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Posts: 414 | Thanked: 109 times | Joined on Mar 2007 @ Silicon Valley
#391
Originally Posted by Skry View Post
ArchiMark, congrats



From the first post of this thread, under the section about Xorg:


Thanks.....I did go through your first page after getting Arch running and tried to follow our guidance....

Just checked and I did install n900-configs and xkeyboard-config-n900-git...



Your clock is off. Sometimes it gets reset. Use ntp or similar. A known issue, also mentioned in the first post, if you would have bothered to read it.
Actually, I did read it....and I have been re-setting clock periodically....





armv7h is not defined in the pkgbuild. You can use --ignorearch, or just add armv7h manually to pkgbuild. I doubt you want to compile firefox with your N900 though..
OK....thanks....




Midori
Thanks for the suggestion....


Yes. If it's not, source of the issue is the same that screws the clock and breaks the audio. Power off once from Alarm, boot in to it again, and everything should work.
OK, will try that.....

FWIW, same thing happened again this morning....
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Last edited by ArchiMark; 2013-05-03 at 23:51.
 
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#392
Originally Posted by ArchiMark View Post
Actually, I did read it....and I have been re-setting clock periodically....
...
FWIW, same thing happened again this morning....
Good boy!

Now, I, nor anyone else involved, does not know why the hardware initializing sometimes does not work. Some seem to have every boot go wrong, some are rarely experiencing any problems. This issue seems to be present with all newer kernels in some form, at least the ones I've tested, and I've seen others talk about it too.

Clock issue is easily solved by setting up ntp, or chrony. For charging (well, usb since charging fails because usb fails) and audio, errors are visible in dmesg, so in that case you know you need to power off and restart to make them work. For some, simple reboot seems to fix this, for some it needs systemctl poweroff and others may even need to remove battery to get their hardware going. Very annoying, I know.
 

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#393
Sorry, I haven't posted here for a few months because u-boot (the October release) refused to boot my Archlinux and I didn't want to reflash the whole phone because of that.

Anyhow, Arch is working again for since the last u-boot update.

I'm considering to hack up a little daemon in C which would dim the screen after a certain delay (I've already got a working bash script but that's merely a POC because the event loop needed after dimming the screen to fully re-enable the backlight once the screen has been tapped eats quite some CPU whilst the goal is obviously to *save* power.

The daemon will be based upon xssstate (just as is the bashscript I'm using right now):
http://tools.suckless.org/xssstate

I'm also considering working out an improved German keyboard layout offering additional chars like &, |, <, >, `, tabstop, delete, brackets and curly braces.
I had already done one of these, but I can't find it right now, so chances are that I might have to restart from scratch.

Skry: I'm having 2 problems with the kernel right now:

1. I'm using acpid with a custom script to disable the screen, lock the touchscreen and the keyboard, and switch off the keyboard LEDs and the backlight (and to undo all those things when the screenlock trigger is pulled again). However, acpid refuses to start up automatically as a daemon during boot because it can't find /proc/acpi/events (it only works when I start it manually after I've logged into my X11 session). Could you please enable CONFIG_ACPI_PROC_EVENT in the kernel config to fix this?

2. I have added the option "ubi.mtd=rootfs" to the kernel cmdline in the bootmenu item file and I'm using the following line in my /etc/fstab to mount Maemo's rootfs:
Code:
#ubi0:rootfs	/mnt/maemo	ubifs	rw,bulk_read,no_chk_data_crc	0	0
I did have to comment it out however, because for some odd reason, the kernel refuses to mount that that file system during boot.
When I remove the # after booting up, and mount it with "mount /mnt/maemo" (as root of course), everything works fine and I can't find any problem (unless I forget commenting out the line again before rebooting). Any ideas what where to look for the culprit?


As far as the crackling audio is concerned, I've found out that for some reason, lxmusic (uses xmms2d) does *never* crackle whilst VLC has garbled audio as soon as you've once had a 100% load peak on the CPU (I use "sha512 /dev/urandom" in a terminal window to trigger the problem).
lxmusic even plays the music without the slightest problem when the cpu is at 100% from my sha512 test above. VLC however has a ridiculously high CPU load to begin with, and often reaches already one of those fatal CPU load peaks when you just try to jump to another position in the same song. If the audio is once garbled, it will stay garbled until you stop the playback of the song (just pausing it isn't enough) and restart it again. The bug seems to occur regardles of whether pulseaudio or plain ALSA is used.
I suspect some bug in VLC or one of the libs VLC is using, but I haven't investigated this thouroughly enough to be sure.

regards
Pascal

Last edited by hardfalcon; 2013-05-04 at 23:52.
 

