Messages

181

Gemini PDA - Linux / Github project and Wiki for Gemini's Linux support

« on: January 18, 2018, 04:01:32 pm »

Sorry I'm not in the know of anything more than anyone else. I would hope that they'll do something nice like using LVM(resizable) to allow flexibility in the setup.

182

Gemini PDA - Linux / Github project and Wiki for Gemini's Linux support

« on: January 18, 2018, 09:48:28 am »

I'm not inclined to revisit the building options, its working now. 9mins for a build of data and 13mins for a build of calendar. (the calendar deps don't need building very often but they are qtpim 55min, eds 15min).

As for other folk wanting the help, I wouldn't push people but there is the full range of things they can do if they feel so inclined:

1. Review the apps listed on the wiki, add pages for ones that don't have pages yet along with links to apps from their favourite other open source platforms detailing the features they particularly like and why we should use that as a base of a new app or to branch and patch that for use on gemini. Should especially give links to the upstream source code repository's if they know them, but fine to still list things if they don't.

2. Test out the current apps, easier once we have devices but the amd64 builds can be tested on a Debian9 virtualbox, which is how I'm coding them.

3. Review the translations, and translate for more languages, data has translations for the languages in the planet gemini dropdown on one of their forms, I figured that would cover the majority of users - they are just google translate output so likely to have some possibly 'interesting' word choices.

4. Folk keen on design/UX can review the apps with those kind of thoughts in mind.

5. Patches welcome for current apps (coders), bugs can be raised on github (non-coders). The interesting thing about say the calendar app is that as its mostly written in QML+Javascript you can just sudo edit the files after you've installed it to try out smaller fixes.

6. Pick an app that is so far not adopted and possibly after some discussion of the best direction to take hack away at it, once you've something you think can at least score say 50% on a usability metric I'll add it to the jenkins builds so we can get more folk testing it.

So as you can see there is plenty for any level of Linux user/developer to get involved with. If it turns out there is interest from more than just myself to stay full time on the Linux side and such folk pick this project as worthy of their time then we can have the discussions around picking a desktop environment/window manager and fixing up a nice set of shortcuts etc. Then possibly focusing efforts on a particular UI toolkit etc. Though I see no problem with having multiple app options for each type of app.

A note on why I'm happy to stick with Debian 9 - it gives us a solid well tested base for adding apps and had just about every WM/DM built for it. With the addition of stretch-backports you can get the latest apps generally a couple of months old, rather than over a year which is a common compliant from those who don't add the backports. The debian developers tend to patch upstream apps to avoid duplicating dependencies. So for example if you install telegram-desktop from the upstream developer you get a statically linked build of about twice the size of the debian one that is dynamically linked. The upstream developer is not interested in having to support the myriad of linux distros with all the different versions of the dependencies, so for simplicity they bundle everything in together. This particular example might be moot as the upstream developer dosn't do arm builds, debian do, and keyboard functionality is not the best so its a possible target for GKA branching and patching.

183

Gemini PDA - Hardware / microSD size

« on: January 17, 2018, 03:14:59 pm »

Excellent, I expect the access time bits have more of an impact than the writeback, so I'm glad they work for you.

184

Gemini PDA - Hardware / microSD size

« on: January 17, 2018, 01:10:49 pm »

RE: noatime causing zero writes (readonly filesystem)

I've only ever used it with ext4, but from googleing the idea it appears other people have used it with ext3? Could you post your from/to lines in-case it was some other change? (I've also updated the page to avoid others having the same problem, I'll test it on my Gemini when I get it and update the page - or anyone else can)

185

Gemini PDA - Hardware / microSD size

« on: January 16, 2018, 08:17:35 am »

On the subject of filing systems, has anyone figured out what are the best ones for wear levelling?

