Messages

61

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxii13 On Nand

« on: May 24, 2007, 04:47:35 pm »

- I noticed this too, Raul, but since I switched to xfce4 I don't really care.  (grin)  That took a bit of tweaking to get to run, but now that it is, I must say I don't know why pdaXii13 doesn't ship with this as the default window manager.  It's nothing short of stunning.

- I do see, however, that KOPI never does trigger alarms unless it's loaded.  Is there something I can do to xfce4 to make it work without having to keep KOPI loaded all the time?  I thought there was something of that sort, but I haven't been able to locate it.

- Also, the neato-handy key mappings that Meanie did for openbox aren't in xfce4, and I haven't been able to determine where that's done.  Hints?  (childish grin)  In particular I like the "super" key, I haven't been able to find the grave symbol anywhere, and the "Fn-number" doesn't appear to perform a "function" key.

- Then I have all the bars set to autohide, but my pointer won't go to the very edge of the screen ... it's a few pixels shy.  I don't think that's an alignment issue because I can hit all the teeny tiny widgets on the screen just fine, and by tapping where one would expect to tap.  Is there any way to, say, map a key to unhide the taskbar, as if I tapped on it's couple of pixels while hidden?

- Lastly, I see pdaXii13 has QT configuration, implying that it will run QT applications.  How would one do that?  I have a handful of QT apps that I would really like to run on this if I could, and that would really be the cat's meow...

- Oh.  Since I started using xfce4, time is never lost.  Bonus!!

- Dang.  Always one more thing!!  There's a CF/SD manager that works with openbox, but I have to drop to the command line to manage them when xfce4.  Am I missing something with that?

62

PocketPenguin / Intro & Faq

« on: May 24, 2007, 04:22:03 pm »

connect to a backplane

- What backplane would that be?  PCI slot?  S100?  (grin)  Or something proprietary?  Just curious how this will all shake out ... if it's booting over USB it doesn't seem like it would need much a "backplane", per se.

keyboard was gioing to use the dedicated keyboard handeling logic with keyscanning and such.

- Is this a normal keyboard, or a "custom" scanned keyboard like the Z has?  Or something I'm not thinking of?  Again, just curious how this "bare-bones" system will work.  For instance, if I had one, how would I interface to my wintel (even if that wintel happens to be running linux) boxen to start developing for it?

63

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Xfce4 Finetuning

« on: May 22, 2007, 12:01:33 pm »

- I can't read past page 19, keeps says too many connections from the SQL server, and that there may be a db corruption.  Hope someone can read this!

<edit>When I add this post, it shows me the post I just added, and I can in fact see what T3_slider put in.  Thanks for the tip!!</edit>

<reedit>This none-viewing thing only happened in dillo on the Z.  Using Firefox on the laptop I have no problems, so it may be a dillo thing.  Stuck the xrandr command in as suggested and alles ist gut!!  Finally I have no icons or other cluttery junk of any kind on Hiro's desktop.  (wistfully happy sigh)  And the clock's been happy today, too.  Bonus!</reedit>

64

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Xfce4 Finetuning

« on: May 22, 2007, 12:15:45 am »

- Hurm.  Loaded pdaXii13 5.4.4 and decided I really didn't like UI even a little bit.  Fortunately there *are* alternatives, and they're right on the feed, so I installed xfce4 and a bunch of plugins from the pdaXii13 feed that's listed in its package manager.

- It ran right out of the box, but it's in portrait and I see no obvious way to rotate.  Will xrandr do that?

- I also hacked Meanie's xinitrc to run like pdaXii13 expects, but it loads NO matchbox/openbox/anybox binaries of any kind, and it runs xfce4-session instead.  This works pretty much identically to the xinitrc.xfce4 that came with it ... takes a little longer to start up 'cause it's doing more, but it still runs xfce fine as you please, in portrait.  I'm pretty sure this is simple to fix but haven't found that simple solution after wandering around this thread.  Could someone clue me in?  Thanks!!

- I can run either the default matchbox/whatever X that pdaXii13 comes with, or I can run startxfce4 and run that.  Both are loaded and Hiroshi is set to boot to console so I can play with either one equally easily.  Right now it's running matchbox so I can have multiple command windows to mess with this.  (grin)  Once I get xfce in landscape I'll see about panels and suchlike to put things where I want them.

