2008.8 raster + zecke, great useability, and remaining flaws
First of all i want to thank raster for his _great_ 2008.8 image, especially for the keyboard. (In fact i didn't recognize much more changes, but im playin with it for 2 days now, so i'm sure i didn't see a lot) And zecke for his _great_ temporary repository for 2008.8. Without you we were nothing ;) (an of course big thanks to all other devs as well) These two make the freerunner actually useable as my daily phone with some small drawbacks i can live with for now. I was somewhat unsure if i could use it as a phone when flashing and trying the vanilla images of the various distros, but finally i'm very impressed by all your work. All of the images show big potential and promise a great future with lot of diversity and openness. I'm sure as soon as the whole bunch of freerunner buyers starts developing we will get an even more impressive and mature platform. Just to sum _my_ big flaws i discoverd in my first 2 days which somewhat annoy me: 1. Unstable suspend The phone tends to go to a sleeping beauty sleep and never wake up again for the next 100 years. (No call, no powerbutton, no nothing wakes it up, even tried to kiss it awake ^^, The kings of ancient times would have loved it if sleeping beauty had a battery to rip out of her back to reboot her) I just disabled suspend for now, as the battery lasts for about 6-8 hours when the screen is blanked. Thats enough for me, as i'm just jumping between computers my whole day where i can plug the FR. Remaining problem with this setup, even when the screen is locked, the display switches on when something touches it (pocket). Which reduces the battery life to about the half (calucated myself with output of battery_current_now). Idea: Would be nice if we could have a blank mode which only switches on the display with the aux button. If screen not locked - touch switches on, If screen locked - touch nothing - aux unlocks and switches on. Question: Is it somehow possible to disable screen touching manually and maybe script the event of the aux button in 2008.8 to reenable it? 2. Voice echo As some people already mentioned on the list, callers hear their echo, in addition to that when i play around with state files i tend to hear myself when talking (through the speaker, not as usual ;). I already fiddled around with alsa a bit (Control.5 'Mono Playback Volume') helped a bit, but not a lot. I thought that this should reduce speakervolume, which if my ears aren't completely crappy it didn't at all. Instead of that, if i push it to values smaller than 70 the other person doesn't hear me anymore. Why does a control named 'Mono Playback Volume' influence the recording of my voice? o.O I think the main reason for the echo is the loud speaker (i can hear it when the phone is a half meter away on my table if the other person speaks loud) which resubmits the other voice again. Did someone manage to get rid of this echo and how? (i already followed the trac ticket with only little benefit) Is there any detailed documentation what the alsa controlls really do as their name seems completely misleading? I will play around on my own when i have time and try to figure out which of the alsa controls really put down the speaker volume and which will help to reduce the echo. I'll let you know the results if any. Maybe some more reliable .state files should be included in the images, rather than the ones which are shiped now. 3. 2008.8 keyboard This is no issue which hits me because i use rasters image. But i, and i think a lot of other people would love to see the keyboard of rasters image on 2008.8. Either as default or changeable via illume-config. I also would love to have the qerty button visible by default. Despite that im very happy with the current status of the software, sure there are some glitches there and some bugs there, but i expected that and like it to see the steps forwared and have to hack a bit to get what i want. Big big congratulations to all the folks at openmoko and FIC, thanks for all the work you put into this and spare time you sacrificed for making this possible. I hope, we, the users and parttime developers and testers, can give a lot back to this project, that you can watch your child grow and be proud of it. Which is what we, as oss developers, really want for our projects. rgds daniel ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: keyboard (was Re: 2008.8 raster + zecke, great useability, and remaining flaws)
On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 7:38 PM, Harald Welte [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 06:21:19PM +0200, Daniel Selinger wrote: 3. 2008.8 keyboard This is no issue which hits me because i use rasters image. But i, and i think a lot of other people would love to see the keyboard of rasters image on 2008.8. Either as default or changeable via illume-config. I also would love to have the qerty button visible by default. I hope not being recognized as a troll now (my history with the project helps). I believe it is almost foolish not to have that keyboard button by default. This phone is still something primarily to be used by hardcore geeks, and please show me the linux geek who doesn't use the keyboard here or there with some application that doesn't hook into the automatically-show-keyboard magic? I wish for this kind of question there would be an easy-to-be-configured polling mechanism that could be put up at some openmoko.org website. I think there are many of those issues where all kinds of people inside openmoko inc. could benefit from a very quick-to-read opinion of their user base without reading through tons of threads of discussions that get time-consuming and boring over time. Just my 2 cents, -- - Harald Welte [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://openmoko.org/ Software for the world's first truly open Free Software mobile phone ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community I agree ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: keyboard (was Re: 2008.8 raster + zecke, great useability, and remaining flaws)
