Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Here is an update from boygeniusreport: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/...or-the-camera/

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

I hope the bar is on the side. Vertical real estate (only 480 pixels) is so precious... Please take some from the 800 pixels we have horizontally.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Really? When I looked into it for an Android phone (gf is also on TMobile) I thought it was more for data..

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

The same info and pics that have been posted here over the last several days and somewhere on the net last month... The boy may be a genius but he must be one of them sl-o-o-o-w genius's or suttin'. :D

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

In beta 2 it's still horizontal (pretty much the same as on Diablo), but it's not configurable or hide-able.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Yea, what happened to the full screen button and what's going to replace it? The multi-tasking is key and we don't know yet how that will work.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

All this fuzz about osso-xterm... Why don't you simply add yourselves to https://garage.maemo.org/projects/osso-xterm/ and start contributing there? :)

Gabriel has been taking Fremantle patches, although something like a vertical bar should probably be discussed before. Still, it's all open source so if you want to give it a try...

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Quim, you've been here long enough to know that, to us geeks, XTerm is core functionality!

So yeah, we need to know about the pipe character. ;)

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

This is why I'm surprised about speculation on a piece of software that has open source code, is open to contributions and can be tested in the Fremantle SDK since the alpha release. :)

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Full-screen is still there, but it just removes the title/status bar. There's currently no way to tell osso-xterm to hide the toolbar in full-screen mode like you could in earlier versions. (Not a complaint, I fully expect that to change by the time it's released).

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Speaking of which, there's been a disappointing lack of response to bug 3929 (Requesting integration of some community supplied XTerm enhancements) so far. Just bringing it up here in case the right people have not seen it yet.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

unless i have missed a VM release, the SDK appears to be a ***** to set up, especially if all you plan on doing is toy around...

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

I must admit I was biting my tongue over that bug. :)

@Quim: Good to see Nokia finally giving you the resources you and your team have deserved from it's inception. It's pretty obvious Nokia are now in an awkward situation with Symbian floundering for the next 12-18 months and Maemo left as their potential "get out of jail free" card.

The RX-51 hardware looks nice and certainly has the spec to succeed, although it's too early to say anything about the UI on Maemo5 as it's yet to be seen in it's fully glory (maybe it's time to "leak" some YouTube videos!)

As ever it's likely the rest of Nokia and their knuckle headed management will be your biggest obstacles to success, but hopefully the grim future facing Nokia in the high-end device market will ensure such obstacles are cleared from your path with the minimum of fuss.

One challenge that still needs to be addressed is the need for more openness in the bug filing & reporting process from Nokia/Maemo engineers - in future Maemo will need a community, developers and mind-share more than ever! :)

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Oh, god, please, not the bottom again! The screen has got some extra (in terms of 4:3 terminal window ratio) space on the side. Add it to a side! Do not take precious vertical space.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Easy, because what's apparently open code, isn't actually open code at all (see Hildon), but old code or only partially updated code that's sitting in a repo waiting for the go-ahead to release the real code.

Open is OK when things are actually open, but as it stands, half the "open" components out there are nothing of the sort. Then by the time they actually attain real open status again after a release Nokia is going to have moved on into maintenance mode and wont expend any effort on addressing community bugs and enhancement requests (not even, seemingly, when those bugs comes with perfectly good patches).

So, no, you can't have it both ways here. Either you actually do your development in the community by getting your developers and managers out and participating in the community and stop with the code-over-the-wall insanity or you end this "open" fiction.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Where there's a will there's a way. I know I'm a crappy UI designer, but someone has to come up with an elegant solution to save vertical real estate in landscape mode.

Attachment 3899

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

ROTFL... I believe it was all about the toolbar, not the virtual keyboard :-)

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

I'm glad I was able to give you a good chuckle, but my point was that everything can go on the side, even a keyboard. :)

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

I hate to disappoint you, but there is much easier way to have a decent on-screen keyboard in XTerm. Simply overlay it over entire screen: as XTerm itself rarely requires mouse input, you can just as well use the whole screen as a virtual keyboard.

PS: In fact, this modification has already been applied to the current Diablo XTerm, quite successfully.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

anywhere one can download said modded xterm?

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

According to Quim in the comments of Bug 3929, someone needs to open a specific bug asking that the toolbar(s) get moved to the side instead of the bottom, or even better, a way to move the toolbar(s) to any edge (left, right, top, bottom) the user prefers. And you also need to provide a patch to do it, so that the osso-xterm guy, Gabriel, can add it.

(Well, there's no guarantee that he'll add it, but I wish I was a programmer so I could try anyway.)

Any programmers out there able to provide this patch? Or is there a version already out there that can have the relevant code diff'ed out and posted as a patch?

