Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

Worth its own thread? Or should we just add on to this?

For myself, I don't know about three months, but long-term, in a nutshell, I would ideally want one of the following:

• Everything I do in Diablo today (web, RSS, podcast/audio, GPS, word processor, spreadsheet) in an OS with more of a future & Qt 4.6. - OR -
• Diablo dual-booting to an OS with more of a future (ideally with Qt 4.6) - OR -
• Diablo cloned to an SD card with Qt 4.6

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

This is what I would like to see.

1. Assist LMA and others and get as many bugfixes and enhancements which can be squeezed into the community SSU. It may even be beneficial to split into two - fixes and enhancements. I would also suggest that if resources permit it may be advantagous to push smaller SSUs out as patches are available, rather than wait until the entire shopping list is complete - This will give a much needed feeling of progress and positiveness to the whole thing.

2. Work with Nokia and whoever to build a "Maemo4.5", with anything backported possible including (if possible) as these seem to be the things which do not rely on the extra hardware of the N900:
Panorama desktop
media player (including A2DP, and AVRCP if possible)
photos (specifically browsing, simple editing, and sharing)
calendar

These can remain as binary blobs if necessary, I think for the most part most N8x0 owners would like to see something rather than be hung up on 100% open and GPL etc.

If nothing else at the end of this I would like to see an updated diablo image with the community SSU slipstreamed, so that when a reflash was carried out all the upto date stuff was already in.

I hope some of this is
a) achieveable
b) realistic

Good luck and thanks for all the efforts both so far and in the future.

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

thank you very much for your work and your posts, Stskeeps.
"how would you like to see your N8x0 in 3 months?"
this is not necessarily directed at you, but since you are kind enough to ask -
i'd love to see the buggy nokia os2008 software (mediaplayer, email, etc.) finally fixed.
i understand why nokia might have wanted to see the tablet community dispersed as soon as possible, (and handing out n900s to key people could cynically be interpreted as a slick move to that effect), but regardless of how few of us are still here, i do think they still owe us fixing those bugs in some form.

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

Interesting. OK, back to the next three months. Stskeeps, I think my priorities would be these:

1. Do what needs to be done to keep the door open to "MeeGo on the N8x0".
2. Squeeze everything out of Diablo that can be squeezed. I know this isn't blue sky & exciting, but I think it could be highly appreciated by the community. And you might even get a bang out of having deliverables for a change. (Supposed to be a joke. ;) )
3. Work on "MeeGo on the N8x0". (I mean, how much can you do before the next code drop anyway?)

The only thing that worries me about #2 is that it seems like lma is doing all the he thinks is doable without Nokia's cooperation. I think someone already tried to go farther (SD69 maybe?) and was told he needed to make "business cases" for his requests. The implication was that Nokia's standard for said business cases was insurmountably high (and that NIT owners getting deeply pissed and buying Androids wasn't a sufficient case :) ).

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

Me too. Doing the same old stuff gets very old for me.

I can agree with this too. I'm just not able to spend much time around MeeGo / Maemo these days for exactly this reason.

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

I read the title of this thread and thought, my momma told me to stay away from nuclear accidents. Yet here I am on a weird sleep schedule and I thought I'd pop in and do a bit of rubber necking. Not as bad as I thought; just a small fender bender.

All I can conclude is that, stskeeps, you are one crazy mother f*cker. I know you were looking for feedback, but I would rather just leave words of encouragement and thanks. You're obviously a huge asset and I hope that MeeGo is as successful as I know you want it to be.

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

Digressing a bit, but for me the sad fact is that to this date there is no direct replacement for the N8x0s. If there was I would have pre-ordered it at full retail price the day it was announced (like the previous 3), while the N900 just didn't interest me even with the DDP discount.

It's not quite as simple as a straightforward CPU/RAM comparison. The N900/Fremantle combination is a whole different class of device to its predecessors, with quite significant differences in things like screen size, battery life, input methods, UI etc (and don't even get me started on dropped software features). Some people might prefer it, and that's fine (hey, other than having a Y chromosome I'm not even in the target group), but for a lot of uses the N8x0s are simply better and the N900 is not a valid upgrade path.

It's not just a matter of hanging on to old hardware either. I'm still using both of mine regularly (even when I had the N900 loan device), while I haven't even booted my 770 since (let me quickly grep my DHCP logs) August 2008.

Hopefully MeeGo will change things by bringing more interesting devices to the market, but for now an N8x0 is the best I can get my hands on :-)

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

In a dream world I would like:

• proper (kernel-independent) dual-boot. KEXEC might do it, or perhaps a more capable bootloader chained off NOLO
  
• a way to generate updated initfs images. Maybe some automatic machinery to which we can upload a tarball of eg updated kernel modules, bootmenu, extra binaries etc and then it overlays it on top of the proprietary stuff, does some size sanity checks and spits out an initfs-flasher deb in some appropriate repository.

In the longer term, IMHO the most imporant development would be getting as much of the hardware as possible supported in mainstream kernels.

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

For some reason I read dstmaster as "disaster" :)

Re: Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster
 

Agreed on both points.

As an example, the contents of the post on the port to the OMAP2 http://omappedia.org/wiki/Maemo_Getting_Started is good, with interesting work behind it. It would be significantly improved (for me at least) with a link at the front indicatiing which devices are/will ship with this processor.

To make the point more general, there are a lot of people who dip in and out of this technical world, and need a few more signposts along the way...