65

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxii13 On Nand

« on: May 21, 2007, 08:13:31 pm »

- I agree, T3_slider, that pdaXrom is simply amazing.  Always have thought that, but every other time I've loaded it there have been fairly significant, imho, problems remaining.  Now I don't see anything significant except this time thing, and I'm willing to play with that one.

- About the slow loads, I point that out for others because I've seen it mentioned many times in this thread.  I know it's doing a lot, so I don't really care.  A terminal does open quickly.  KOPI takes ten or fifteen seconds.  Firefox takes something like 30, but it sho is sweet when it gets there!  I'm guessing the speed difference we see is you have a 3200 and swap space, where I have a 1000 and no swap at present.  (shrug)  Dunno, and don't care.  If I can figure out this time thing I'm sticking with this puppy.  It's too cool not to!  (geeky smile)

- I haven't tried a command-line date yet.  Thought of it, but haven't tried it.  I know Meanie does have that hardware sync command in there 'cause I've seen it.  I've wondered if doing that every time X starts might be part of the issue?  (shrug)  Dunno.  I'm going to fix this window manager thing first.  Dang that "pinboard" is about annoying.  But this is Linux.  I *have* alternatives!  (happy smile)

- I prefer the power button myself.  I'll just remove the menu suspend. (shrug)  Same with reboot, which never does.  I do a shutdown instead.  No biggie.  This is Linux ... there are always multiple routes to any destination.

- Thanks for the matchbox tip.  I'm going with xfce myself, once I get there.  I had to reflash to fix the window dressing issue, so I'm back to the basics.  I figure that's a really good time to mess with X, in case I have to reflash again.  (giggle)

- Sorry I didn't quote.  In a hurry.  Telescope's out equalizing temperature and I gotta get out amongst the stars.  Thanks!...

66

PocketPenguin / Intro & Faq

« on: May 21, 2007, 02:11:42 pm »

- I'm not advocating using gigabit.  I'm advocating having an Ethernet port on the Pocket Penguin at whatever speed the battery can handle.  I'd rather have Ethernet at 1Mbit than have to rely solely on USB "networking" at any speed.  I'd be happy to have a PP either way, but I'd prefer if it had Ethernet.

- Everyone has other obligations.  Far as I'm concerned the fervor has died down and now we're into the long slog.  No biggie for me.  I've been in the new house eight months and haven't set up the cross-dev workstation yet.  I bet if someone told you, Da_Blitz, they had an OS ready and needed a development system to start working on it, you'd move along faster.  (shrug)  I don't see that OS manifesting itself, either.  The Pocket Penguin will get done, or it won't, and either way I expect we'll enjoy ourselves, or we wouldn't even consider building it.

67

PocketPenguin / Alternatives

« on: May 21, 2007, 01:53:40 pm »

- Sorry for the term confusion.  So this will put uboot at the CPU reset vector, which will make sure basic hardware is functional, then pass off to kexec to load the kernel of choice.  Once that's done the kernel modules initialize the rest of the hardware.  I'm intentionally not including where OS copies, etc are taking place.  I presume once I learn enough about uboot and kexec things like this will be obvious.

- Having finally loaded a version of pdaXrom that's stable enough for my tastes (I knew they'd get that right eventually) I have to say it would be an excellent candidate for an operating system.  I think it already uses uboot as well.

- The "spare" Linux boxen have taken a back seat since the move, so I don't have my development workstation set up yet.  When I do I'm going to download Meanie's code for pdaXii13 Akita, since that's what I'm running on Hiro right now, and get that to build.  I can play with uboot and kexec from there.  Even if pdaXrom isn't using those tools, I should be able to vet the boot sequence to use them.  It'll be a good learning experience.

68

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Pdaxii13 On Nand

« on: May 20, 2007, 11:37:41 pm »

- One: STELLAR WORK Meanie.  I've played with your XQt package with Cacko and was impressed, so when I saw you'd tweaked pdaXrom for Akita I had to give it a go (5.4.4 "Sally", by version).  Certainly the most functional distro of this I've ever run.  Only been this weekend, but it hasn't crashed once, it turns on and off reliably, and KDEPIM works like a charm so I have all my data and passwords.  GOOD FORM!

