Poky: The Perfect Zaurus Distro? Options

[enodr]

I have had my Zaurus C3200 for less than a year and I must say than I am a bit disappointed by all the distros out there:
- OZ/Opie if fine, but I need the power of X11, and moreover some apps (OpieStumbler, but I could name other) simply do not work

- I don't like much the Pdaxrom dev. environment, I think Openembedded is much more powerfull and reliable in time.

- So there is the slow OZ/GPE with it's ugly desktop (unless you like the plain blue electric desktop). You have to login using a password (login on a PDA????, ok but that should be an option not a default), doesn't have any correct GUI application to connect to a Wifi network (weither Open/Wep or WPA), the icon set is ugly (the contact app icon is the best). The CF/SD card applet does not work on Spitz (and it won't in its current state as it tries to eject the internal CF!)...

It seems all the energies of the developpers are concentrated in the highly technical details (kernel hacking, making Openembedded even larger and efficient) which is of course a chance but we need someone to look after the "user experience" (is it not what a distro should be made for: users?).

So yesterday while browsing I came accross this page:
http://projects.o-hand.com/poky

The poky distribution is based on the Openembedded development environment. I have compiled it quite easily and installed it on the C3200. And my first reaction was : WOAAAA!!!!



- It has a superb boot splash screen
- It's very fast to boot
- It runs X11 with matchbox and no stupid login screen
- The default look is superb
- New contact and date apps made by o-hand (the company behind poky)
- Works with openzaurus feeds (or just install openembedded to compile more apps)

It still needs some tweaking (install a newer wpa_supplicant version to have Wifi+WPA, ...) but it works great!

This is for me what OZ/GPE should have been for months. I hope the future Angstrom will follow the path of Poky, or better that Poky will become a full distro with a support of the Zaurus community.

That was my 2 cents, and I wanted to share my experience with the users out there, because I never heard about Poky on those forums.

N.

[mimeca]

- So there is the slow OZ/GPE with it's ugly desktop (unless you like the plain blue electric desktop). You have to login using a password (login on a PDA????, ok but that should be an option not a default),

You can set a default user and the system won't ask you a login on startup.

It seems all the energies of the developpers are concentrated in the highly technical details (kernel hacking, making Openembedded even larger and efficient) which is of course a change, but we need someone to look after the "user experience".

Free time is a luxury and developpers works on high priority task. You can see a icon theme for GPE here.

- New contact and date apps made by o-hand (the company behind poky)
- Works with openzaurus feeds (or just install openembedded to compile more apps)

Did they release the source code? Can you post some images?

[jpmatrix]

yessss!

would you tell us more ?
does it work with the C3000 ?
i don't know svn at all, and i could not find a real howto... would you give us the way to install Poky ??

[danboid]

Does Poky do anything to address the graphical card applet issue?

[koen]

is it not what a distro should be made for: users?

As always: patches accepted

[enodr]

As always: patches accepted

Well that's a bit more complex than that. For example I think you should host Angstrom's wiki on your main website and I am ready to offer help (I am not a big kernel hacker or a super GTK app developper, so that's all I can offer in my free time). But you may think "no that's stupid, I don't want". So my help is useless...

This is exactly the same for the distro: I believe Poky is better than OZ/GPE, in the way it was designed. You could just take Poky recipes and use them in OZ/GPE or Angstrom. But you may think: no I don't think Poky is the way to go. So where do we go from that?

I have a full time job and will never be able to maintain a distro (and I have to really thank you - all the devers out here - for what you are doing with OZ / Angstrom / OE ...), but I just wanted, as a user, to say that I was impressed with Poky, and that maybe there were could things to look in this distro.

BTW I haven't found who are the persons behing Poky / O-hand? Anyone can tell me?

[koen]

As always: patches accepted

For example I think you should host Angstrom's wiki on your main website

It is hosted on the same site

Powerbook-2:~ koen$ host linuxtogo.org ; host angstrom-distribution.org
linuxtogo.org has address 85.214.40.226
angstrom-distribution.org has address 85.214.40.226

[BarryW]

As always: patches accepted

For example I think you should host Angstrom's wiki on your main website

It is hosted on the same site

Powerbook-2:~ koen$ host linuxtogo.org ; host angstrom-distribution.org
linuxtogo.org has address 85.214.40.226
angstrom-distribution.org has address 85.214.40.226

Damn! For a second there I thought you were hosting them off a powerbook!

