Maemo is a Debian derivative,so its not pure Debian,but still that didnt stop me from getting all the Debian goodness on my device.
All it took was installing the Easy Debian package,which downloaded a large Debian image file to my phone giving me access to stuff like OpenOffice.org, Gimp, the LXDE Desktop Environment, Evince, Firefox,Java etc and a lot of other precompiled apps from the Debian repo…kewl,isnt it ?

Now, the programmer in me was dying to start programming the phone. And what better than Python for some instant nirvana ! . To get started i wrote a simple hello world snippet,that makes use of the GTK libraries on the phone.The code is as follows:

import gtk
from gtk import Window, Button, Widget
if __name__ == "__main__":
    window = Window(gtk.WINDOW_TOPLEVEL)
    window.connect("destroy", gtk.main_quit)
    button = Button("Hello World:)")
    button.connect_object("clicked", Widget.destroy, window)
    window.add(button)
    window.show_all()
    gtk.main()

And below is a pic of the program running on my phone . Nothing really fancy,but definitely a step in the right direction !

Well,thats all for now folks.Twitter has made me really lazy,so writing more than 140 character posts is now a huge task for me . But,still ill try and keep updating about my n900 hacks and experiments. Bye for now, have fun !

I had a strange problem with email notifications being sent out by Mantis. When the emails arrived in my inbox,the inbox view showed ‘Unknown Date’ in the date field for the mails. Mantis uses PHPMailer as the mail library. This bug has been discussed on the PHPMailer mailing list. Quoting the solution below.

In class.phpmailer.php ’s function RFCDate(), there is a bug in the timezone code which returns +0580 for Indian Standard Time instead of +0530.

The line

$tz = ($tz/3600)*100 + ($tz%3600)/60;

should be replaced with

$tz= (($tz - ($tz%3600) )/3600)*100 + ($tz%3600)/60;

After patching my Mantis installation with the fix, the issue was resolved.Hope this helps someone else faced with the same problem…have fun

Python support is provided by the Aptana PyDev plugin, which was earlier a part of their Pro version,but which they have now released as free and open source

Detailed instructions for setting up and using Aptana PyDev are given at http://pydev.org/manual.html,and here i have summarized the installation steps involved.

1) Go to Help->Install New Software

2) Click on Add, to add the update site

3) Now enter any Name for the update site,say PyDev,and in Location enter,http://pydev.org/updates and press OK.

4) Then select what you want to install and click Finish.

After installation is over, you will have to specify the location of the python interpreter on your system. So, to do that :

1) Go to Window -> Preferences.

2) Under PyDev select Interpreter-Python

3) You can press Auto Config to make Aptana automatically detect the python interpreter on your system and add it, but if that fails for some reason , no worries, just click on New,enter a name and Browse to the location on your file system where it is installed. Then press OK on the select interpreter screen and OK again on the Preferences screen

Thats it, you should now have full Python support in Aptana Studio…Happy Hacking