What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

The first Fremantle device will soon be shipping. But many of us still intend to get more life out of our N8x0 NITs. There may yet be an opportunity to get some components of Diablo opened up:

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=284
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=292

Please identify one or two components of Diablo you would like opened up and, most importantly, constructive reasons why you want it opened up. What use cases would be enabled and what would you do if you had full access to the software?

(no hardware related issues please, such as WiFi and graphics drivers - those are already identified and well documented)

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

The stylus keyboard input method. Not because it needs fixing in Diablo (it's as close to perfect as it can be IMHO), but so that it can be ported to Fremantle (where the available input methods leave much to be desired, all covered in other threads) and possibly Mer. Use cases: much more usable command line work, editing code (or even just discussing commands and code in chat/email), any input use case that involves alternating between numbers and alphabetic characters a lot, multilingual input.

(Once the N900 launch dust settles down, it'd be nice of Nokia to clear the backlog in http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages - last answer over 10 months ago).

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

I want to see the RTComm Beta (telepathy-haze) integrated into the core RTComm system, and I would like the community to be able to take over the maintenance of that system.

Sure, telepathy and telepathy-haze are OSS, but I'm pretty sure there's lots of closed bits in there that I'd love to see opened up.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

I don't know if this is in Mer, but it would be essential there, particularly for those of us with N800's/770's.

(In fact, isn't it opened already? How could Stskeeps et al be creating Mer without it?)

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

No, we use him-arabic and hildon examples. Some features missing such as gestures etc.

We're switching to thumb keyboard only in Fremantle style for 0.17.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Not to mention it's S-L-O-W

Et tu Brute? :-(

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

+1 for the stylus keyboard.

I got so used to it that I can almost peck at it as quickly as I can type on a normal keyboard. :D

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

WHY?

That's horrible news for those of us who like the stylus keyboard! "Et tu, Brute?" is right.

I thought a major point of Mer was so that we could keep using our N800's, etc. Eliminating the stylus keyboard on the N800 would make it virtually useless to me. I'm positive that most N800 users rely on the stylus keyboard over the thumb keyboard. I haven't used Mer yet as it's too rough for my needs and abilities. But if it won't have a stylus keyboard, then I'm never going to use Mer.

What's going on? I'm really baffled and rather upset by this news. Why is the Mer team dropping something so essential to the old hardware?

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Nooooooooo! Please don't do that. I love the stylus keyboard.

If it is for some reason necessary to switch to thumb keyboard, can't it just be set to be the default keyboard, while still giving the user the option to switch to the stylus keyboard?

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

It seems to work at a decent speed for me, at least in 0.16testing6.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Oh God.. another vote from me for the stylus keyboard. I raaaarely use the thumb-keyboard and I rarely have my bluetooth keyboard with me. I absolutely REQUIRE the stylus keyboard. for my N800.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

I absolutely REQUIRE the stylus keyboard. for my N800, also!

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

I would hate to lose the stylus keyboard. The stylus keyboard gives such fast access to letters, digits and a pretty good range of symbols.

Even on the N810, I use the stylus keyboard more than the slide-out keyboard.

Regards,
Roger

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Haven't had a chance to play with 0.16 yet (installed it and gave up when I couldn't configure WPA), but more specifically on 0.15 it took a long time to switch modes (either shift or language switch).

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

back in the n800 days, I used the stylus keyboard for some things (vi, notes, email authoring) ... but I used the thumb keyboard for others (mainly IMs). For some things, the stylus keyboard was better, and for others, the thumb keyboard was better.

My opinion would pretty much be: definitely make sure you have the capability for _both_. I can't imagine Mer being successful, on devices that have no physical keyboard, if it can't do both stylus and thumb keyboard input.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Oh dear, I made talk.* explode.

Can a moderator please move this sub-discussion into Alternatives and name it "I DEMAND STYLUS KEYBOARD IN MER" or something along those lines? This thread about opening things in Diablo is way too important for this discussion to happen within it.

First off, let's operate with the principle of less talking more doing. If you want stylus keyboard support, one of you should sit down, look into Hildon Input Method (Framework) differences between Diablo and Fremantle HIM(F). At that point, you suggest a fix, we add it to the distribution, done deal.

You have no vendor but this community itself. Find someone who can do it and do it. If not, we can't have stylus keyboard.

Story is that someone removed stylus keyboard support from HIMF in Fremantle (which was completely unneeded in my humble opinion).

Reasoning for thumb keyboard (and yes, I think a stylus keyboard is excellent in X-Chat or X-Term):

The UI doesn't lend itself to stylus keyboard and I don't think Fremantle apps expect to be squeezed.

We have been lagging behind in HIM versions (stuck at Diablo versions) for ages now, with the problems that come with that.

We have excellent open source thumb keyboards now and ability to make many different types (see https://bugs.maemo.org/attachment.cg...56&action=view )

Besides that, it's trivial to recompile the old HIM packages and use them..

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

You're right, after pressing shift, it does take its sweet time to update the keys to uppercase.

I think the wireless configuration issues were fixed in 0.16testing6 (I can now connect to a hidden SSID, which I couldn't do in the previous ones.)

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Good point!

If we would go back to the main topic, this all started because of a request to open up the source for the stylus keyboard, which would enable it to be ported to Fremantle.

Since you want to remove the stylus keyboard from Mer for it to be more like Fremantle, that is more of a reason to request to open up the stylus keyboard source, since if it will be in Fremantle, then it would be in Mer as well.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

i know its a pipe dream, but the connectivity controller would be nice, so that some itchy bugs could be fixed...

