I’ve always wanted to be able to support all kind of text on my Symbian bible. The problem is this: the Unicode support for Symbian is very limited, and even non existent for some languages. Few weeks ago someone asked me if I can make Symbian bible to support Malayalam bible (using Malayalam script of course). Malayalam writing system was only supported recently by major operating systems (such as Windows XP and OS X Leopard), and Symbian haven’t support it yet (and even if it supports it, the support will only be activated to phones on certain sales area).
I know that there are several Unicode layout library, such as Pango, Qt or ICU. All of them are too big for me to understand and port to Symbian. So my solution was to use the freetype library and harfbuzz font shaping. After using those two libraries on Symbian, I think now I can understand Unicode. Here is my quick guide to understand Unicode, from having a data and a font, to displaying the data with that font.
First thing that you need to understand is: Unicode defines list of characters for many languages of the world.
Some languages doesn’t have the concept of lower or upper case. Some languages have their own numbering system. Every language has their own system of ordering things. If possible: always use the function provided by the library you are using.
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I bought the Eee PC 4G last week, but I haven’t used it optimally. Today when trying to write a new blog post using Eee PC, I felt that the space key is very difficult to press. After searching around, I found out that many people experience the same problem. Surprisingly it is very easy to take of the Eee PC keyboard. Just press on the three dots on top of the keyboard using screw driver, and it will pop out.
Fixing it quite easy, I used a tape to make the space key thicker and easier to press, and I put a tape also in the keyboard to keep the rubber part from moving.
You can see more pictures on my photo gallery.
Here is the current progress of the kernel porting:
- Basic architectural support (IRQ, timer, memory mapping)
- Serial port
- EHCI driver
- OHCI driver
- MTD driver
Here are some notes regarding the development:
- Serial port is 16550 compliant, but you need to remap the registers.
- STR9104 have PCI bus, but it is not connected anywhere. The old kernel have a driver for PCI bus, and it was used in the EHCI driver. I think this is kind of a hack, because the PCI stuff is not needed.
- The EHCI and OHCI is part of the SoC, not on the PCI bus. There is a quirk in the initialization of the OHCI part (you can look at it in the patch)
- MTD driver is based on CFI chipset (AMD/Fujitsu). I only tested reading and writing configuration partition (mtd2 and mtdblock2)
- Network Driver (STR9104 contains MAC hardware, and in Agestar it is connected to IP101A as the PHY hardware)
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I finally managed to modify the STR9100 network card driver to work on Linux Kenel 2.6. There weren’t many modifications that i made (I will post the details later). So the next important thing will be to port the USB host driver. I think I began to understand the old driver, and I hope I can quickly port this last importang stuff.
Microsoft office provides several new nice looking fonts in their Office 2007. Some web pages and applications already uses these fonts to make their display looks nicer. To get these fonts into your Windows without buying Office 2007, you can install Power Point Viewer 2007 which is a free application to view a Power Point Presentation.
Information for Indonesian participant is available here. Deadline for sending your information is February 5th, 2007.