[kellyharding]

yessss!

would you tell us more ?
does it work with the C3000 ?
i don't know svn at all, and i could not find a real howto... would you give us the way to install Poky ??

REading the site would seem to indicate you need to start by reading this file: http://svn.o-hand.com/view/*checkout*/poky...dme.txt?rev=767

Kelly

[kellyharding]

- It has a superb boot splash screen
- It's very fast to boot
- It runs X11 with matchbox and no stupid login screen
- The default look is superb
- New contact and date apps made by o-hand (the company behind poky)
- Works with openzaurus feeds (or just install openembedded to compile more apps)

It still needs some tweaking (install a newer wpa_supplicant version to have Wifi+WPA, ...) but it works great!

This is for me what OZ/GPE should have been for months. I hope the future Angstrom will follow the path of Poky, or better that Poky will become a full distro with a support of the Zaurus community.

That was my 2 cents, and I wanted to share my experience with the users out there, because I never heard about Poky on those forums.

N.

Certainly seems interesting. More alternatives aren't always a bad idea. Advantage of open source/Linux really is the choice you get. Don't like Sharp's ROM, fine run Cacko, don't like that? try OZ, or pdaXrom, or OpenBSD...

Kelly

[nevarrie]

I have to give poky credit in that to easier to get a build env up then the standard openembedded. Have one command to run and getting everything into a clean directory structure witht he scripts needed to start building is nice. Though since I have a 6k it would require modification(pulling the missing .bb, .conf and .include files from OE) to make it work for my Z, but I think I can easily take some of the bb files they are using and put them back into OE if I find any packages that I think I want to try. Not sure how well the svn structure would work for someone like me that has a angstrom, dev and ipaq-3600 builds setup, but for some that is just wanting to build stuff for one device this idea might now be a bad idea to get some a build env for building packages.

This PIM based on EDS might be something to try. Should be interesting to see how that works on my e-image and how well it syncs.

From what I can see it will work for building images for c7x0, akita, spitz, nokia770, qemuarm, and cmx270.

Just my sleepiy thoughs.

[speculatrix]

poky looks like a remake of GPE with some of the headaches taken out. I used GPE for a while on 6000L and thought it quite clean and elegant, once I'd gotten past the broken wifi configuration problems. If I ever get my 6000 reliable again, I'd consider giving poky a go!

[jpmatrix]

yessss!

would you tell us more ?
does it work with the C3000 ?
i don't know svn at all, and i could not find a real howto... would you give us the way to install Poky ??

REading the site would seem to indicate you need to start by reading this file: http://svn.o-hand.com/view/*checkout*/poky...dme.txt?rev=767

Kelly

i did

but i don"t know svn at all

could you just post a little howto?

[jerrybme]

i did

but i don"t know svn at all

could you just post a little howto?

Make sure you have all required software installed:
build-essential
diffstat
texi2html
cvs
subversion
gcc-3.4
libsdl1.2-dev
zlib1g-dev

Open a terminal and cd to a directory where you want to have your files.

enter the following

CODE

svn co http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/poky/trunk poky

It will download all the files you need to start in a new directory below where you ran the above command. The directory will be oddly enough called "poky"
browse to the /poky/build/conf directory and open the local.conf.sample file and check the following section to make sure you're building for the correct machine type, in my case a "spitz"

CODE

# The machine to target
#MACHINE = "c7x0"
#MACHINE = "akita"
MACHINE = "spitz"
#MACHINE = "nokia770"
#MACHINE = "qemuarm"
#MACHINE = "cmx270"

Save the file as local.conf.
cd to the /poky directory and run the following command:

CODE

source ./poky-init-build-env

It will tell you the build enviroment is set, then run:

CODE

bitbake oh-image-pda

Sit back and wait and cross your fingers.

Good luck!

[danboid]

Does poky have a working graphical card applet for (un)mounting cards and turning the wifi on/off?

IMO this is OZ/GPEs current biggest failing