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Let me be clear. We are not asking that these components of Diablo are opened up so that they can be used in Fremantle. If Nokia wanted the stylus keyboard (or any other component) to be in Fremantle, it would be in Fremantle already and we are not trying to circumvent that decision. Opening up will allow us to troubleshoot and support Diablo, extending the useful life of N8x0 tablets and Diablo to the community.

See
http://wiki.maemo.org/Diablo_Community_Project

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

booooo!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Sorry, I did not mean to circumvent any decisions of the UI design team of Fremantle, though a stylus keyboard as a Community addon, would be a welcome addition.

Also since extended support for N8x0 devices, is mostly going to be provided by Mer, opening the source of the stylus keyboard, would be a tremendous boost to the usefulness of the devices, especially the N800.

It would also be useful even in Diablo itself, to add more features to it, for example; tweaking the word completion, or dictionaries, or adding a whole bunch of other useful plugins.

Also then instead of making the Arabic keyboard a whole other input method, if we had the source then those languages might be able to be added directly into the original one.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

No problem, all's good. :)

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Back to the original topic, I've been having a hard time making a request. Reasons:
1. I'm not a Linux developer and will have very limited ability to do anything myself.
2. It's hard to figure out what functionality is associated with closed source packages. Thanks, lma for that link, but I'll still make mistakes.
3. These FiF bugs that bother me... some of them could be fixed by simply using third-party apps instead. I don't have any special affinity to the built-in apps EXCEPT that they automatically tie together. File Manager launches media player not (insert name of third party program). Would it be more productive to allow users to specify which default program is launched (assuming this is even possible) for a specific file type and just ditch the closed-source apps? Would that kill off a whole slew of problems?

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

on 3, look into dbus-switchboard...

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Is there a list of what things are and aren't opened up from Diablo? (and if there's a schedule to open up more of them once Freemantle and the N900 are released)

Not just software, but also look&feel type stuff (icons and logos from the basic UI themes, etc.)?

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Are you talking about something other than this?

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Well, the list you linked to seems incomplete, as it doesn't contain the stylus keyboard (unless it's under some name I can't decode like osso-libXXX). And that omission makes me think the list may be even more incomplete.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

i would agree that the keyboard seems to be missing from said list...

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Apparently nobody cared if it was open source as long as it was there, it was that good :-)

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

The Fremantle release contains many open components that were closed (or their equivalents) in Diablo. But no new components are planned to be opened in Diablo because of the Fremantle.

To make things easy and operative, we will listen the Mer project since they have a clear goal and have shown commitment and certain developer power to achieve it. Stskeeps & co, can you share the top 3 closed Diablo components that you would find useful to have access to the code? 3 at most, and we can look at new cases as soon as current cases are solved or well on its way.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

I am confused by two things. Can you answer them please?

First, you say no Diablo components are planned to be opened, and then you ask for 3 closed Diablo components useful to Mer. Since Mer is an open project, this seems inconsistent.

Second, why is Fremantle the reason you don't want to open Diablo components? Diablo is EOL, dropped in lieu of Fremantle. Aren't Diablo components less commercially viable to Nokia than Fremantle components?

Thanks.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

extended use of maemo4 over maemo5/mer equals slower move over to maemo5 as a platform.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

I said, or wanted to say, that no Diablo components will be opened because of Fremantle. They may be opened because of Diablo community editions, Mer or whatever other good reasons you find.

Opening components takes time. Sometimes a lot of time. This is the main reason for being conservative.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

IMO, the obvious 3 would be GPS, BME, and (now) GLES... everything else can be replaced, but those 3 are essential.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

OK, so - this is my current list for N8x0. It is the top 3 things that constantly annoy a bit when dealing with these devices on a technical level.

1) Going through with https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4874 - documentation of the CAL area.

Community has shown that it can make it's own libcal implementation and asks to have documentation to avoid breaking things. We constantly run into libcal issues when building lower level system software such as DSME and others and we would like access to write why the system lifeguard rebooted for instance without risking breaking things. Having proper information on how to read and write safely to the area is key, the deeper specifics of each element less so.

2) Open sourcing retutime - it is a major component in sense of dealing with RTC on the device and alarms and it would be good to have this tiny but important binary opened.

3) Not so much open sourcing.. but some way to get patches into gpsdriver and released a fixed binary containing fixes for:

* Requirement that user is /home/user
* Serial line handling by gpsdriver that breaks under recent kernels (there was a thread somewhere on it) - this causes issues with getting on to later kernels.

This is what bothers on a very low level regarding this specific hardware.

The rest (using binaries) I hope, in time, would be covered through http://wiki.maemo.org/Token_based_access_restriction which is getting implemented on maemo.org this month to be able to demonstrate.

This is my own list and what bothers me as maintainer of the HW repo for N8x0 for Mer. - I would like to hear what the community SSU people say as well.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Thanks. Community SSU is currently considering

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3199

and various other UI elements

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

Again, all that UI stuff can be easily replaced. Even CAL can be ignored/replaced if necessary in the end. Hardware support cannot be easily replaced without a LOT more work reverse engineering, documenting, and reimplementation.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

I guess everything that prevents other OS (Android or Ubuntu) on the legacy devices has to be opened. I guess it's sound, GPS and such things.

Also I would be happy if someone could backport the N900 browser to my N810.

Re: What do you want opened up in Diablo?
 

(N810) sound has been part of Linux-OMAP for a while at least. AFAIK, the only hardware left is GPS, BME, and GLES.