For anyone who dosn't know what it is then have a read of Wear_leveling

But basically our flash drives/cards are going to last for a much longer time if we have some part of the system doing that for us. It can happen in the flash controller hardware or in the drivers or in the filesystem. I'm hoping the internal drive is sorted by the controller/driver but have no evidence of this being the case, removable media on the other hand is unlikely to have this?

One additional thing to do is to set 'noatime' so that every read doesn't also cause a write: ReducingWrites

186

Gemini PDA - Linux / Make phone calls from Linux

« on: January 11, 2018, 06:33:58 pm »

There are installable packages for ofono and wammu available in the debian 9 repository. Something to play with when we get the devices...

To clarify: All I'm saying is that if you type 'apt-get install ofono' you can expect something to get installed (ie its part of debian so yes it works on ARM), from its description it claims to be a 'Mobile telephony stack (daemon)'. So no UI. From the dependencies on wammu there is no indication that it will talk to ofono, seems more like its designed to talk to external bluetooth mobile phones. But my expectation is that ofono would be the route into linux for the telephone functionality of the hardware.

187

Gemini PDA - Linux / Github project and Wiki for Gemini's Linux support

« on: January 09, 2018, 10:27:00 am »

Yes -e == efl, but also -qt == qt, which you'll see is at the end of the calendar name. No decisions have been taken on the choice of a window manager, or even framework. I was hoping to get some other dev's involved in the project, and then there would be someone to discuss such choices with. The general idea was to improve 3rd party apps, I've started with these as the desired UI is sufficiently different to anything else available, both have heavily borrowed from other projects in the how does this API work type way rather than take app and modify keyboard handling.

So far I'm not much in favour of either as best for keyboard+touch+mouse operation, its like as if people forgot all about the old things when they made new things, both apps have to have significant custom keyboard handling which should just come for free with the use of a good framework.

Slow builds, partially using qemu to do arm64 builds is slow, doing proper clean builds where all the dependencies are installed fresh each time is slow, the whole learning how to get jenkins to put things in the right place for this way of working involves running the builds many times over, plus plenty of little niggles like having to reboot before gpg-agent would notice the increase in the ttl causing every build to fail the repo install. But I've been documenting it all the wiki so it might help others up the learning curve quicker for those wanting to port other distros/apps etc.

188

Gemini PDA - Linux / Github project and Wiki for Gemini's Linux support

« on: January 08, 2018, 05:59:14 pm »

Just finished setting up jenkins for the GKA project, building amd64 and arm64 binaries.

The http://gka.thinkglobally.org/ website has been updated with relevant info. Data and Calendar apps now available.

This is obviously just a first bash at these apps, and there will be plenty of tweaks once we get some hardware to try it out on.

189

Gemini PDA - General Discussion / A matrix chat room for the Gemini...

« on: January 03, 2018, 04:36:58 pm »

I can recommend the use of the native matrix clients: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

190

Misc News / Video interview with Planet at CES 2018 - questions welcomed!

« on: January 03, 2018, 12:28:51 pm »

I feel its somewhat moot to be asking questions this close to the release, we might as well just wait and see, but curiosity has me adding:

 - Linux(d9) screen resolutions for HDMI output? (I assume if not in mirror mode it will work fine, but in mirror mode how does it cope with different sizes available at the hardware level? Possibly this is just up to the software to start treating the screen as the smaller of the resolutions and the one with the larger resolution just scales things up to fit?)
 - Linux(d9) OpenGL desktop-acceleration?
 - Is it possible to change the volume during a voice call? (Presume opening will put onto speaker phone mode, so then changing the volume will change the speaker phone volume?)
 - Flash file system longevity, do we need to be running a wear levelling aware filing system or does that all get handled in hardware by the flash controller chip?

191

Gemini PDA - Linux / Github project and Wiki for Gemini's Linux support

« on: December 29, 2017, 09:06:19 am »

Thats the general project wiki for those who want to get involved.

For a more user focused what's available now you should check: http://gka.thinkglobally.org/