Danboid (who has trouble registering) says:
I've been playing with the first pdaXrom beta for the C3000 today and I'm very impressed- big thanks to Thc, sashz and the rest of the pdaXrom devs for putting together such an amazing distro for the Z. I followed Thc's install instructions and it installed fine. However, I had a few problems that I'd like to point out.
VIRTUAL KEYBOARD
Didn't work at all for me, so of course this means I can't use my Z in portrait mode with the keyboard tucked away. Pushing the 'ABC' icon in the panel did nothing. I went to 'Panel' in the pdaxrom menu and chose 'Virtual keyboard' and so now I've got 2 abc icons that don't work in my panel. How do I get rid of the second one (or any panel icon under matchbox)?
USB CONNECTIVITY
This was the other big thing missing for me. USB connectivity was better than under Cacko in one respect as I could connect first time (I normally have to unplug, say 'No' to 'Alert USB..' then plug the Z back in again to get the 'Communicating' screen up under Cacko) but sadly there is no option to mount the /hdd3 internal HD partition as a USB disk like under Cacko, only the CF of SD card slots. I presume this feature is planned for the next release?
PACKAGE MANAGEMENT
I thought it was fantastic being able to download new progs with a click over WiFi on my Z- I just wish the pdaXrom package manager resolved the dependencies for you. Installing gnumeric took an age, mainly due to all the errors that come up on this beta when installing stuff- each package takes about 5mins to download and install! I'm sure that will be fixed in the next release. As has already been mentioned in the beta announcement thread, before you can get packages to install you must edit /etc/ipkg.conf and change /mnt/ide to /mnt/hdd1, /mnt/ide2 to /mnt/hdd2 etc. The official pdaxrom feed sites were down when I last tried them so I used this URL instead:
http://zaurus.spy.org/feeds/cacko/pdaXrom/1.1.0/rc12/feedDon't put a / on the end, that seemed to break it for me. I installed a few packages, not many though, before I was told that I'd run out of space and couldn't install any more. On that same beta announcement thread, somebody said that I need to change /tmp so it is located on hdd2. I was told I couldn't delete /tmp (which was linked to /dev/shm/tmp) as it was a RO filesystem so I did this
***DONT DO THIS, IT WILL WRECK PDAXROM!***
cd /dev/shm
rm -rf tmp
ln -s /hdd2/tmp tmp
I was hoping that would fix it but now I can't start anything under pdaxrom or even quit out of it to the shell Are there any instructions on how to re-install a borked pdaxrom install and then I need to know the proper commands for changing the /tmp directory or whatever it is I need to do to get more program install space.
SUSPEND
When I close the screen on my C3000 under Cacko it puts the Z into suspend mode. This doesn't seem to be the case with the C3000 beta.
HIDING PANEL/ RESIZING WINDOWS/ RUNNING GIMP
I installed The GIMP but when I ran it I couldn't click through the setup screens as the 'Next' and other buttons were either covered by the panel or off the physical screen area. I tried resizing the window but had no luck. Is there no way to minimise/move the Matchbox panel or a keyboard shortcut for resizing windows?
VIRTUAL DESKTOPS
Wha? No virtual desktops under Matchbox?
VIDEO PLAYBACK
After a bit of experimenting, I found the best command to play vids was
mplayer -fs -vo sdl moviefile
When I've got pdaxrom running again I've got to try installing the shared-mime-types package and getting vids lauched with a click from under rox-filer.
MISSING PACKAGES
dillo isn't good enough for most people as it doesn't support javascript and so can't access sites such as Yahoo! mail. I'd like to see either Firefox, Embedded Konqueror or another, better browser installed as standard instead. Why is there no GUI file manager installed by default? Rox-filer or xfe as standard would be nice! I would imagine most people install mplayer and I would like to see gnumeric as a default app too as I think most PDA users want a speadsheet and it is such a pain to install. Are there legal issues with bundling mplayer? Maybe so. Also, I do realise that gnumeric needs the GNOME libs and that will significantly increase the size of the ROM image, maybe hold a vote for that one?
UNTESTED
There were only a few things I wanted to test before I bricked my install, and hence aren't really as important questions as the ones before as I'll find out soon enough but it would be still nice to know:
Wake-on-alarm under Ko/pi (does this work?)
Adding and removing my own program links and folders to the Matchbox interface
Printing diect to my printer via USB
Running another desktop instead. When I change X to launch rox/equinox/xfce instead will it be configured for pdaxrom already or will I have to set everything up myself (panel battery monitor etc.)
Thanks for your help!
dan