<edit>Can't say it hasn't crashed.  (sniffle)  It kept the time, today (may 21) but set the date back to May 14.  When I used the Date/Time dialog to fix it, and saved, the screen went dark, and I had to power cycle.  On resume it had totally hosed things.  All window decoration is gone (border, titles, etc), the task/applet bar is gone, and none of the keys (like the "super" key) work any longer.  If it weren't for that annoying bunch of icons on the screen I couldn't do anything at all.  (bemused grin)  Dunno what to do at this point, but I think it's going to be simpler to reflash than spend all the time researching what flat file to edit to fix it.  It also appears to have corrupted the xfce installation because that won't load.  Multiple reboots/resets have had no effect.  Bogus.  This time thing is going to be a deal killer in the end.</edit>

- Two: It does lose time.  I *think* when I use the menu to suspend it, it freezes the clock, because it doesn't lose only six hours.  Today it was off by nearly 12.  When I use the button it doesn't *seem* to do this, but it is a bit vexing to have the clock be inaccurate.  Any hints on what I can run/do/edit to troubleshoot this?

- Three: It turns on *very* slowly.  I personally don't care, but it does do that.

- Four: There's this bar at the bottom, see, but running apps never appear there.  Is that normal?  If it is, it is, but if it isn't, I'd like to troubleshoot that as well.

- Five: This appears to have QT installed as well as X, but when I install a QT app it won't work.  I copied all QT libs to /usr/lib/qt/lib and all QT bins to /usr/lib/qt/bin, then symlinked those dirs from /opt/QtPalmtop but it still can't find libs on launch.  I don' t have any QT apps currently installed (nuked kernel-modules by accident and had to reflash), but any pointers in that direction would be nice.  None of the X versions of Sokoban work right.  (little boy pout)

- Six: There's this funny bar at the top of the desktop with all of the normal menu selections under it, as icons.  I would like to completely dispense with that entire bar and icon system.  There are also a number of customizations I'd like to do to the UI, and I'm pretty sure they're doable, but I'm a Rank N00b at X on the Z and have less than no clue where to even start.  I've done some poking around here on OESF, but search has never been a strong point of the OESF forum software, that I've noticed, so I've had limited success.  If anyone has any hints in that direction I'd appreciate it.  For instance, this seems to have "rox" installed, but I can't get it to show me files other than that desktop-level icon thing.  Grrrr, I say.

- Seven: I'm thinking of ditching all managers except icewm or fluxbox.  I don't know how that could be a problem but it never hurts to solicit input.  (grin)

- Eight: I read somewhere that this won't turn until the lid is closed for a while, then it works.  Mine does this.  Minor to say the least, but I thought I'd toss it out there.

- Nine: Every applications launches very slowly.  Again this doesn't bother me, because it's a full-blown Linux distro, in essence, complete with X.  Others may find this more annoying, but nothing I've seen makes any difference in load times, even unloading scim (though that did boost memory quite a bit - sweet)

- Ten: jamvm is equivalent to 1.4.x.  Very nice!  No more brain-dead evm!!  I've even scripted it to launch as "java".  (grin)

- Eleven: One of the backlight brightness settings is "off".  Cute!

- Twelve: Virtual desktops *are* there.  There doesn't seem to be any default to show them, but the "super" key (now that I've read this thread and know what it is) goes back and forth just fine as you please.  Wowzers!!  That'll be a good clutter reducer on this tiny display.

- More later ... these are just my initial observations.  I'm thinking this is the first non-Sharp ROM that's been stable enough to keep around.  My little mind is officially boggled...

69

PocketPenguin / Alternatives

« on: May 19, 2007, 12:24:24 pm »

ive been lookinng at it and i was going to use uboot to boootstrap the kexec'ing linux kernel that then boots thhe kernel/OS of your choice. cuts down the dev time and pumps up the feature set and allows you to do the entire "signed kernel" and trusted boot thing (which i aam a fann off scince  i have all the keys to my device just likee you will have the keys to yoour device.
...[snip]...
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- I've finally gotten 'round to looking up uboot and kexec.  So this thing would point to uboot in the "MBR" (or flash load addr equivalent), which would do all the setup work (including what a "bios" would do on a desktop), then it use kexec to load the kernel of chioce?
- I haven't gotten to the secure part of this yet, but I've only just started wading through uboot's documentation.  I haven't found the docs for  ARM yet, the ones I have are for PPC, but I'm sure a lot of the overall system is the same.  (shrug)  I'm not too worried about that at this early stage.

