Dan Does Rc4

[danboid]

I know- "Forums are not bug trackers"- but still I just thought you might all be interested in my experiences with the latest OZ rc for the C3000 so here's my review-

First I thought I'd try the new oz/enlightenment17 image. It flashed fine but e17 crashed when I tried logging in so all I got was a very nice looking login screen so I flashed the latest GPE image instead.

I tried the first alpha of 3.5.4.1 for the spitz and I was disappointed that, save from a cool new bootsplash graphic, altboot and a few extra packages to choose from, little has changed. In fact, it generally seemed more buggy with only 2 out of the 6 or 7 packages that I got to install before I ran out of space actually working. The install instructions should really highly recommend re-partitioning your MD for OZ so you can at least get a basic set of packages on to do the common PDA tasks- at least firefox, abiword, xmms and gnumeric also need to installed and theres not enough room with the default partition map.

It would seem that 3.5.4.1 isn't going to displace my Cacko rom yet for these reasons

a) Doesn't look like pxa270 video overlay will make it in time for 3.5.4.1 final

b The GPE graphical package manager is useless for anything other than browsing available packages- that is after you've done an 'ipkg update' from the terminal as even 'update packages' doesn't work under the GUI. It also badly needs a search option.

c) I can't access Yahoo! mail under either gpe-minibrowser or osb-browser and bookmarks is broke under osb-browser

d) The screen would flash sometimes and the Z turned itself off randomly on a couple of occasions when just browsing through the menus of GPE.

So, I'm waiting for a better kernel (full support for the pxa270 based Z's in the mainline kernel) and a newer GPE before I can go tell the world how mind-blowing the Zaurus OZ/GPE experience is.

Other problems I had were

* Every time I installed a package it complained about not finding ldconfig, even though it was under /sbin. I presume this has been left out of the default $PATH?

* Neither xmms nor beepmediaplayer worked. I prefer xmms because you can double the size of its WAAY to small control panel, which should be double size by default. beep didn't produce any errors, just did nothing and didn't open a window whilst xmms complained about a missing libgtkstylus.so

* I thought I'd try hiding the GPE panel thinking it would be obvious how to get it back- nope! How do you unhide the panel? When you hide the panel, for the first time at least, it should say 'Push so-and-so to unhide the panel'.

* Maybe I missed it but it didn't seem that the panel applets for mounting cards and turning the wifi card on and off weren't installed by default. I think every Z user will want to install these if they're using GPE.

That was more than enough flaws to send me packing, disappointed, back to cacko. The GUI package manager crashed whilst I was trying to install abiword so I didn't get to check to see if the spell checker is working now. Does it have a British English dictionary?

[lardman]

The install instructions should really highly recommend re-partitioning your MD for OZ so you can at least get a basic set of packages on to do the common PDA tasks- at least firefox, abiword, xmms and gnumeric also need to installed and theres not enough room with the default partition map.

Please feel free to add to the wiki. I don't own one of these (nor do many of the devs) so I can't recommend anything.

d) The screen would flash sometimes and the Z turned itself off randomly on a couple of occasions when just browsing through the menus of GPE.

Interesting. Doesn't sound good. Did you work out why it was happening? What you were doing at the time, etc.?

* Every time I installed a package it complained about not finding ldconfig, even though it was under /sbin. I presume this has been left out of the default $PATH?

From the command line? Make sure you use 'su -' otherwise /sbin isn't included in the $PATH and that's where ldconfig lives iirc.

* Neither xmms nor beepmediaplayer worked. I prefer xmms because you can double the size of its WAAY to small control panel, which should be double size by default. beep didn't produce any errors, just did nothing and didn't open a window whilst xmms complained about a missing libgtkstylus.so

Can you submit a bug report for xmms please. beepmp doesn't work as it expects a different (deeper) colourdepth than the Z can handle.

Sorry you were disappointed,


Si

[Hrw]

I tried the first alpha of 3.5.4.1 for the spitz and I was disappointed that, save from a cool new bootsplash graphic, altboot and a few extra packages to choose from, little has changed. In fact, it generally seemed more buggy with only 2 out of the 6 or 7 packages that I got to install before I ran out of space actually working. The install instructions should really highly recommend re-partitioning your MD for OZ so you can at least get a basic set of packages on to do the common PDA tasks- at least firefox, abiword, xmms and gnumeric also need to installed and theres not enough room with the default partition map.