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#394
Originally Posted by Skry View Post
Good boy!

Now, I, nor anyone else involved, does not know why the hardware initializing sometimes does not work. Some seem to have every boot go wrong, some are rarely experiencing any problems. This issue seems to be present with all newer kernels in some form, at least the ones I've tested, and I've seen others talk about it too.

Clock issue is easily solved by setting up ntp, or chrony. For charging (well, usb since charging fails because usb fails) and audio, errors are visible in dmesg, so in that case you know you need to power off and restart to make them work. For some, simple reboot seems to fix this, for some it needs systemctl poweroff and others may even need to remove battery to get their hardware going. Very annoying, I know.
Thanks for all the info...

To clarify, I was referring to using the AC charger....I don't use USB for charging...

Also, can you please clarify what key or keys I need to press to type symbols such as '>' or '|', etc ?

Thanks!
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#395
Originally Posted by ArchiMark View Post
Also, can you please clarify what key or keys I need to press to type symbols such as '>' or '|', etc ?
For the US layout, this might help you:
http://static.tecnocino.it/tccellula...n900-rover.jpg

If you need other characters, you may wanna try a virtual keyboard (there are 1 or 2 in the repos or the AUR, and if you want something lightweight, there's also a virtual keyboard in the suckless tools collection:
http://tools.suckless.org/svkbd

Another option might be adapting your existing keymap:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Remapping_keyboard
 
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#396
Originally Posted by hardfalcon View Post
I'm considering to hack up a little daemon in C which would dim the screen after a certain delay
That will make you a hero.

Originally Posted by hardfalcon View Post
I'm also considering working out an improved German keyboard layout offering additional chars like &, |, <, >, `, tabstop, delete, brackets and curly braces.
If you feel like it, pull request on github once you've done it would be great.

Originally Posted by hardfalcon View Post
1. I'm using acpid with a custom script to disable the screen, lock the touchscreen and the keyboard, and switch off the keyboard LEDs and the backlight (and to undo all those things when the screenlock trigger is pulled again). However, acpid refuses to start up automatically as a daemon during boot because it can't find /proc/acpi/events (it only works when I start it manually after I've logged into my X11 session). Could you please enable CONFIG_ACPI_PROC_EVENT in the kernel config to fix this?
I have acpid starting just fine on boot, doing pretty much the same thing as you have it doing. That particular kernel option has been deprecated since, well, 2.6.something. Nevertheless, sure, I can enable it on next update, which is probably when Ubuntu 3.5.7.12 is out.

Originally Posted by hardfalcon View Post
2. I have added the option "ubi.mtd=rootfs" to the kernel cmdline in the bootmenu item file
...
for some odd reason, the kernel refuses to mount that that file system during boot.
Any ideas what where to look for the culprit?
I have this working, but I've set it up a bit differently. Since the ubi support is there as kernel module, I've setup the following:

In file /etc/modprobe.d/ubi.conf, I have
Code:
options ubi mtd=rootfs
softdep ubi pre: omap2
In addition, I have entry in fstab. This should be enough to get required modules loaded on boot, when filesystems in fstab are mounted.

Originally Posted by ArchiMark View Post
To clarify, I was referring to using the AC charger....I don't use USB for charging...
Well, you are plugging the charger cord to musb port of N900 aren't you?

Originally Posted by ArchiMark View Post
Also, can you please clarify what key or keys I need to press to type symbols such as '>' or '|', etc ?
https://github.com/archlinuxarm-n900...900-git#readme
 

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#397
Originally Posted by Skry View Post



Well, you are plugging the charger cord to musb port of N900 aren't you?

Yes....but thought you meant trying to charge via usb cable to pc....versus the AC charger...


Perfect....Thanks!!!
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#398
To follow up my post from december, here's an update

So I've never used the n900 I have before and then tried to install arch. I've used archlinux for quite a few years, but still this isn't as easy as I thought as I know too little about the n900 yet. For now I'll stick with maemo and learn about it. I also need all the GUI stuff to make phone calls, write sms etc. from maemo, but I don't have the time to convert all the Maemo packages to PKGBUILDs (altough that would be a really nice project ).

