a good fit.

Re:

1: Yeah, the RDocs I was looking at through the browser looked great, I
just imagined that blogs and such might look better in portrait since
they don't generally use full width anyways.

2: Bummer. I'll checkout the Wiki you mentioned. Thanks for the tip.

Thanks for the answers tho'!

 

[Curt Hibbs]

So, I'm attempting to post the port for public consumption but I don't
have a host to store the tar ball on (I didn't realize the RAA only
provides links to packages and doesn't offer storage of the package.)
Any ideas about where I could host the tar ball?

You an host the entire project on RubyForge. Besides the tarball, you
could check the source into your project's subversion repository.
You'll also get all the usual RubyForge amenities: mailing lists, bug
tracking, wiki, etc.

If you don't already have a RubyForge account, just click on the "New
Account" link on the home page. Once ou have an account, you log in,
click on the "My Account" link and then click on the "Register
Project" link.

Curt

 

[ruby770]

Ruby for the Nokia has been released to RubyForge w/an important
configuration fix. Enjoy!

Ken

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=1364