MP3 playback in Nemo Mobile on the N950

If you've been playing with Nemo Mobile on your N950 recently, and wanted to do more than just swipe around the Lipstick UI, you might have noticed that while there's a music player app, it can't playback MP3 files (OGG files seem to work fine). This is a quick'n'dirty log of what I had to do to get MP3s playing (I've checked in the repos for something similar, but couldn't find it):

First, install the Mer Platform SDK:
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK

Then, get SB2 (for armv7hl, as this is what Nemo-on-N950 uses):
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK#Compiling_with_the_SDK

Then, set everything up so you can use "nemo-n950" as target with sb2:
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK_and_SB2

Install build dependencies (you might need more than these, use "zypper se " to search for package names):
sb2 -t nemo-n950 -m sdk-install -R zypper in gstreamer-devel gst-plugins-base-devel gst-plugins-bad-free-devel gstreamer-tools orc-devel zlib-devel

Get the gst-ffmpeg sources (use version 0.10.11, due to bug 655238):
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/gst-ffmpeg/

Extract the sources, then do:
sb2 -t nemo-n950 ./configure --prefix=/usr
sb2 -t nemo-n950 make
mkdir tmp
DESTDIR=$(pwd)/tmp/ sb2 -t nemo-n950 make install
cd tmp/
scp -r . root@192.168.2.15:/

The last step obviously assumes that your device is connected and USB networking is properly set up. And then we hear somebody say "Well, but why not package it properly?". Ok. Take this modified gst-ffmpeg.spec file (based on gst-ffmpeg.spec already included in the sources). Then build a package using:

mb build -t nemo-n950 gst-ffmpeg.spec

This will leave you with gst-ffmpeg-0.10.11-1.armv7hl.rpm in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/armv7hl which you can then scp and rpm -i to your device.

FOSDEM 2013

I attended FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Belgium last weekend. It was my first FOSDEM, and as such, I was quite positively surprised about the location/setting (big University with too many rooms and tracks to visit them all) and reach of the event (open source projects from every different corner you can imagine).

It was also nice to catch up with old friends from Maemo/MeeGo times like Quim, but at the same time it was impossible to say hi to everybody, as the location is so big, the event only lasts two days and everything is quite hectic and crowded. Still, I managed to meet community celebrities like rzr (of Harmattan Community Repository fame) and e-yes (of Nitdroid-on-N9 fame) in person at the event, which was really nice.

Apart from meeting people and having a good time in Downtown Belgium (so many beers to choose from), Jolla Mobile was also present at the event, and I managed to attend two talks (QML App Development and Porting Nemo to new Hardware), where I found out about Sailfish.Silica 1.0 (Jolla's Own Version of Qt Components), and Open Source Components of Jolla (really good to see Sailfish Silica open source'd and also good to see maliit and contextkit used as middleware).

The photos of the weekend, including a quick sightseeing tour on Monday as well as your usual dose of food porn can be found on Flickr.