Impressions of the openzaurus 3.5 usage with russi

[Petro]

I had the openzurus 3.2 on Zaurus 5500 and enjoyed it. Then I decided to
try the 3.5.1, and I’v got the following impressons:

Positve:

1. The appearance is much prettier now J
2. Russian records in the address book are ordered correctly now.
3. opie-reader with the Russian hyphenation package is almost as good as
weasel for palm

Negative:

1. Once a day I’m getting a “cf edjected/cf inserted” message. On the
3.2 I had the same problems only with fat sd’s.
2. Once in a couple of days it’s hanging at the switching on and during
operations as well. A coupe of times I even had to make a full reset.
3. Presumably, due to these faults I had serious problems with ext2 on
the cf.
4. The Russian screen keyboard is not appearing correctly even if
Russian fonts are installed. It is necessary to install a i18n-ru locale
to fix it, which is not right.
5. I used a keyz on the 3.2 to switch the hardware and screen keyboard
layouts, on the 3.5.1 it does not work. I’ll rebuild it when I’ll got
time, but I’v read on the http://opie.handhelds.org , that “Added applet and configuration application for switching hardware keyboard layouts.” Have not
understood yet, where is it, the default one is switching just only the
screen keyboard.
6. Since there is a Russian locale in the “feed”, why not to have an
appropriate Russian fonts there? For instance, from the
http://my-zaurus.narod.ru/fonts.html, since unicode-fonts from the
“feed” are too large.

The 1,2 and 3 are extremely inconvenient, would you please tell me where
can I get the 3.2 version?

Pavel

[TimW]

3. opie-reader with the Russian hyphenation package is almost as good as weasel for palm

Let me know what isn't as good and I may be able to fix it - or at least improve it  

[Petro]

3. opie-reader with the Russian hyphenation package is almost as good as weasel for palm

Let me know what isn't as good and I may be able to fix it - or at least improve it  

It would be good  to add a small progressbar at the bottom of the screen with ability to scroll the text in a full screen  mode.

[TimW]

It probably isn't quite what you want, but if you go to "Settings/Toolbars" and go to the "policy" tab, you can enable a QT style scroll bar. This will normally get hidden in fullscreen mode but by mapping a button to "Toggle scroolbar" you can bring it back again. This enables you to do page and line up/down using the scrollbar.

Real-time scrolling of the screen probably won't work too well because the display data is only read and decompressed as it is required and that is too much work to do on the fly. It may work on the bigger devices (I have a SL5000) and is probably enabled (I was going to disable it because it doesn't really work on the SL5000 but I'm not sure if I did or not).

OTOH, the on-the-fly decompression means that you can read huge files. I'm working on a high compression variant of rbmake and, inspired by the squashfs thread, I'm going to test it on the wikipedia. Some of the pages in the wikipedia I downloaded using the perl script aren't very good html so I'm having some problems but it looks like I should be able to get it to under 500MB (if the first 2000 pages are representative of the whole thing it may come under 350MB - but if they aren't then who knows how big it'll end up!). Of course, the squashfs approach will be better if you want tables and the javascript search functionality.

If you can have a play with the QT scroll bar and let me know what needs to be changed to do what you want, I'll give it a go (I suspect that what you want will be for me to make the "Mini scrollbar" behave more like the QT scrollbar so that you can do page/line up/down and, maybe, scrolling).

[TimW]

Have you tried the two types of scrollbar, yet? I'm thinking of making the mini scrollbar act more like the QT Scrollbar anyway, but it would make sense to get your feedback first, if you have any.

BTW, I've managed to get the Wikipedia into opie-reader format and it comes in at 275MB. I need to do some more experimentation to get the best parameters regarding usability versus compression but the main point of the exercise was to debug the distiller - the squashfs version will be better formatted plus it probably has the javascript search function...and I don't have the bandwidth to post it anywhere, anyway.

[TimW]

I've made the changes to the mini-scrollbar which should now do pretty much what I think you want - not necessarily very well, but definitely much better than before.

The two big problems are that with the books I read one pixel of movement of the scrollbar is equivalent to about 10,000 characters worth of text, and on my old SL5000 there is a lot of "dither" which means I get loads of "drag events" differing by a pixel or so even when I keep the pointer perfectly still.

I've worked around these by paging up/down to where the pointer is currently resting so that you don't skip over huge reams of text, and by making the scroll stop immediately you lift the pointer even if it hasn't reached where the pointer was last (ie you can stiop it scrolling as soon as you get to where you want).

I've also made it jump over blocks of text if it gets too far behind the pointer so that you can drag the handle over longer distances and still get to where you want to be in a reasonable time.

PM me with your e-mail address if you want to try it out (and if anyone else decides to try it let me know which ROM you are using as well).