I thought that users which bought microdrive powered models know what to do when need some space... Looks like I was wrong.

a) rather not - maybe as ugrade later - our kernel team lack time

 tried to report it to GPE people?

c) tried to report it to GPE people?

d) sad to hear... I cannot check it - my c760 works.

So, I'm waiting for a better kernel (full support for the pxa270 based Z's in the mainline kernel)

Ah.. 2.6.20 or newer?

Other problems I had were

beepmp is going to be removed - upstream dropped it. xmms works for me (even without libgtkstylus.so).

GPE panel - it's matchbox-panel - report it to their bugtracker

* Maybe I missed it but it didn't seem that the panel applets for mounting cards and turning the wifi card on and off weren't installed by default. I think every Z user will want to install these if they're using GPE.

And I think that every Z should have firefox + thunderbird in base install... OZ has feeds, feeds has packages - is it reaaly hard to use ipkg??

That was more than enough flaws to send me packing, disappointed, back to cacko.

Uf.. one user to care less..

/me is tired of OZ work

[lowen]

I tried the first alpha of 3.5.4.1 for the spitz and I was disappointed that, save from a cool new bootsplash graphic, altboot and a few extra packages to choose from, little has changed. In fact, it generally seemed more buggy with only 2 out of the 6 or 7 packages that I got to install before I ran out of space actually working. The install instructions should really highly recommend re-partitioning your MD for OZ so you can at least get a basic set of packages on to do the common PDA tasks- at least firefox, abiword, xmms and gnumeric also need to installed and theres not enough room with the default partition map.

I thought that users which bought microdrive powered models know what to do when need some space... Looks like I was wrong.

* Maybe I missed it but it didn't seem that the panel applets for mounting cards and turning the wifi card on and off weren't installed by default. I think every Z user will want to install these if they're using GPE.

And I think that every Z should have firefox + thunderbird in base install... OZ has feeds, feeds has packages - is it reaaly hard to use ipkg??

That was more than enough flaws to send me packing, disappointed, back to cacko.

Uf.. one user to care less..

/me is tired of OZ work
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For many reasons I'd like to see OZ succeed.  Right now, from using 3.5.4.1rc4 on a C1000, I can see that there is a way to go before it's a 'normal user' distribution.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, now, primarily due to the other kernel 2.6 problems (SD card compatibility randomness, for one; Symbol Spectrum showing up as eth0 instead of wlan0 for another).  I for one understand your condition of be tired; I maintained the PostgreSQL RPM's for Red Hat and similar distributions for five years, and I got all kinds of user grief.  I finally just ran out of time to do all the builds (I was building half a dozen separate sets of binaries for different distributions, and a release took a full day's worth of building, and troubleshooting the build due to upstream brokenness).

On the subject of ipkg, the biggest 'normal user' issue I see is the brokenness of the GUI installer.  Which bugtracker would reports on the GUI installer go?  Honestly, the cacko GUI package installer interface is better: and it has its own problems.  Users want to know what package to install; while ipkg does work ok (it is quite similar to yum or apt-get on the desktop distribution side) one must know what package one wants first.  There isn't, as far as I can find, a way to get the package description in the current GUI installer.

If I could get the OpenEmbedded build environment working on my desktop I might be able to help some with this; but I'm up against the glibc binary locale generation issue (and I've set the local.conf variable that is supposed to fix that in org.openembedded.oz354x).   I'm learning what I can quickly about the way the buildsystem works, but day job load reduces amount of learning time, unfortunately.  The OE environment looks to be a wonderful system; I just can't get it to work here.  

[lardman]

On the subject of ipkg, the biggest 'normal user' issue I see is the brokenness of the GUI installer. Which bugtracker would reports on the GUI installer go?

