maemo.org - Talk - Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by ARJWright (Post 283613)

Vote: Not usable on a daily basis.

For good measure - I'm grateful for all the reports in this thread. We do have issues and all of you do a great job at highlighting where our priorities need to lay and that honesty of the problems and you people testing it is what makes it possible to move closer to something you can actually use.

Responding to a few issues:

Quote:

Originally Posted by MSchievelbein (Post 282379)

My main complaint is that when I boot it, I have to hold the menu key and select Mer off my internal card

I believe it's possible to use cal-tool to set a boot id matching the one in /etc/bootmenu.d/*.item (qwerty12: what was this again?)

Quote:

Originally Posted by svs57 (Post 282544)

I go back to maemo.
1. Needs turn hardware keyboard. Al lot of Fn keys show wrong symbols

Currently Mer resorts to 'us' layout, but if someone would sit down for a day and write a control panel for it, in PyGTK or something, everyone would have the feature.

It's fairly simple: List of keyboard layout to activate, and a script starting when Hildon starts that sets the keyboard layout. 'setxkbmap -layout <layoutname>' is the one to set the layout.

Quote:

Originally Posted by svs57 (Post 282544)

4. Can't find sound modules.

Sound is working but not documented, as they rely on a rather shady way of getting the DSP tasks for now.

Grab a updates repository line from your Maemo-Diablo's /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hildon-application-manager.list (i think), put it in the Maemo sources.list, apt-get update; apt-get install tablet-sound; remove the updates repository line again -- and then shut down your tablet (no reboot, halt completely, this will crash Mer on next boot otherwise, don't ask me why this happens), and boot.

Next time you boot you will have DSP tasks (but you will have to unmute it using an ALSA mixer. ALSA is muted by standard for who knows what reason..)

We still have trouble with PulseAudio however. Does anyone in the community have any experience with PulseAudio drivers, and want to take up a day's task of converting osso-esd's DSP driver to PA? The osso-esd DSP driver is -really- simple to figure out how it works.

Quote:

Originally Posted by svs57 (Post 282544)

5. Don't like that soft keyboard open when hardware used.

Did you know that powerlaunch is not just a more advanced power menu? It is actually a full scripting language for making tablet behaviour (reacting on events, etc). If someone spent a day realizing how powerlaunch works, and used the gconf hooks in HIM to deny soft keyboard opening, we'd have this too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by paulkoan (Post 282597)

It needs fbreader, pidgin, skype and claws to be good to go for me.

FBreader, Pidgin and Claws - with 0.13 we will have a Scratchbox-free environment ready for all of you (OpenSUSE Build Service). You could get those apps building like you would on a Debian machine, help adapt the packages to Mer (it's often very simple), and we'd all have those applications.

Quote:

Originally Posted by benny1967 (Post 282648)

would it still be useful to file "user-level bugs" (=I can describe what happens, but not why) about such things or would that only generate useless noise ATM because you're aware of these issues, anyway? (Or would rather have more qualified bug reports at this stage of development?)

All bug reports (provided they're for the most recent version) are more than welcome. Bug reports are also a place you can look at to see if there's anything you can help fix.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ekul (Post 282697)

3. A tool to add items to the mer menu would be very nice. Even if it's just a cli app that takes a .desktop file and category as arguments and generates a menu entry it would be great since currently you have to launch jaunty software from xterm
4. The font size used for the mer and applications is very small. If it were larger finger usage would be a lot easier.
5. On behalf of lefties everywhere a left-handed version of the default theme would be much appreciated. The scroll bars on the left hand side goes a long way towards making the device much less frustrating

3. - we could have a simple script that after packages are installed try to send a message to Hildon to update the applications menu. I believe HAM does that already. Anyone in the community who can do this?

4-5: Yes, admittedly - and everything is able to be changed in the theme. The theme is freely adaptable - we can even do a hildon-theme-layout-mer-lefties so any themes depending on it would have left hand scrollbars.

Or someone could make a simple control panel to indicate handedness, and add to the ~/.osso/current-gtk-theme.gtkrc (not exact name, too lazy to look it up atm, but there's a gtkrc file everything stems from) - I think it is just a one-liner to add left-handed scrollbars?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ARJWright (Post 282975)

- widgets in the status bar area seem to all be float:left; really makes it disconcerting when you have only 4 active, and the clock isn't right aligned. Customization is good, but eh... might be a bit too fluid in that respect.

- got a crash of Hildon desktop which pretty much rendered the device useless. There was nothing but the background on the screen. I'll have to see if I can reproduce it to better help there. Was running Midori over Wi-Fi with the slider closed at the time.

Marquee widgets being float:left - I'd love them to act better, but I'll be honest, I'm an idiot when it comes to GTK. I understand the framework somewhat and I can patch some things, but fact is, if any of you in the community are able to help out with even simple GTK (sadly not PyGTK when it comes to hildon-desktop) things, help with tiny spots that need fixing, please do participate. GTK coders are hard to find it seems, but they do exist in this community (or we wouldn't have fantastic applications like we do).

Quote:

Originally Posted by MSchievelbein (Post 283061)

1) Is there a way to make it so that the screen does not dim after 30 seconds. I do a lot of document reading and it dims before I can even finish a page.

3)Should we be installing applications from Extras and elsewhere using the default installer or apt-get? The default installer does not seem to handle dependencies. When I try to install Canola or advanced-power or some others, they give me dependency errors and do not install. Would synaptic work with MER ?

1) Yes - if we extend Advanced Backlight to be a control panel for this as well, and move out the functionality from DSME (which is now open source too). rm_you seems to have stepped up to the challenge. We might even see ABL on X86.

3)

Right now the default installer does not show anything but user/. Simple reason for this is that we want to show the Hildon applications up front. But also, if we actually do show -all- the Ubuntu packages, Hildon Application Manager will slow to a grinding halt (because of the sheer size of the repositories). But consider this - you can grab all of it through apt-get install, - and when you port an application to Hildon, you never have to worry about library porting problems anymore.

As part of 0.13 (i hope) we will start trying to build Maemo.org extras as well, using OpenSUSE Build Service, so we don't have the dependency problems.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sleepy_sanchez (Post 283079)

I have the same questions as benny1967. Should we file such usability bugs and small requests like "a restart option when hildon-desktop crashes" in maemo bugzilla

Yes, yes, definately. Also, you might not know this, but if you see the "Hildon desktop crashed" box, you can (because of powerlaunch) probably click power button to get the power menu, or hold power until LED blinks, and press dpad down to reboot.

Quote:

(insert anything about 770)

Rule of thumb: always make sure to have swap and that first boot wizard find it. Get me /var/log/first-boot-wizard.log if things break, and /home/username/.xsession-errors. Make sure 'dmesg' does not have any I/O errors in it.

Anyway, my point with most of this is:

The skills to make these leaps with little effort, exist in this community. Mer has made it this far with a huge bunch of small efforts and a small group of dedicated individuals that almost deal with Mer from morning to night.

Help us out and even your small effort will lead to something everyone of us can enjoy to use, - and feel a sense of ownership of, as you helped created it.