You are right, for many folks the smaller the image file the more attractive the proposition of easy mer / debian becomes. Anyway, I just figured out how to expand the size of an existing image so I can do that as needed.

I don't want to give up on Abiword yet... though, you are absolutely right in that it looks hopeless! :-)

--denis

Today i'll test the latest KDE 4. it might be usable now, when Qt 4.5 is available . So, how about KOffice? Anybody tested? I will propably test it along KDE, but i have no idea if KOffice would be any better than OOo. Should it be better than Abiword?

Qole,

I played a bit more with Abiword... one way to trigger the high cpu condition is by invoking the hildon virtual keyboard either within Abiword (with a document loaded up) or within a concurrently running app. I tried using an external bluetooth keyboard and it was worse: soon as keyed some input Abiword would crash. With the matchbox keyboard that you provide things work ok. Wonder how things behave with the N810? Anyway, a combination of issues between mer's handling of the hildon input method and likewise with abiword is doing us in! Anyway, maybe things improve with future releases of mer...

--denis

Ok folks, here's the new image file. It has OpenOffice3 with Hildon keyboard support, Gnumeric, and Epiphany with the latest OpenJDK6 Java. I think things are shaping up nicely...

Image File: ubuntu-mer-java-img-v2.tar.bz2
Partition tarball: ubumer-ooo-epi-gnum.tar.bz2

This leaves you with 326 MB of free space in the 1.1 GB image file.

Indeed!

So far, so good with this new image! The Epiphany browser, though, has its rough edges... managed to freeze my n800 once, another time it went into a cpu loop at startup. The much faster Midori browser is there, but has no java and the virtual kbd only works on the URL bar.

Any new technical bits in this image that perhaps you ought to document in your blog entry on coonfiguring an easy-mer image from scratch?

Best,

--denis

Just a quick update before I go to bed. I thought I'd try to update the Java components because I noticed they bumped the version number slightly and they just added the icedtea-6-jre-cacao package:

Sounds good, no? Well, it seems that my attempts sadly fell into the Not Fixing Things That Aren't Broken category. Maybe later.

delaroca: Just a note about the virtual keyboard; in the Tools > Settings of the stylus keyboard (bottom left corner on my kbd), I found that if I disabled "Launch finger keyboard with [centre d-pad button]", then I could pop up the keyboard with the centre button on fields that don't cause the keyboard to pop up. Does this work for you, too?

EDIT: Nevermind; it doesn't work on Midori's web form fields. But it does on Mozilla browsers like Epiphany. (I haven't had Epiphany crash like that on me, BTW)

EDIT2: Getting the Epiphany extensions package (with things like adblock and greasemonkey) took a bit of fancy apt-footwork. The key is to use the version of python-gtk2 in the Ubuntu repository, not the one in the Mer repository...

And I understand what you're asking, delaroca; you want to know what I did to get OpenOffice to install in such a small footprint. Me too. I think I'll have to go back and do it again, taking notes this time.

This is an interesting development; what's changed? Perhaps I am now booting to Matan's hacked movable-windows Matchbox, whereas before I switched to his version without rebooting? I don't know. More data points welcome here!

I really think this is more like what we'll see under Fremantle with GTK apps.

Yes about the virtual keyboard option, it happened that's how I have my tablet configured from day one... and there seem to be places even in ooo3 where this trick gives a working virtual keyboard.

Actually, I wasn't quite asking about the surgery you did to trim the size of the image as much as how you actually take an original mer rootfs and turn into an easy-mer rootfs... the recipe on your blog is still valid, no?

Kudos for the minimal size of this v2 of the easy-mer image... after doing a bunch of locales I needed, and the usual apt-get update and then apt-get autoremove / autoclean I even managed to recover a little more space. So you truly outdid yourself this time. Maybe at some point you can write some notes on the magic you did!

Is it normal that clicking on ooo3's menus takes a tad of time... enough delay that I fond myself tapping once or twice more until the menu pops up... I get the impression that menu activation in say Gnumeric and Midori is a lot quicker. I still to try running ooo3 at max cpu speed and see what difference that makes.

As you suggested previously, I am adding ttf fonts via /home/user/,fonts and everything is working well with ooo3... I suppose that I should keep from adding to many fonts, no?

Best,

--denis

Qole,

I briefly went back to easy-debian. I was surprised at how quick OpenOffice2 runs, both launching and working on docs. It makes me think that this version is better suited to the resources of our tablets.
Abiword, albeit an earlier version does appear to work ok in easy-debian.

EDIT: Re libgtkstylus with ooo3, is it possible at all to "select text" and then right-click (tap and hold) to pop-up the formatting menu? The right-click unfortunately deselects the text... in Abiword, you can actually select text, then separately do a right clck and the selected text remains selected... I suppose with ooo3 the suspect is the Gtk plugin used on easy mer? But ooo2 exhibits the same behaviour... and abiword 2.6.4 deselects text soon as you do the right-click.

--denis

With OOo 2.4, debernardis and I spent a few man-hours optimizing things so it started very quickly. With OOo 3.0, I think those optimizations don't work anymore. And I can't find any good optimizations online. I had Java enabled, but disabling it doesn't help. It still takes over two minutes to start 3.0 for me... A bit saddening, because it is so much nicer looking, with the pop up keyboard and the hildon theme...