I've received encouragement to continue my "impressions" series, so I shall for now, at least as far as I have something to say. Today's episode features bugs that belong in the 'zilla, really. I'll try and stick them in later today, when I'm hopefully less tired (if they're not up already). This flow is easier to write for now, and at least we get some written record right away, no?
So. Bugs. Kernel bugs, even. These ones actually took me a bit by surprise, as I did expect stuff like USB and memory cards to mostly work. I still managed to suppress panic, and studied the issues a bit yesterday so I could do a proper writeup and bug reports. MicroSD. I started copying a bunch of music onto the microSD with scp, but pretty quickly into the process I hit an I/O error on writing to the card. Restoring predictable behaviour seemed to require a reboot. Tried again. Soonish, I/O error. Limited scp to 500 kbps (-l 500). I/O error. Limited scp to 100 kbps. Everything works fine (well, writes to the microSD work fine, we'll get to the other snag I hit at this point next). So, apparently the sd driver has some bugs that exhibit themselves under non-light loads. And the other thing. Some time into the transfer, the Neo started disconnecting from the USB bus, disrupting USBnet. The host sees it as a bona fide USB disconnect. Unplugging and replugging the USB cable helps to reinitialize the usbnet, but the problem repeated itself every few minutes. Tried different ports on the computer, and one on my monitor's hub, plus different cables, with the same result. Didn't think to check Neo's dmesg yesterday, and the bug has not yet reproduced itself today (the Neo is doing heavy usbnet I/O here right now to try and trigger something). Someone (I forget who, sorry) on the IRC channel said having had similar problems, and suggested that the Neo may be overloading the USB host, drawing too much current, causing the bus to reset. May be, I don't know; the host's dmesg merely said "USB disconnect", though, nothing about the reason. As these bugs have presented themselves, one has mysteriously vanished: I can now unmount the microsd card without umount complaining about inappropriate ioctl for device. I have done nothing to fix this, but there it is. As an aside, played around a bit with running remote X apps on the Neo, to get some feel of the possibilities. Ran things like glines, dopewars, firefox, openoffice... Ok, the OO.org was just for the hell of it, but Firefox was actually useful. Tried also changing screen orientation with xrandr in that context, as browsing is more convenient that way. (And yes I have good eyes ;) Anyway, while doing this, it really did strike me that this is not just for kicks, but running remote X apps _does_ concretely increase the uses for the Neo. Not perhaps everyone's piece of cake, and not something you want to be doing over GPRS. Still, I can see myself using the Neo sometimes as an X terminal eg. on the couch at home over Bluetooth, or a random wifi hotspot on the move (come GTA02). I have 2M upstream at home, have run X apps over that before, and the VGA resolution helps limit bandwidth requirements. Still haven't dared take the plastic off the screen except to peek in. Looking into screen protectors, but premade ones seem to be by handset model, not by size. Asked pdair.com, no go. Query now at pdascreenprotectors.com if they happen to have a suitable size or can produce one. FIC should do these things come mass market as well. I very much don't like the idea of wear and tear on not-easily-replaceable parts over this beautiful display. Oh, and while playing some of the oggs I copied onto the Neo, the quality of the speakers surprised me. Of course one dares not talk about hifi with mobile speakers, but still, it's better than I expected; I shant be ashamed to demo a piece of music out loud on the Neo. I hear one of the speakers will have to go for GTA02, so the wifi will fit, but that's no biggie; if one wants stereo from a handset, one wants headphones anyway. Still using these: uImage-2.6.21.6-moko10-r1_0_0_2388_0-fic-gta01.bin openmoko-devel-image-fic-gta01-20070728081358.rootfs.jffs2 Moko on. -- Mikko Rauhala - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/> Transhumanist - WTA member - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/> Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.singinst.org/>
