Important Update...

[doppiaemme]

There are a lot of things that should be changed.... from documentation to collaborative work tools.
Why here it is so different from the other great Open Source project??
I know that in other environment where they weren't open enough a fork happened.....
Is forking project a blasphemy?

[Xromer]

UHM...... this time, i have to be onest, i begin to feel a little tired.
Like Chuck.r it 's 1 month that i' m continuosly asking about a PdaXrom account to load all the stuff and midifications i did to the Builders rules.ipk files and sources for the all new packages i compiled.
The only persons i find on the cacko chat are always Hrw and Pgas, no other developers.
Always Hrw helping with config troubles and Pgas helping with the Account' s one.
THX a lot to this 2 one.
I' m beginning to chat with GPE guys, who are every time answering me.
To talk with Sashz it' s becoming more and more difficult.
ROM Comunities are being everytime getting more confusing.

Some posts ago CoreDump too, didn' t have a bad idea to fuse OE and PdaXrom distributions:
You know, you *could* use OE to compile pdaXrom. While a few things might be missing currently, it wouldn't be much of a problem integrating them (as you already have all patches required for the missing bits anyway).

With OE you *could* have cutting edge stuff (or not, you can hard-wire the version of each single package if desired) while beeing binary compatible to the large OZ feeds. I believe pdaXrom users would benefit greatly from that move.
From Sashz no response.

This is from Meanie:
If we all cooperate, then the Zaurus will be more fun and productive for us all.

I agree totally.

Other from Hrw:
OE/OZ repository is open for anyone. pdaX repo is closed and only Sash has access to it. He release dump of it from time to time as pdaXrom-builder.

It' s the reality.

I begin to feel a little upset for your closed behaviour Sashz, now as i said we have a very good Forum people a lot of persons wanting to help, but it seems you don' t want this to happen.
With this behaviour we cannot grow and this time i agree totally with chuck.r
I' m very happy that you have a new work, surely with only donations you could not live, this is logical.
But if helping you means to hunt you and Laze, i don' t want to do like that, because i too, have my work and i' m busy.
Seeking you this way bring only me and other People in confusion, because i can' t correct suddenly the errors i do everytime with dependencies and configurations of the packages.
And as a beginner i do a lot! EHEHEH!! :-)
That way brings me and other contributors to make a lot of confusion and confuse all the PdaXrom people and Pgas it' s being tired to do the contributor filters to the mail.pdaxrom.org logically.
This is really what' s going on for me.
BYEZ!

[ZDevil]

Well said, Xromer.

I don't even know we can "compile pdaXrom using OE"... Stupid me. (But where is the documentation saying this or is there any collaborative attempt to do this?   )

Hope Sashz and others are not taking these critical comments personally. I believe they are aiming at improving the way things work here, but by no means the person doing that.

Truly, Sashz has always been doing surprisingly great work. You are still the hero behind pdaXrom. Without this pdaXrom project I won't get so into Linux and Zaurus. I'm very much fed up with Sharp ROM's inflexibility and (to me nonsensical) constraints on Z's functionality. So pdaXrom and OE (or together) will be THE way to go.

[Xromer]

Well said, Xromer.

I don't even know we can "compile pdaXrom using OE"... Stupid me. (But where is the documentation saying this or is there any collaborative attempt to do this?   )

Hope Sashz and others are not taking these critical comments personally. I believe they are aiming at improving the way things work here, but by no means the person doing that.