Then I have read about the Thumb2 architecture. I think that this would be great for alarm on n900, too, if someone has the time to rebuild all/most alarm packages with that architecture :> Should save lots of RAM, and with arch it is a lot easier to just rebuild packages (ABS and scripts for ABS!) than in debian/maemo imo.

It's also nice that you can just install chromium from the repos with alarm. This is really messed up in maemo.

But with some luck, I can join the alarm-on-n900 users in the future, when I either have more time or more telephone stuff is ported over and the installation guide gets a bit more detailed (what do you recommend for partitioning? it's easy to break maemo when partitioning :-/ )

I hope that this isn't too much offtopic here, just wanted to throw in my experience so far and a few ideas which might be helpful

I really like this project, keep going everyone!
 

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#399
Originally Posted by robotanarchy View Post
So I've never used the n900 I have before and then tried to install arch. I've used archlinux for quite a few years, but still this isn't as easy as I thought as I know too little about the n900 yet.
Well, personally I can't agree, as the installation is just a matter of installing a boot loader, partitioning and extracting a tarball.

Originally Posted by robotanarchy View Post
I also need all the GUI stuff to make phone calls, write sms etc. from maemo, but I don't have the time to convert all the Maemo packages to PKGBUILDs (altough that would be a really nice project ).
If it would only be that easy..
There are lots of closed source software in Fremantle. Some components were modified and modifications never got upstreamed. Generally stuff is quite old now and may be somewhat tricky to compile, at least without touching the source. Not saying it's like that with everything in Fremantle, nor that it is impossible, but merely stating it might be more complicated task than one would think of.

Originally Posted by robotanarchy View Post
Then I have read about the Thumb2 architecture. I think that this would be great for alarm on n900, too, if someone has the time to rebuild all/most alarm packages with that architecture :>
I've understood that with modern gcc, thumb2 is enabled by default on targets that support it.

Originally Posted by robotanarchy View Post
But with some luck, I can join the alarm-on-n900 users in the future, when I either have more time or more telephone stuff is ported over and the installation guide gets a bit more detailed (what do you recommend for partitioning?
Unfortunately, I don't have time (or that much interest anymore) to work with the phone functionality, so unless someone brave enough steps up and does something about it, there will be no progress. Same goes with pretty much everything.

I will not make installation guide any more detailed, every bit of information required is either here, wiki(s), or easily found from Google. Results of copy-paste-without-reading-or-understanding installations can be read throughout this thread. Just do your reading and I'm sure you can do it

Originally Posted by robotanarchy View Post
I hope that this isn't too much offtopic here, just wanted to throw in my experience so far and a few ideas which might be helpful

I really like this project, keep going everyone!
Not at all offtopic, quite the contrary. I'd be glad to see even more discussion.
 

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#400
This post has focus on graphical environments. It tries to collect a few configuration tips and open questions.

lxde

It just works. I find it too desktop-centric for the n900, though.

awesome

I have never used awesome before, but decided to give it a try based on Skry suggestion.

Out-of-the-box, it comes pre-configured to use Mod4 as its shortcut key, which usually maps to the windows key on the desktop, but is missing on the n900. The easiest fix is to edit .config/awesome/rc.lua and change Mod4 to Mod5, but I find this far from ideal as it makes the keyboard messier.

Please share your awesome tweaks to make it more comfortable in the n900 keyboard.

enlightenment

It fits nicely in the environment; see the screenshot. Out-of-the box, though, the keyboard does not work apart from letters.

Using a terminal, I had to re-apply the keyboard configuration once inside e17:
Code:
setxkbmap -model nokiarx51
This can be automated by creating a .desktop file in /etc/xdg/autostart/ with the following contents:
Code:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Fix keyboard settings
Exec=setxkbmap -model nokiarx51
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Then add this to the autostart application in the settings menu. With this configuration the keyboard works, with the exeption of ctrl+blue and shift+blue combinations. If someone knows how to improve the keyboard usage under e17, please share your tips.

weston

It loads if invoked as:
Code:
weston --backend=fbdev-backend.so
It requires calibration to be usable, and my desktop was upside-down. Moreover, the tablet-shell crashes when I try to load it. The shell works.

In any measure, I have no experience with weston, so please post your tips.
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