R198 First Touches And Experiences, should I put this kind of stuff into a bugtracking system? Options

[walkman]

Hi,
after quite a bit of positive responses from the thread about my experiences with pdaXii13v2, I gave a try to r198 once again. I will try to document my experiences again, together with my solutions. I am not sure whether I should put all this to a bug tracking system (is there one? it seems so, but I probably have to register at pdaxrom.org, do I?).

First touches - U-boot and install
- the step-by-step guide does not seem to be up-to-date, therefore I followed the quick install guide at http://www.pdaxrom.org/?q=docs/installation/quickguide.
- BTW on my C1000 the system menu (the one with 4 options in Japanese, or U-boot loader) appears only when 1) unplug all the power, 2) press the reset button after 5 sec., 3) hold OK button, 4) at the same time plug-in the power cord (still hold OK), 5) press the power up button while still holding OK. And 6) then be patient, because the screen will show something after some 3-5 seconds. If impatient, you can press power button again what will cause a preliminary shut-down again...
- after successful install of the U-Boot loader there's a kind of bug in the system. Trying to run

CODE

$ ls /mnt/cf

reliably crashes the system. What works (after a restart) is

CODE

$ cd /mnt/cf
$ ./autoboot.sh .

i.e. first "cd" and only then you can do "ls". Otherwise it crashes...

First boot
- after the first boot, pdaXrom install asks whether to add a new user. Of course I did that! It finally asks for a login/passwd. I provided the new user credentials and then (after being greeted by a warning screen about my rights ) ran "startx". Something strange appeared. It seems to be window maker, or that kind of thing. 2 cyan windows with some english interleaved with unknown characters. And of course uncalibrated stylus! No way to make this work... So a reboot was needed...
- after reboot, I logged as root and ran "startx". I got the calibration screen and everything worked well...

WLAN
Of course the first thing to do is to configure the network connection...
- first thing is the orinoco vs. hostap confusion. My D-Link DCF 660W cannot be activated.

CODE

$ ifconfig wlan0 up

yields nothing.
- knowing what to do, I immediatelly uninstalled the orinoco driver:

CODE

$ ipkg remove orinoco

- then reinsert the card (or re-activate using card applet) and

CODE

$ ifconfig wlan0 up

starts the card well.
- bug?: trying to configure the card and immediately a problem! wpa_supplicant is not installed by default!!! That's bad... fortunately at least "dhcpd" is there...
- take the CF card to my laptop and download wpa_supplicant from the r198 feed to it
- insert the CF card into the Z and see whether it mounts automagicaly... Somehow no... Why?

CODE

$ ls /mnt/cf

yields nothing. Maybe it's normal. I do not complain... But the card is identified by the card applet (Toshiba THNCF256MPG - actually, it's Hama 256MB, but that's alright, probably Hama uses Toshiba chips). So

CODE

$ mount /mnt/cf

solves the problem.
- so running

CODE

$ ipkg install wpa-supplicant...ipk

, everything seems to be OK.
- bug?:let's edit the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf config file by

CODE

$ vim /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

, and there we are. vim is not installed! OK, not everybody is into vim. So what is there? nano, pico, joe, emacs, jed... Nothing... Is there any suitable editor pre-installed??? Leafpad... At least...
- although actually I do not need it, right? This

CODE

$ wpa_passphrase ESSID PASSWD > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

should make it right away...
- then

CODE

$ ifconfig wlan0 up ; wpa_supplicant -Dhostap -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B ; sleep 5 ; dhcpcd -t 30 -h HOSTNAME wlan0 ; ping pdaxrom.org

makes it as a fresh breeze. Done and network is up...

Packages
- open Package Manager and see what goes on... Nothing... The only pre-configured feed is cacko-unstable and even that one does not work... Nada, zero, nic...
- so let's try to upgrade to SP8. Download to SD card, then install... Done.
- Package manager now correctly lists some feeds. Great...
- bug?: what is not nice, is in the package manager that the top-right listbox ("Install on ...") somehow goes out of the window... In the normal mode, as well as in the maximized window.
- what is nice, I obviously have 70MB free on my NAND root partition. With pdaXii13v2 it was about 30. Possibly I had a lot of pre-installed software which now I will put mostly to the SD card...
- feature request: unclutter could be in the pre-installed package, couldn't it? In the end, this is a touch-screen, so no need for the cursor anyway (most of the time)...

