Messages

286

Gemini PDA - General Discussion / Another review

« on: March 10, 2018, 03:14:28 am »

Thanks for the review, vader... can I ask which country you are in...not the U.K. I presume?

I'm in Australia.

287

Gemini PDA - General Discussion / Another review

« on: March 09, 2018, 07:33:14 pm »

I only found out about fdroid recently.

One last thing, hdmi out might require a custom wire, but miracast works on the gemini. Go to settings, display and at the very bottom there is cast. Start cast and click on the 3 dots and check the enable button. So long as your network is all setup, you should see the available cast destinations. Select one and bam, you are on the big screen.

There is about a 1/4 of a second delay which is fine for most non game things. I am typing this "on the big screen.

288

Gemini PDA - General Discussion / Another review

« on: March 09, 2018, 06:33:54 pm »

OK, so I received (out of the blue) my gemini yesterday. Here is a little review from my whopping 24 hours of ownership.

First impressions
Wow, this thing looks professional. The boxing was as good as anything I have ever received. Th very first time you pick up the gemini it feels solid. I had it delivered to the office and it caused quite a stir. Everyone wanted to have a play (I am a software engineer). The screen is large (for a phone) and the keyboard looks amazing.

So how does it perform
Maybe I was one of the lucky ones, maybe problems are rare, but people are vocal. I dont seem to have any problems - my gemini works in all respects. Anybody worrying about x25 vs x27, doesn't need to. This thing flies. I have installed a few apps via fdroid (didnt give a google account) and they work well. I was particularly impressed with mupen64 (nintendo 64 emulator) which ran full speed without any hiccups. I even connected a game controller to the right hand USB and it worked! I tried some webgl pages which always made my old snapdragon 810 groan, and they worked flawlessly.

That keyboard
Everyone is different, so they will have a different experience. For me, the keyboard is near perfect. I can really punch out words at quite a fast rate. I could never have dreamed of writing this review on a phone screenm it would have been painfull. The only thing that will take time to get used to is the placement of some symbols like : and '. They reuquire the fn key to be pressed, but that is all about getting used to it. Standard letters, and punctuation is in the spot you expect and you can rattle off sentences with ease.

Overall
Very very happy with the gemini. It will be perfect when I dont have to use android

289

Gemini PDA - Android / Putty or other SSH client

« on: March 09, 2018, 06:18:10 pm »

I installed termux from fdroid. From there do a: pkg install openssh and voila! I am waiting for sailfish to become available, but until then termux will do.

290

Gemini PDA - General Discussion / Shipping email (I got my Gemini PDA)

« on: March 08, 2018, 10:42:13 pm »

Out of the blue, mine turned up this morning. No problems so far, keyboard is brilliant, I am in googless mode with fdroid app store - waiting for sailfish now

It is a high quality device, really solid and just works. For those wondering, i am order 5xx and live in Australia. It came with a US plug (as explained in the indiegogo comments section) but that is no problem - I have many adapters. I'll give it a proper go when I get home tonight.

Telephony all works as expected, VoLTE, SMS 4G - yay.

291

Gemini PDA - Sailfish OS / Sailfish OS

« on: March 06, 2018, 12:46:07 am »

I've always liked sailfish, but never had the opportunity to use it. It is a fully fledged linux distro with an easy to use GUI. It is easy to install dev tools and all the CLI tools you are used to and use it as a linux box. The advantages are that it has telephony services that already work (phone calls, SMS etc). You get a polished phone experience, and a complete linux system. I run linux all day every day for work and for me, this appears to be the best of both worlds. You can still use your gemini as a phone, but also have a linux box on call.

Sailfish for the win.

Your enthusiasm brings hope. Do you know if it will run mainline Linux applications? I am thinking of Libreoffice and the GIMP, as well as a couple of Gnome applications I use regularly. I fear that the adaptation of desktop Linux distributions to the Gemini will be slow and never quite complete, and fear that PC substantially overpromised in this regard. But if Sailfish can run most mainline productivity applications, that fear is assuaged considerably.

Still to be determined, I guess, is how Sailfish will be on an external monitor, assuming that this can be gotten to work reliably. And of course there is the landscape issue.

Sailfish uses Wayland (not X). In the sailfish open repo, you can install QXCompositor and XWayland, meaning you can run X apps. You can install a native compiler, so you can compile from source. You could skip the compositor, and use a pi connected to a monitor/tv and run X apps displaying on the pi over wifi (basically your own chromecast). You wouldn't be mirrored.

Search for sailfish repos for community compiled/maintained software. One good one is: https://openrepos.net/ - although not having a sailfish device (yet), I can't say how well it works.

292

Gemini PDA - Sailfish OS / Sailfish OS

« on: March 05, 2018, 10:01:29 pm »

I've always liked sailfish, but never had the opportunity to use it. It is a fully fledged linux distro with an easy to use GUI. It is easy to install dev tools and all the CLI tools you are used to and use it as a linux box. The advantages are that it has telephony services that already work (phone calls, SMS etc). You get a polished phone experience, and a complete linux system. I run linux all day every day for work and for me, this appears to be the best of both worlds. You can still use your gemini as a phone, but also have a linux box on call.

Sailfish for the win.

293

Gemini PDA - Linux / Planet says new Linux info today

« on: February 19, 2018, 08:12:01 pm »

I was really hanging out for Debian - but I must admit, I always liked sailfish for a phone os. It was built on mer, and as such is a fully functional Linux (unlike android).
It was also built for a phone, so I would guess phone features would work. Another plus is that it can run (some) android apps, so you can have the best of both worlds -
install your banks android app, and still have a secure full Linux to play with. You can install the build chain (gcc...) and compile/run apps in the terminal. I'll probably end
up trying them all, but as I have a 4G version, and it will be my daily driver, I am actually leaning towards sailfish. Bring back the days of the N900

Another issue is that debain/Ubuntu is great when plugged into a monitor, but I think it might be hard to read (small) whilst the phone based OSs already have this in hand.

PS. I develop all day in debian, hence my initial preference.

294

Gemini PDA - Linux / Swappiness value change to reduce wearing of the flash memory

« on: February 12, 2018, 08:50:43 pm »

On any system with flash memory, I always turn swap off. If you really need extra ram, then create a compressed ram drive and use that as swap. It sound silly, but it can give you significantly more space, and it is very fast. If you have a 3G ram/1G compressed split, you may get 2-3G in swap, meaning 5-6G overall. It is a standard trick used in embedded systems.

295

Gemini PDA - General Discussion / Shipping email (I got my Gemini PDA)

« on: January 28, 2018, 07:25:11 pm »

It is the 29th  well, here it is. Starting to get excited.......

I wonder if they will ship my (Australian) order direct from China. I am a low number backer - hopefully not much longer to wait.

296

Gemini PDA - General Discussion / Wine 3.0 for Android released, with x86 emulation on ARM

« on: January 24, 2018, 11:06:29 pm »

I was using wine via qemu on the pi - it was quite slow, but usable for basic stuff. The x27 should be a bit faster than the pi2, so it should work.