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Here's a screenshot of current osso-xterm in fremantle SDK

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Is bash in freemantle, or must we suffer busybox again?

fnord

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Why would Nokia ship it if they don't need to? If you want it, use apt-get (and probably don't make bash symlinked from /bin/sh).

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Well, you need it to select text and (in Fremantle) scroll.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

It is in the repository, but that's probably just for scratchbox (as in Diablo). Bash is the default interactive shell in Mer though (/bin/sh is dash).

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Well, the busybox shipping with Fremantle is newer and has many more features enabled.

The performance benefits of using busybox over GNUtils and bash are non-trivial. Although power users may be making some sacrifices with busybox, the vast majority of users will appreciate significantly improved startup times.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

I own a nice ssh client that uses keyboard and function overlays. For quick stuff here and there it works fine. And maybe even for text messages or forum posts a translucent keyboard would be reasonable. But I often edit and stare at code, and I've found my side keyboard terminal program to be the most productive solution at the moment. My opinion is that being really productive on a smart phone is an open frontier, and I'm not convinced we've seen the best solutions yet. And if an apathetic person like myself gave it a try, it's likely others are thinking about it also. Maybe.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

However it's been frozen at 1.10.2 since at least prealpha2 (it wasn't included in the first one) which is getting a bit long in the tooth now, and is not even the latest 1.10 patchlevel (which had already been 6 months old at the time prealpha2 came out).

Busybox ash sucks as an interactive shell. With the extra rootfs legroom in Fremantle having bash preinstalled and used as root's and user's login shell by default (while keeping ash as /bin/sh) would make "power" users happy without sacrificing performance or delaying startup.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

What is this strange and bad looking font that is being used in Fremantle anyway? Where is the marvelous Nokia font? I am a big fan of the Nokia font, I love it that many applications use it in Maemo... The xterm, for example, uses it in the toolbox. What is this skinny thing they are trying to make us swallow??

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

This, however, increases platform complexity, adds packages to support and increases testing time. It'd be much simpler for some fine community member (yourself, perhaps) to put together a small package and upload it to Extras. Then Nokia isn't saddled with lots of extras support costs, and you can get exactly what you want.

That's the nice thing about this platform, if you've got an itch then scratch it!

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

That's just a screenshot from the SDK. The SDKs have never included the Nokia font used on the device.[1]

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=306774&postcount=1 shows a screenshot of Fremantle running on a real device, displaying the Nokia font, in the title bar, which we've all come to love.

[1] A default install of the Fremantle SDK does not include it, like its predecessors, but, this time, with the Fremantle SDK, it can be installed after adding the nokia-binaries repository: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...2&postcount=75
Thanks Yerga ;)

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

I don't see how they could have had any much fewer physical keys. I have yet to see a phone with keyboard that doesn't have some sort of directional keys. The zoom buttons aren't on the keyboard and that balances that most every phone has the same key and uses it for a volume key. The fullscreen key balances the standard camera shutter button, and menu keys are as essential for the Maemo platform as a Windows key for the Windows platform.

One of the problems with this keyboard is that there's no obvious way to use common european characters without removing common punctuation or other much-used characters from the Sym charset. Another is that it's less useable for typical linux terminal tasks, like " | more " or " | grep " - and this community is much about linux terminal tasks.

Of course, we can always use a bluetooth keyboard, but then they could've made a more Diamond2-like device.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

What I found funny is that the chr key was grossly underutilized on the N810 (e.g. why menu when you could do chr+e for é as such). We can only guess what kdb input is possible with the N900 - the basics are clear but (hopefully) there are a few tricks up Nokias sleeve, maybe through some funky ctrl-shift-fn combo, or dynamic layouts (wouldn't it bee cool for layouts to change when you switch from terminal to composing mail ? or swap kbdmaps with fn-enter or sorts ?). So, it's nut just in the number of keys, but with less keys you have to be smarter on the usability side. We'll see how that plays out.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

It isn't completely true ;-)

The device font is available in Fremantle SDK installing the ui-fonts package: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ly/019981.html

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

That's an entirely different conversation. I'm just saying you can have bash as the default interactive shell without impacting system performance or boot time.

But since you brought it up, it's not like ash-as-interactive-shell comes without its own support problems.

FYI, that's a solved problem: bash packages are already available both in Extras and in the SDK repository, and the Extras one comes with a simple tool (bash-setup) to change your default interactive shell.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

fwiw this is how x-term looks today in full screen splendour. If you want to keep this discussion, feel free opening a new thread since this topic has deviated a lot from the original post. Thanks!

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

Hmm, Debian 3:1.10.2.legal-1osso26+0m5

I suppose that implies there was an illegal version somewhere?

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

The legal-1osso* busybox version suffix has been there since chinook at least, no idea why.

Re: RX-51 Tablet picture released at Engadget
 

The major Italian financial newsper sports an article on the Rover:
http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/SoleO...lesView=Libero

Suits are now informed :)