Misc
- checking menu and icons... Icon set is beautiful, I like it very much...
- config bug?: menu is somehow weird. Settings goes below the screen edge! The same for Applications, which on the first place contains "Exit". Hmmm... Does it belong there at all?
- when I press the power button the screen shows some white stripes on shut-down as well as on power-up. It was not present in pdaXii13v2. I mean, I do not mind, but somehow it is not very aesthetic...

- When I turned the display, I noticed there's an almost invisibly small text written on the background in OpenBox. Nice one ... But I suspect a typo in there: ---pdaXrom - the rom with at twist --- www.pdaxrom.org ---. I guess, that "at" is a typo, isn't it?


Conclusion
- all in all, this r198 seems to be pretty usable version already... I am going to give it a try... Could somebody tell me where can I report such issues/testing results like I list here? Is this a stuff for bugtracker?

[Capn_Fish]

There was one at http://www.pdaxrom.org/?q=casetracker but, it seems all of the cases have been removed and that it has been deactivated.

If you want an editor on the default install, use Vi or Leafpad. You can get a full Vim build or Nano from my feed (see my sig) if you so desire.

Thanks for the write-up. I'm sure InSearchOf can shed some light on the bugtracker thing. I suspect it has to do with th upcoming 2.0.0 release, but I'm not sure.

[InSearchOf]

Ok... sorry about the non-notice about the bug tracker... if you might have notices... pdaxrom.org has been cleaned up... there were TON's and TON's of spammers pounding that site... hiting all the bugs in the bug trackers... in turn renaming all the cases... well when do that is it hard to sort out all the cases... So... my only choice was to get rid of all of them... but did take down a lot of the issues so I can get then resolved. SORRY AGAIN

And walkman THANKS FOR ALL THIS!... It will really help with preparing for the new release

Late

[root]

Maybe it's a good thing to fix the "PdaXrom Forum" shortcut on pdaxrom.org.. Just remove the "s" =)

[InSearchOf]

Opps... forgot all about that...

Late

[InSearchOf]

Done

[walkman]

Hi, as it seems to be useful and I am still missing a proper way to report bugs/issues, I am keeping this thread alive and using it as a bug-tracker.

MPlayer
- Install of gmplayer worked.
- try to run it, yields nothing...
- try the same from the command line and see that it needs libsdl.
BUG: dependency of mplayer on SDL package is missing
- SDL-sound installed (installed obviously also the core SDL package)
- gmplayer starts and everything is alright

- let's try to use mplayer from command line as I am not that fond of the GUI thingy:

CODE

mplayer http://www.sky.fm/mp3/solopiano.mp3

BUG: for whatever reason mplayer starting script launches aterm. I do not have aterm installed, so it crashed.
- OK, let's install aterm
- mplayer now launches aterm, opens a new window but still crashes, i.e. does not play anything and aterm also exits...
- so let's take a look at the script and see that it actually tries to launch mplayer3.
- trying to launch mplayer3 yields success and everything plays well... almost...
ISSUE: The volume is too loud by default. Moving the slider on the volume applet in the panel is very sensitive. Below one half, the music is off and above moving the slider a little bit goes from silent to VERY loud.

CPU usage on blank screen
- as I would like to use my Z as an mp3 player (and want to wash dishes with Midnight Oil in my ears ) I want to start mplayer, blank the screen, close the display and enjoy the music. And here some minor problems start...

Closing display
Question: I am not sure whether the display blanks when I close the display. Does it? When I tried to open it a bit and peak in, it was on... Not nice to battery...

Blank screen and CPU
- I started mplayer and everything played well. CPU was high, but the music was smooth and played well...
- blank the screen using PowerCtrl applet works, but somehow the music is not smooth anymore!
BUG: blanking the screen obviously does something with CPU usage. I see two possibilities:

1. blanking the screen leads to higher CPU usage for some reason (doubtful)
2. blanking the screen leads to CPU underclocking (why?)