Harald Welte wrote: I hope not being recognized as a troll now (my history with the project helps). I believe it is almost foolish not to have that keyboard button by default. This phone is still something primarily to be used by hardcore geeks, and please show me the linux geek who doesn't use the keyboard here or there with some application that doesn't hook into the automatically-show-keyboard magic? I wish for this kind of question there would be an easy-to-be-configured polling mechanism that could be put up at some openmoko.org website. I think there are many of those issues where all kinds of people inside openmoko inc. could benefit from a very quick-to-read opinion of their user base without reading through tons of threads of discussions that get time-consuming and boring over time. Just my 2 cents, +1 Even if the core applications can (and should!) implement the show-me-the-keyboard mechanism, I don't think it would be trivial to implement it for other (ported) apps like, say, Battle for Wesnoth or Numpty Physics (yes, I do realize those are all games ;) ). Just my two cents, too :) Regards, Konstantin ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: 2008.8 raster + zecke, great useability, and remaining flaws
On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:21:19 +0200 Daniel Selinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] babbled: First of all i want to thank raster for his _great_ 2008.8 image, especially for the keyboard. (In fact i didn't recognize much more changes, but im playin with it for 2 days now, so i'm sure i didn't see a lot) And zecke for his _great_ temporary repository for 2008.8. Without you we were nothing ;) (an of course big thanks to all other devs as well) These two make the freerunner actually useable as my daily phone with some small drawbacks i can live with for now. I was somewhat unsure if i could use it as a phone when flashing and trying the vanilla images of the various distros, but finally i'm very impressed by all your work. All of the images show big potential and promise a great future with lot of diversity and openness. I'm sure as soon as the whole bunch of freerunner buyers starts developing we will get an even more impressive and mature platform. thanks very muchly. i hope in future to contribute on the community side - though my focus will be working on OE, not OM and thus i'll be building with/on FSO. working on ASU (2008.08/09) means i will always need to maintain a fork and battle with whatever om's design team decides is to be for om, so it's easier to work with FSO as i want to focus on the community - i.e. us - nerds. the actual userbase of the freerunner. :) Just to sum _my_ big flaws i discoverd in my first 2 days which somewhat annoy me: 1. Unstable suspend The phone tends to go to a sleeping beauty sleep and never wake up again for the next 100 years. (No call, no powerbutton, no nothing wakes it up, even tried to kiss it awake ^^, The kings of ancient times would have loved it if sleeping beauty had a battery to rip out of her back to reboot her) there's 2 issues here. 1. yes sometimes it doesnt wake up at all - ever. sometimes it never sleeps! qpe holds the apm suspend process up (probably due to gsm modem issues in trying to set the modem to standby mode). so you can plug in with usb and ssh in and its alive - but screen stays unlit as the suspend process is hung. so you will ant to check which is which. i do say - since i removed my sim card... suspend/resume is much more reliable! :) I just disabled suspend for now, as the battery lasts for about 6-8 hours when the screen is blanked. Thats enough for me, as i'm just jumping between computers my whole day where i can plug the FR. Remaining problem with this setup, even when the screen is locked, the display switches on when something touches it (pocket). Which reduces the battery life to about the half (calucated myself with output of battery_current_now). Idea: Would be nice if we could have a blank mode which only switches on the display with the aux button. If screen not locked - touch switches on, If screen locked - touch nothing - aux unlocks and switches on. Question: Is it somehow possible to disable screen touching manually and maybe script the event of the aux button in 2008.8 to reenable it? yeah. this is because e/illume uses x's screenblanking infra. the problem here is - you can't stop x from turning on backlight on a touch. i may need to change this to bypass x and talk to backlight directly - it's really ugly and makes things much less portable with the same codebase from device to device - but may just be a necessary evil. 2. Voice echo As some people already mentioned on the list, callers hear their echo, in addition to that when i play around with state files i tend to hear myself when talking (through the speaker, not as usual ;). I already fiddled around with alsa a bit (Control.5 'Mono Playback Volume') helped a bit, but not a lot. I thought that this should reduce speakervolume, which if my ears aren't completely crappy it didn't at all. Instead of that, if i push it to values smaller than 70 the other person doesn't hear me anymore. Why does a control named 'Mono Playback Volume' influence the recording of my voice? o.O I think the main reason for the echo is the loud speaker (i can hear it when the phone is a half meter away on my table if the other person speaks loud) which resubmits the other voice again. Did someone manage to get rid of this echo and how? (i already followed the trac ticket with only little benefit) Is there any detailed documentation what the alsa controlls really do as their name seems completely misleading? I will play around on my own when i have time and try to figure out which of the alsa controls really put down the speaker volume and which will help to reduce the echo. I'll let you know the results if any. Maybe some more reliable .state files should be included in the images, rather than the ones which are shiped now. 3. 2008.8 keyboard This is no issue which hits me because i use rasters image. But i, and i think a lot of other people would love to see the keyboard of rasters image on 2008.8. Either as default or
Re: keyboard (was Re: 2008.8 raster + zecke, great useability, and remaining flaws)
in many ways it's good to know i won't be the meat in the sandwich between community and company going forward. :) Don't worry Raster you're not the meat in the sandwich, i can see most of the things you do helps us, but somehow the design department doesn't like the good changes you make, and i can see that if the design department keeps making foolish decisions they'll very soon become that meat in the sandwich and be crushed until there's no meat in the sandwich, then there will not be foolish decisions anymore and we can have a poll on the decisions, that's the open way of doing it. ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