Truly, Sashz has always been doing surprisingly great work. You are still the hero behind pdaXrom. Without this pdaXrom project I won't get so into Linux and Zaurus. I'm very much fed up with Sharp ROM's inflexibility and (to me nonsensical) constraints on Z's functionality. So pdaXrom and OE (or together) will be THE way to go.
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Well said Zdevil hope Sashz and other PdaXrom guys (if there are any, 'cause i ' ve never seen other than Sashz and Laze) will listen to this.
As from OZ guys like CoreDump and Hrw there is an open way for colllaboration as i saw from the posts.
The thing that i would like to have would be only one ROM and big comunity of reference.
I know that it' s very difficult to have it, but even more collaboration could be better or not?
Think like having all people energy, efforts and donations directed in a more near ROM developing stuff, wouldn' t it be cool?
Having the Documentation and Feed of the various developing branch in one solution?
As i said all the comunities are confused, i see lots of OZ-PdaXrom posts not bringing to anywhere only to useless fights, where we could unite the efforts.
I see people get confused for the amount of contrib, feeds and etc.
And people having only 1 Zauri like me passing from one Distro to other having to do all the things from the begin due to lacks from 1 part and the other.
For me it' s only a waste of resources like Hrw, CoreDump, GPE-Guys, Sashz and very good resources as i saw.
Think about Bitbake with Menuconfig builder like the Pengutronix one and PdaXrom with all the packages like Gtk+ up to date like the OZ one.
I saw a very good guide about bitbake from Hrw but i find my self not yet confident, with bitbake as i was before passing to PdaXrom.
Maybe i' m the lame beginner that still need graphic interface like Pengutronix one. :-)
Hrw i promise i will enhance my skill studying. :-)
Maybe i'm a dreamer, but sometimes dreams come true, not? HIHIHI!  


I don't even know we can "compile pdaXrom using OE"... Stupid me. (But where is the documentation saying this or is there any collaborative attempt to do this?   )
Zdevil: Refer to CoreDump for this as he told it but i think that shell be many solutions to fuse the maximum from one Distro to other.
I heard that there' s people using one distribution kernel with other kernel tree; but....... do we have to arrive to this to have one solution? I think it' s crazy!
Bah!!
I throw it there, let me know if i'm right or wrong.    

[clofland]

I am a real fan of Sashz, but I also tire of the "one man show." On the other hand, it is hard to complain when he does such good work.

There has, however, been some real bitterness in the past when someone forked someone else's ROM and started on their own way with it.

Laze, what do you think of all of this talk of taking pdaXrom and cleaning up code and putting it into some CVS system and turning it into a group effort? Do you see this as a good idea or a bad one? Why? I kind of consider you as Sashz's "agent," so maybe you could give some opinions here.

[McChubby]

This is why I'm hopeful that Laze and Sash will see the benefits of opening up pdaXrom and encouraging others to participate. I know the community are very much behind them, so I don't see why they should fear that they'll lose overall control. Never underestimate loyalty.
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Hell, I'd be willing to help - I've been an AIX C developer for the past 13 years, and I'm pretty good with low-level UNIX stuff.

I only got my C1000 last week, and I have to say I'm a bit cheesed off!  As a newbie I'm finding it really difficult to take-in all the different sources of information (some of which is old or inaccurate) - of all the ROMs I liked the look of pdaXrom best, but at the moment I'm put off by it, since for a newbie it's very frustrating; numerous feeds, difficult to determine ROM version compatibility, website info out of date, docs out of date.  I also don't understand the rationale of putting a major functional change (kernel and boot mechanism) in half-way thru a beta release i.e. 1.1.0beta3->1.1.0beta4.

However, I'd be happy to help sort some of these things out.

I'm not trying to upset anyone, I'm just a newbie frustrated with my new "toy"!

[ant]

I only got my C1000 last week, and ...
<snip>
...I'm just a newbie frustrated with my new "toy"!
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You see...it's a mess... the newbies (McChubby, you're not exactly a noob...) are discouraged: me too, after 3 years I'm feeling some frustration!

IMHO we don't need further forks, instead some merging.
Two versions based on the same kernel / baselayout would be enough :

ONE for beginners and PDA-users
(Being that Cacko appears/is mostly unmantained, I'd say OPIE with 2.6 kernel)

ONE with X server
(Summing up the best of both worlds: GPE / pdaXrom)

Then I'd split the developers at least in two teams: one team could concentrate on the Linux/Kernel/optimization issues while the other could port/patch the applications independently.
The work on the applications could be then partially done by a large number of advanced users...

...
Hell, I'd be willing to help - I've been an AIX C developer for the past 13 years, and I'm pretty good with low-level UNIX stuff.
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Just my 2 (Euro)cents

Ant

P.S. Don't forget a decent, unified, Bugtracker

P.P.S.
My Kernel-DreamTeam : Sashz, maslowsky, RPurdie

[loji]

I'm new to pdaXrom as I've jsut gotten my C1000 - but I had a 5600 for years before that, so have seen the community grow and mature during that time.

on 5600 I used Wapaton -> which sadly now is abandonware. Chaos was a student, and his studies caught up with him leaving no time to continue the ROM. It stuck at 1.6.1, and although he released the sourced tarballs + root fs -> as far as I know no one has picked up the project. This is even after I put together a full dev package. ( a Zdsl image w/ cross compile tools + Qemu so even windows users could develop)  The interest simply wasn't there -- even though it had become the majority Rom for 5600.