I am not sure which one is right, but overclocking CPU before blanking the screen worked well and music played quite alright afterwards (still not smooth at times, but probably I overclocked it not enough)

PowerCtrl applet
- mb-applet-powerctrl is started from command line

ISSUE: on clicking on the icon in the panel an error message is issued to the command line:

CODE

mb-applet-powerctrl failed to open /proc/driver/fr/corgi-bl

What's that?
ISSUE: I noticed that volume control is completely missing in powerctrl applet. I remember it used to be there in pdaXii13v2.
BUG: CPU overclocking in powerctrl applet does not work:
- clicking on CPU clock frequency issues an error message:

CODE

mb-applet-powerctrl failed to open /proc/ZAURUS/VCORE.

- CPU speed is set to 104Mhz which is obviously wrong.

[walkman]

Ok... sorry about the non-notice about the bug tracker... if you might have notices... pdaxrom.org has been cleaned up... there were TON's and TON's of spammers pounding that site... hiting all the bugs in the bug trackers... in turn renaming all the cases... well when do that is it hard to sort out all the cases... So... my only choice was to get rid of all of them... but did take down a lot of the issues so I can get then resolved. SORRY AGAIN

And walkman THANKS FOR ALL THIS!... It will really help with preparing for the new release

Late

Thanks for an explanation. So why don't you use bugzilla with proper account settings? Accounts could be given only manually to users with whom you/other pdaXrom developers come into contact on this forum, or via e-mail.

[Capn_Fish]

What about the SF bugtracker?

[walkman]

What about the SF bugtracker?

What do you mean by that? Are you suggesting that there's already a functional pdsXrom bugtracker? Did I miss something?

LATER EDIT:
Oh, you mean probably Sourceforge bugtracker... I did not know pdaXrom is on sourceforge... I see now... Can I use that one? It's empty by now... Do you/all pdaXrom developers watch it?

EVEN LATER EDIT:
He! Project activity is obviously ZERO. Well, except for my hits today .

[Capn_Fish]

I don't know if people watch it, but I thought I'd throw the thought out there.

[InSearchOf]

pdaxrom.org bugtracker will be back up soon...

Late

[damndirtyape]

r198 bugs on a 3200:

The up arrow key does not repeat.

If you exit X11, the 'a' key does not work, you cannot run startx. A reboot fixes it. (luckily there's no 'a' in reboot)

I replaced the internal microdrive with an 8G flash card. The internal flash card shows up in the card control applet instead of whatever's plugged into the external CF slot, like a NIC.

[Capn_Fish]

The up arrow stuff and a key are fixed, at least in SP8.

[walts]

This thread has evolved into a bug reporting discussion. If you don't mind I'd like to get it back on track.

This is my first serious experience with pdaXrom r198. I have a C3200 and most recently was using pdaXii13 on it, but due to the inclusion of a lot of the networking into the new kernel, I decided to switch.

There are a lot of mysteries about r198 that I'd like to learn more about. I've been searching the forums and wikis for a few days and have not found the answers I'm looking for.

What about that wonderful 6BG hard drive on the 3200? pdaXii13 made use of it, as does Angstrom, but I don't see where r198 would use it for anything but a big data drive. I tried the following based on hluc's writeup for pdaXii13:

CODE

#mkswap /dev/hda2
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 100634KB
#swapon /dev/hda2
swapon: /dev/hda2: Invalid argument

(I should point out that I've been fooling around with Zaurii or a few years now, and have probably learned just enough about Linux to be really dangerous.)

I was wondering if the hard drive images from pdaXii13 could be used for any benefit, but it seems that just untaring the files to the hdd would not do anything, and there would no doubt be problems with the kernel versions.

Speaking of the hard drive, df shows me partitions 2 and 3 but not partition 1 on the hard drive. Where did it go? The root partition appears to be the flash ROM.

My network card burned out on me, so I have been trying to set up bluetooth so I can use my cell phone as a modem. There is no bluetooth networking applet, and the various instructions I have found to get bluez cofigured are not working. hcitool scan reports the device is not available, and all the instructions I've read say to use the applet to set up; but there is no applet. The PPP modem applet seems to have bluetooth capability, but the "Search" button says "can't get DUN info"

So I'm pretty much stuck here, and I could use some help.

TIA

Walt