Men in love

When I got a Handspring Visor (a Palm Pilot offspring) roughly ten years ago, I was amazed about all the nice things you could do with the device. I even wrote a German version of the visor linux howto, although I never really finished it. What I especially liked was the possibility to install a ssh client and use it to connect on the push of a button to my workstation -- which I took to good use several imes when my Xserver went beserk. Unfortunately, over time the major incentive to use the thing, syncing calender and address book vanished, as it turned out to be a major hassle when the main calendar to sync with was Lotus Domino. So, since some years my trusty Visor has only gathered dust. But even back in 2000, it was clear to me that the Palm Pilot would only be the starting point and that at some time in the then-unknown future, we would have small devices that would allow issuing phone calls, taking pictures, listening to music as well as providing the "usual" features of handhelds.

Back then, I didn't really think about when exactly that device would arrive but I think the time has come finally. Some days ago I bought a Nokia N900, which is a mobile device running Maemo on top of a Linux kernel on an ARM platform (see this overview of the hardware for more details). This is really a neat little gadget which is really as close to my ten year old dream as you can get: It comes with mobile phone capabilitiy, UMTS and wlan connection, 5MP camera, media player, RSS feed reader, etc. and also has a quite usable sliding keyboard. It's not really a mobile phone but a pocket computer which you can also use to call people with, which shows for instance in that most applications require the device to held in landscape position.

Of course, what's most interesting to me is the software on the device. Basically, Maemo 5 is a linux distribution based on Debian technology, e.g. apt/dpkg and friends work as expected. You don't get all of your favourite linux applications of course, but still there are quite a lot of the regular stuff you would expect. This includes the mobile version of Firefox, Fennec, vim, OpenSSH (client and server) and even Emacs. Being the geek that I am, nearly the first thing I did was a remote login via ssh from my workstation on the N900 (also see this overview of USB networking on the N900). Native maemo applications are typically developed with Python and GTK, although that is probably going to change for Maemo 6 (Nokia has announced it favours Qt over GTK). The community seems quite active, too: just shortly, a port of Clisp (a Common Lisp compiling to byte code) was announced (including a running Swank backend, so you can connect from your development Emacs remotely), although I imagine that the development environment for Python is, generally speaking, more advanced (for Maemo development, this is). I haven't looked any closer into developing for Maemo up to now, but it surely looks interesting.

ObTitle: Gossip, "Music for men"