70

PocketPenguin / Intro & Faq

« on: May 19, 2007, 11:39:24 am »

actually you might want to know there is an actual product called "winbloze", it was an excellent parody of windows and its users about 7 years age if my mem dosent need to be fsck'd ;)

- Funny.  I wonder how long it took the "real" Winbloze to sue them?  (wry grin)

the one advantage of usb ethernet is it can be faster than ethernet, however YMMV

it has USB host so why not stick a gigabit USB2.0 ethernet adaptor in the port ;)
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- As speculatrix mentions, USB isn't faster than gigabit, it's just faster than 100Mb.  Whoopie.  So is Firewire, whose latest incarnation is also faster than the latest USB, just like the first incarnation was.  So why not put Firewire in because it's faster?  But faster isn't the point.

- The point is that Ethernet is the world-wide networking standard.  USB is unfortunately now the standard for peripherals, but it is not routable.  Just because someone's made a do-dad to allow USB to connect to Ethernet and pretend to be routable doesn't mean that solution is desirable.  It just means it works.  If USB were really faster or better for networking in any manner what-so-ever, the world would have migrated to it from Ethernet.   But the world hasn't.  Neither should the Pocket Penguin.

- On a personal note, I don't want to have to carry any more dongles around with me than I have to, or have them hanging off the back of the Z like some goiter.  I would prefer that my pocket Linux workstation be able to natively connect to a real network like a real workstation.  Wifi is not secure enough to be trusted as the only Ethernet-like network connection.  A wire is essential, and USB faking Ethernet is not.

- You mileage may vary, but that's my half-nybble, such as it is.

71

New products and alternatives / Em・one

« on: May 18, 2007, 11:07:28 pm »

- Not sure I like miniSD as the only aux storage option, nor even the fact that it's a phone.  Better to have BT and a dedicated phone in your pocket for link-up than try to stuff everything in one device.  In the US that locks you to a carrier ... big black mark.
- That keyboard looks about goofy as well.  One would be forced to use it like an oversized thumb board.  Bogus.  The clamshell Zs are usable either way, table top or two thumbs, equally well.  Also doesn't mention backlighting on the keys, or I missed it.  I miss that terribly on the Z line, but at least I can position the display to shine on the keys in the dark.  Not so this thing.
- Then it runs Winbloze.  Biggest drawback of all, but if it's flashable that'll be corrected in the long run.
- All in all it looks like something designed for people who don't know what a pocket computer is.  They just want some fancy doo-dad and don't care that their insecure uber-multi-phone is spreading viruses and trojans via an ad-hoc mesh network to hundreds of millions of systems wordwide.
- I'll keep my Linux, thanks...

72

New products and alternatives / New Zaurus Successor?

« on: April 28, 2007, 03:49:28 pm »

AAAHHHHH, my eyes they burn!!!.

the googles... they do nothing :(
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- Omigod!  I'm DYIN'

73

PocketPenguin / Intro & Faq

« on: April 11, 2007, 09:59:26 pm »

- Unfortunate, the poor Ethernet.  It's no larger than USB A, but that's a lot of area compared to mini-A, I guess.  (sniffle)  I was so hoping to have real networking.  USB networking is "real" about like Winbloze is a "real" OS.

74

Software / Kde-pim/pi 2.1.0 Available!

« on: April 06, 2007, 04:27:30 pm »

Hello everyone, I am new to Linux and have some potentially dumb questions.  I have a C750, and I just installed the latest Cracko ROM I could find.  Will this work on my device??  Also, does this replace the PIM included in Cracko's ROM, or does it install it in addition, so I have different PIM apps I need to choose?  Thanks for your help.

Mark
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- I think it replaces, but you can "sync" with the Sharp DTM to pull your data over from there, and put it back again later, say if some application is expecting to find it there and not in "std.vcf" where kdepim puts it.
- I personally never sync anything, so never have to worry about where my data is.  Copy "std.vcf" an it's backed up.  Simple.  Easy.
- Hope this helps...

75

General Discussion / Keyboard Not Working On C1000....

« on: April 06, 2007, 04:11:08 pm »

- Never thought about that pesky diagnostic menu.  I'll give that a whirl to confirm my suspicion (?) about the switches before ripping the whole thing apart.  I view that with more than a little trepidation.  The last low-power device I disassembled I managed to zatch it ... dead as a doornail.  (whimper)  Then again, that could be a prime reason to get a 3200!  (bemused grin)  Still and all, I'd hate to have something happen to Hiroshi.  He's been a good little unit.
- Then again Hiro's been fine since yesterday.  Maybe the continued production vibes just perked him up?  (heh heh)
- Thanks for the info, TRIsoft!...