Dealing with device for Ubuntu Touch development

Lately I am working on Ubuntu Touch Calendar application. Recently I also got device and now I wanted to run and test application on real device.

So it seems there are two type of Ubuntu Touch image,
one cdimage-touch, which is read-write image but it does not support over the air update and
other ubuntu-system, which is read only, but which can be updated over the air

For development purpose its better to use cdimage-touch, as you can transfer file from computer to device and test it as its read-write. Its not possible with ubuntu-system image. But if you just want to see how Ubuntu Touch looks and test applications then ubuntu-system image is good.

You can follow steps mentioned here, to install appropriate image on device.

Now we have proper image on device, then following are some command which can be used to install the application and transfer file form computer to device.

adb push can be used to tranfer file from computer to device, just like copy

adb push tests/autopilot/calendar_app/tests/test_calendar.py /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/calendar_app/tests/

BTW, " /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/" is the path where test case are installed by default on device. And above command is coping updated test case file to device.

If you want to run test on device then you can use following command on your desktop terminal.

phablet-test-run calendar_app

Same way we can transfer QML files as well. Like below.

adb push YearView.qml /usr/share/calendar-app/YearView.qml

It seems "/usr/share/" is path where applications are installed.

If you want to install complete application built from source code, then you can run following command to build application from source. You need to run this command from directory where debian folder is residing.

debuild -uc -us -b

This will generate .deb file in parent folder. You can copy this file to device via adb push. Then you can goto device's shell by adb shell command.

adb push DEB_FILENAME.deb /tmp
adb shell

And finally install .deb by running following command on device's shell.

cd /tmp
dpkg -i DEB_FILENAME.deb

Now you should be able to run latest installed app.

Un-boxing BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha C

After a long wait, finally today I received my BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha C device. As you know it developer version of BlackBerry 10 Qwerty device.

Following are few pics from ub-boxing, if you are curious about how device looks and what comes with it.

It comes in nice little box, same as Dev Alpha B, with Micro USB cable and Power cable.

Build quality wise its also boxy and made from plastic.

On one side , there is micro USB port for data transfer and charging and micro HDMI for TV out, on other side there are media keys, on top there is audio jack and power button.

Here are few snaps after power on.

Debugging lzo(.lzo) file in maemo

If you are facing segmentation fault in Maemo device than there are some tools available to retrieve core dump files from the device. These tools are in the sp‐rich‐core package. sp‐rich‐core  will produce a core dump file and also additional information about process, most of /proc data, last lines from syslog, df, ifconfig output and much more.  All of such information is added to a
rich core dump package (.rcore) and then, it is compressed in .lzo file.

The core dumps by default are saved on directory /media/mmc1/core‐dumps on device.

To uncompressed core dump you need to use rich-core-extract tool. The package sp‐rich‐core‐postproc provides the rich‐core‐extract utility, which extracts the information from a rich core dump file that GDB can read.

To install this tool type following

apt-get install sp-rich-core sp-rich-core-postproc

Now to uncompress lzo file and to get core dump file use following command.

rich-core-extract core_file.lzo

For more information using gdb in maemo environment visit this post.

Also visit this link for more information on debugging on maemo platform.