About:

GNUGoS60 is a port of the FSF's GNU Go game engine to Nokia's S60 smartphone platform running on SymbianOS.

It is Free Software.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Inkscape and svg2svgt

If you want to make an icon for S60 3.0 you are supposed to make them as SVGT, and to help with that the SDK contains a utility called svg2svgt. This is written in Java, and it's wonderful installer generally fails to install (at least on the 3 PCs I have tried). There is a workaround for this though which works, and is included in the release notes (though who ever reads those). Anyway, generally what happens is that it complains that it is not compatible with the Java 1.3.x that is by default installed on most Windows. It doesn't recognize even if you have later JRE installed. Anyway, the solution is to put JAVA 1.4.x in your PATH.

cmd
c:>set PATH=C:\program files\java\jre1.4.x\bin;%PATH%

then run the installer for svg2svgt from the command line.

c:>\Symbian\9.1\S60_3rd_MR\S60Tools\svg2svgt\installer\svg2svgtconverter.exe

Hey presto, it installs.

So now you look around for a way to make a SVG, and really there is only one good free option, and that is to use Inkscape. You duly design whatever you want and save it in Inkscape, and then run the svg2svgt on it. Hey presto, it looks nothing like the icon you designed in Inkscape.

What has gone wrong? For a reason explained here by Greg_Jokiel the svg2svgt doesn't parse the style attribute used extensively by Inkscape to set the colors and other things. The end result is that your icon looks nothing like you expected. shapes are the wrong color or disappear altogether. Greg_Jokiel gives a solution in that link, though it would be a pain to do by hand even for one icon. Anyway, I created a script svg2s60 to do what he recommends and make the Inkscape files parsable correctly by svg2svgt. No guarantee that it works correctly for all (or even any) files, but it worked correctly for my icon.

Updated 01 Sept 2007: "here" link fixed

Monday, February 05, 2007

Status of GnuGoS60 on real phones

Just thought I'd give a brief rundown of the phones that this port of gnugo has been confirmed working on, and those that have reported problems. If you don't see your phone here (or it contradicts what I have listed), and you have tested it please add a comment giving the status.

I know there are still bugs in the software, so please ignore them :)

This is just a "somehow works"/"doesn't work at all" type of check for GnuGoS60-0.1

Reported OK

  • 6600
  • 6670
  • 6120
  • N73
  • N80
  • N90
  • N91
  • N93
  • N93i
  • E50
  • E61
  • E61i
  • E65
  • E70
  • 6630 - broken in v0.1, but sort of works from v0.1.1 onwards
  • 6680 - broken in v0.1, but sort of works from v0.1.1 onwards
Reported Not OK
  • 6630 - broken in v0.1, but sort of works from v0.1.1 onwards
  • 6680 - broken in v0.1, but sort of works from v0.1.1 onwards
  • E70 (2.0618.07.10) - real issue or not?
(Updated 06/02/2007 21:36 - N80 somehow works)
(Updated 13/02/2007 21:26 - E50 somehow works too)
(Updated 14/02/2007 22:32 - N91 somehow works too)
(Updated 16/02/2007 21:41 - E61 somehow works too)
(Updated 05/05/2007 18:15 - N73 somehow works too)
(Updated 22/05/2007 20:56 - E70 somehow doesn't work) - (03/07/2007 still valid?)
(Updated 22/05/2007 20:58 - E65 somehow works too)
(Updated 03/07/2007 22:47 - E70 somehow works too)
(Updated 03/07/2007 22:47 - E61i somehow works too)
(Updated 22/09/2007 22:47 - 6120 somehow works too)
(Updated 08/12/2007 22:37 - 6680, 6630 problem fixed in v0.1.1)

Thursday, February 01, 2007

GNUGoS60-0.1 Released (woohoo!)

I am pleased to announce that version 0.1 of GNU Go for S60 has been released. You can download it here.

It supports S60 3rd edition and S60 2nd editions. The support for 3rd edition is a bit better than 2nd edition which still has a kind of hack in to make it run at all, but that slows it down pretty severely. Nevertheless it plays a game of Go. Not much else, but it's a reasonable start.

Version 0.2 will seek to implement some of the more important features that are missing from the interface, though might be a while coming, so enjoy version 0.1 for now :)