For opie: http://opie.handhelds.org/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/BugReport

For GPE: http://handhelds.org/bugzilla/

If I could get the OpenEmbedded build environment working on my desktop I might be able to help some with this; but I'm up against the glibc binary locale generation issue (and I've set the local.conf variable that is supposed to fix that in org.openembedded.oz354x). I'm learning what I can quickly about the way the buildsystem works, but day job load reduces amount of learning time, unfortunately. The OE environment looks to be a wonderful system; I just can't get it to work here.

I've never encountered this issue, but you will find that irc is a faster way to get help for this kind of issue. Try #openzaurus or #oe.

We're happy to help,


Si

[CoreDump]

I know- "Forums are not bug trackers"- but still I just thought you might all be interested in my experiences with the latest OZ rc for the C3000 so here's my review-

First I thought I'd try the new oz/enlightenment17 image. It flashed fine but e17 crashed when I tried logging in so all I got was a very nice looking login screen so I flashed the latest GPE image instead.

Err, well, e17 should work fine on C3000.

I tried the first alpha of 3.5.4.1 for the spitz and I was disappointed that, save from a cool new bootsplash graphic, altboot and a few extra packages to choose from, little has changed. In fact, it generally seemed more buggy with only 2 out of the 6 or 7 packages that I got to install before I ran out of space actually working. The install instructions should really highly recommend re-partitioning your MD for OZ so you can at least get a basic set of packages on to do the common PDA tasks- at least firefox, abiword, xmms and gnumeric also need to installed and theres not enough room with the default partition map.

Well, Firefox alone needs about 20Mb.. But I do agree that a propper partition size should be mentioned in the instructions.

It would seem that 3.5.4.1 isn't going to displace my Cacko rom yet for these reasons

a) Doesn't look like pxa270 video overlay will make it in time for 3.5.4.1 final

Correct. But it will come eventually.

b The GPE graphical package manager is useless for anything other than browsing available packages- that is after you've done an 'ipkg update' from the terminal as even 'update packages' doesn't work under the GUI. It also badly needs a search option.

Yeah, it's as useless as the Opie package manager  

d) The screen would flash sometimes and the Z turned itself off randomly on a couple of occasions when just browsing through the menus of GPE.

This only happens when your battery gets =<30%. I believe the screen flashing is a left-over debug function but I could be wrong. And the machine doesn't turn off randomly. It only happens when your battery is <30%. I didn't encounter this bug in recent kernels but I didn't exactly look for it.

So, I'm waiting for a better kernel (full support for the pxa270 based Z's in the mainline kernel) and a newer GPE before I can go tell the world how mind-blowing the Zaurus OZ/GPE experience is.

The latest GPE devel snappshot looks pretty well to me.

Other problems I had were

* Every time I installed a package it complained about not finding ldconfig, even though it was under /sbin. I presume this has been left out of the default $PATH?

You didn't use the root console but "su'ed" to root from a user console which messes up your $PATH. Try calling "su -" instead.

* I thought I'd try hiding the GPE panel thinking it would be obvious how to get it back- nope! How do you unhide the panel? When you hide the panel, for the first time at least, it should say 'Push so-and-so to unhide the panel'.

Heh, yeah, had that happen to me today, too    No idea how to restore it heh

* Maybe I missed it but it didn't seem that the panel applets for mounting cards and turning the wifi card on and off weren't installed by default. I think every Z user will want to install these if they're using GPE.

I don't think there are any ATM

[Hrw]

Hold stylus on side where panel was to restore it.

[JohnX]

To bring back the hidden panel just tap the slim bar where it used to be, like HRW said. However, if your touch screen calibration is off a little it might be difficult or impossible to make the tap register in the right place to bring back the panel. Either try re-calibrating or just run

Code: [Select]

matchbox-remote -panel-toggle.

[CoreDump]

To bring back the hidden panel just tap the slim bar where it used to be, like HRW said. However, if your touch screen calibration is off a little it might be difficult or impossible to make the tap register in the right place to bring back the panel. Either try re-calibrating or just run

Code: [Select]

matchbox-remote -panel-toggle.
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I wasn't able to get the panel back by clicking. I guess the field which reacts to the click is rather small on VGA and should be raised a little bit.