Sash seems much more on top of his game, and I do not fear that this project will turn belly up. As far as confusion over the project, pdaXrom is so much different from the normal Sharp from, (or even Opie) that there is a slight learning curve.

The hardest part is figuring out the feed situation, a problem which stems from the migration to the new site. That is a common problem during any site migration. But even with the small amount of time sorting out which feeds are actually needed - I prefer it immensley over killez and the entire sharp family!  At least I know the packages in the feeds I have will work with my machine/rom  --- I would constantly have problems with my 5600 getting packages that wouldn't work because they were packaged in a strange way, or meant for a different rom but never stated that anywhere.

By Sash keeping things locked down, there is some kind of quality control and sanity check. Maybe not the kind we'd rather see - but at least anything that gets released is released as quality. One of the main requests I see about pdaXrom is for applications. But with the builder anyone can compile those. (I think what is needed there is a very good How-To for it- then Sash wouldn't need to get back answering so many questions, since it seems he doesn't)

The one thing I don't get is refusing free offers to cleanup code, etc.. , but it's hard to complain when we went from a stable point release to a beta 4 with an entirley new kernel +_ Boot Loader (a first in the Zaurii family!) in just a handful of months



Congradualtions Sash, everyone deserves a break - I can't wait for 2.6 + U-boot to mature.

[omro]

By Sash keeping things locked down, there is some kind of quality control and sanity check. Maybe not the kind we'd rather see - but at least anything that gets released is released as quality.

What about the bugs which have been in pdaXrom in every single release, beta or stable, I've ever seen? None of the windows are sized correctly on opening, the onscreen keyboard doesn't even fit the screen, the power on/off has been unstable (critical for a pda), the keymap is always wrong, right shift never seems to work out of the box, etc etc etc There aren't exactly quality release points. In order to make any realise of pdaXrom useable, you've had to massively adjust it, Meanie has an entire page on how to do this on his site. That shouldn't be necessary, though all hail Meanie for his site and brilliant work towards making the Z incredible. :-)

The one thing I don't get is refusing free offers to cleanup code, etc..

Exactly.

pdaXrom is brilliant, it *was* light years ahead of the other ROMs. But I recently looked at OZ/GPE recently (something I would never have done if pdaXrom had realised a stable, bug fixed version ages ago). Look at OZ/GPE and you'll see clean, fast, stable, and while it has some bugs, there are none of the stupid, lingering, should have been fixed ages ago before moving on, kind of bugs.

If anyone cares to look back, there was a thread asking for money for pdaXrom's survival.

link

I suggested a number of things, but mainly that in exchange for this money, we, the users and contributors, should have some say in the direction of pdaXrom or there should be more openness from pdaXrom. This idea was stomped upon by the developers and by a lot of people from the forum at that time. That was in August of last year. I don't actually see pdaXrom any further forward in the intervening months, despite a lot of people donating and I know a lot did. Infact, despite numerous betas, there's nothing closer to a stable, everyday release unless you're prepared to do a lot of tinkering once you flash.

The closed nature and lack of accountability for the money is why I think myself, and hopefully many others, stopped donating. A huge mistake was made there, this Rom has an enthusiastic and willing community of people happy to devote time to coding and bug fixings and others who would give money when they couldn't code themselves. What a mistake letting that go to waste. To be honest, as someone who did contribute money, I feel a little short changed.

Anyway. I really hope we can all move forwards. I hope it doesn't come to forking pdaXrom or abandoning it, but if OZ/GPE continues to run as well on my C1000 as it does now, I'll not look back unless something major happens with pdaXrom.

[danboid]

Gotta say I'm a bit confused with this thread. The main theme seems to be 'should we/ shouldn't we fork pdaXrom?' and surely this has just come about because pdaXrom can do some things that OZ currently can't. If thats the case then whats stopping said features being ported over to OZ/GPE? It sounds as if somebody needs to organise an easy (graphical) build interface for bitbake making porting as easy as under pdaXrom, or maybe better docs is all thats required there.

We must try to avoid further forks at all costs. In the case of open source you can't have too many cooks to spoil the broth, but too many distros will when we only have such as small community of developers.

I am very happy to hear that GPE development is coming along at a good pace and that the developers are responsive as this is surely one of the most important (if not THE most important, alongside OZ) project in the Linux PDA world. I have high hopes for GPE 2.8 and GPE-PIM and I think these projects will very shortly transform our Z's into seriously good PDAs devices as well as being incredibly cool portable workstations.

What does worry me is this

https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=19942

What?? Hrw is hardly using his Z and is struggling to find the motivation to build or test any new images? That really is strange as whenever I have been on this forum or any of the Z irc channels I can always count on Hrw being there to help/ tell me how much he doesn't like ROX's Appdirs  If this is still the case then Hrw should voluntarily step down as release manager.

The other thing that worries me is kernel development. It seems that within OZ it is only RP who really does anything. I BADLY want to see proper pxa270 overlay support which is as good as or surpasses 2.4's bvdd but it seems that this isn't a priority for RP. RP, if you're reading, may I may make a suggestion? If we raise some funding would you be able to concentrate on this (and pxa270 freq scaling) so we can get this major obstacle out of the way? Or is there anybody else who think they might be up to this task?

[omro]

What does worry me is this

https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=19942

What?? Hrw is hardly using his Z and is struggling to find the motivation to build or test any new images? That really is strange as whenever I have been on this forum or any of the Z irc channels I can always count on Hrw being there to help/ tell me how much he doesn't like ROX's Appdirs  If this is still the case then Hrw should voluntarily step down as release manager.

The other thing that worries me is kernel development. It seems that within OZ it is only RP who really does anything. I BADLY want to see proper pxa270 overlay support which is as good as or surpasses 2.4's bvdd but it seems that this isn't a priority for RP. RP, if you're reading, may I may make a suggestion? If we raise some funding would you be able to concentrate on this (and pxa270 freq scaling) so we can get this major obstacle out of the way? Or is there anybody else who think they might be up to this task?
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I think this is more a question for the general forums than this one or any distribution specific forum. Have you asked in the general software or hardware specific forums?

[danboid]

No, but I'll repeat my suggestion in a new thread elsewhere as, to me at least, this is a biggie.

[omro]

No, but I'll repeat my suggestion in a new thread elsewhere as, to me at least, this is a biggie.
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Everyone has their personal wants and needs :-)

[albertr]

"If you want to have it done, do it yourself". What prevents anyone from starting developing? pdaXrom, Opie, GPE, whatever... pick the one you'd like more and improve upon it.
-albertr

[Xromer]

Ok:
1) Look, i dont' t want to say that Sashz hasn' t done anything, it' s very far from what i think.
2) I would like to make people who' s not programming how is incredible the work you have to do to maintain a distribution, only studying the Builder' s and Pengutronix tools to compile the programs automatically took hours and hours to me.
So i cannot imagine what Sashz did to put these things toghether.
Yes, there where money and code contributions but i think (with respect of that as i also contribute with money and then cross-compilations) that the effort of the people like Sashz,Hrw,Florian,Neal and all other free developers it' s unpayable.
Also because i look at it from a knowledge stuff before all.
3) The photo i did of the OpenEmbedded environment now, i see it' s true from your posts.
I' m very glad that, the ball i threw, was collected by so much people.
This is the proof (if ever we should need) of how many people is ready to contribute and seek the OE environment like me.
For this reason i don' t want all to be thrown off.
We have the best PDA i' ve ever seen, THE ZaUrI the real cross-point between PDA and Notebook.
Excellent developers!
Exciting Forum people!
I can' t see this wasting.
This is what i wanted to say, only this.

If you want to have it done, do it yourself". What prevents anyone from starting developing? pdaXrom, Opie, GPE, whatever... pick the one you'd like more and improve upon it.
-albertr

Look at my signature, sure i  began to do it, sure.
But more we are, faster we do.
That' s my opinion.
BYEZ!