Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
Lets please be careful not to over-engineer. While Mike makes good points, we have this wonderful human social network we can depend upon as well. E.g., If I am downloading something from your machine, I can ask you to hold on a second until I finish. Let's take advantage of the fact that the kids are in the same community/school most of the time and not worry so much about corner cases until we have some more breathing room. -walter On 8/16/07, Mike C. Fletcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jim Gettys wrote: ... There seems to be no way to manually adjust the backlight level in ebook mode. What would be the policy for it? Leave it on all the time or dim down after some idle time? Also CPU (and wireless?) should go to suspend for most of time in ebook mode? We have code in at least our PDF viewer to literally do exactly this; as soon as the page is rendered and it is idle, it puts the machine to sleep. For the activity developers in the audience: This is (I believe) in the GIT read-activity/readactivity.py[1] module. The implementation uses the HardwareManager[2] service (set_kernel_suspend) exposed over dbus to directly send the kernel into suspended state. AFAICS there's no allowance for tracking whether something *else* might need the machine to be alive (e.g. a download or the like being done in the background). The same Manager object has controls for various operations such as changing brightness and the like. On the original topic of the thread (what the power manager should do): I'm guessing eventually we'll want some of the logic currently in the read activity to migrate into HardwareManager. That is, allow for signaling inhibit_suspend( ) and allow_suspend()[3], rather than directly setting suspend, such that a given activity can declare that it must be allowed to continue processing in the back-end. Then you'd want something like suggest_suspend() so that a foreground activity can tell the system hey, I don't expect to do anything for a second or two, if no-one objects, feel free to suspend. From there, a second level does a suggest-suspend from Sugar (or whoever) on no-cpu, no-network (other than the autonomous routing), no-input, for a given period. No opinion on where/how to put that. HardwareManager should likely send dbus events so that activities can watch for resume, suggested-suspend, or what have you and adjust behaviour accordingly. Example usage scenario: switch a per-second clock-updating timer to a per-minute timer. Hope this helps, Mike [1] http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/read-activity;a=blob;f=readactivity.py;h=3eeb858cc5ea1dc67a60faee90628100479509be;hb=HEAD [2] http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=hardware-manager;a=blob;f=hardwaremanager.py;h=3154b17553621cc41fa947cbff2756372e6e37ec;hb=HEAD [3] with allow-suspend happening automatically after a short-ish timeout if the activity doesn't re-assert the inhibition -- Mike C. Fletcher Designer, VR Plumber, Coder http://www.vrplumber.com http://blog.vrplumber.com ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
You have to remember that the kids using these machines might not yet know how to read, so just popping up a notice with a paragraph explaining the situation and Yes/No buttons isn't an ideal solution. -Don http://xarg.net/blog/one-entry?entry_id=20005 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-hackers/19991003.freebsd-hackers Word of the day: Bikeshedding I saw this word somewhere and did not know what it meant. It turns out to be an excellent word for describing a lot of what goes on in online communities. It comes from Parkinson's Law by C. Northcoate Parkinson. He describes how a planning board will approve spending millions of dollars to build an atomic power plant but if you go to them to get approval to build a bike shed they will argue endlessly. The problem being that the atomic power plant is so large, complex, and difficult to understand that no one can really argue about how exactly it is done. On the other hand, everyone knows what goes into a building a bike shed and so everyone feels qualified to argue about the details. For some reason, technical discussions seem to be particularly susceptible to bikeshedding. There was a great post by Poul-Henning Kamp on the freebsd-hackers list: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-hackers/19991003.freebsd-hackers which describes a particularly virulent attack they had on their list and submits a plea to avoid it in the future. I think just writing the code is a good antidote to engaging in the arguments in the first place. If the functionality is straightforward and easy to implement then just do it rather than argue about it. Most of the people spending their time arguing probably have enough inertia that they are not going to write any code and consequently, if you do have the initiative, the code itself is the most suitable response. As Poul-Henning Kamp said: I wish we could reduce the amount of noise in our lists and I wish we could let people build a bike shed every so often, and I don't really care what colour they paint it. Who knows, if you write enough code we might even end up with an atomic power plant (or for you greens in the audience, a lovely old growth forest). http://www.bikeshed.com/ Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change. Guylhem Aznar wrote: Hello, On 8/17/07, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lets please be careful not to over-engineer. While Mike makes good points, we have this wonderful human social network we can depend upon as well. E.g., If I am downloading something from your machine, I can ask you to hold on a second until I finish. Let's take advantage of the fact that the kids are in the same community/school most of the time and not worry so much about corner cases until we have some more breathing room. Yet thinking before implementing can easily overcome future problems. I believethe idea of inibitors for the various power schemes should not be overlooked since their benefits can be important. In your example, a download activity could make the suspend wait an additional minute or two, explaining the user than its request was noticed, won't happen until the download/upload is over, unless it is overriden. If people are in the same class, of course, but what if the person is several hops away on the mesh network? Moreover, this interesting idea could also be applied to video playback/screen rotation requests, explaining that the screen can't be rotated or the playback will stop, etc. There's a great potential in such examples to go beyond the traditionnal power management done in GNU/linux. But anyway, if you think these cases are so special and supporting them will take too much time, write a quick shell script to test the concepts, play with it, and see if it helps you or if it's just a waste of cpu cycles. PS I have some more suggestions (ex: a maximal suspend mode to carry the machine without using it) but on a computer I don't have here - I will post a message a little bit later. Guylhem ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
accessibilities first tests - many questions
Hello, As explained before, I started playing with the DCON (displaying test images in X, changing various parameters, etc) and other stuff. The results are interesting. For example, a black and white mode will backlight on, even if it reduces the percieved resolution, could be usefull to read at night, or for people with sigh problems who need high contrast. I am exploring other similar options. The only things I don't know yet how to do with the DCON : - how to disable the smoothing algorithm applied in color mode - how to reduce the framerate (for ex for ebook reading, but it could also be handy in text mode) I have done some shell scripts to test my stuff (ugly but handy, esp when you are only testing ideas) ; I will post them here when I will get back home for feedback. If someone can help with the smoothing/framerate, some quickdirty bash code to do it would help. Regarding power management, I have a problem with the DCON freeze before suspend to ram: the display looks like frozen, but when I query the freeze file just before and right after the suspend, I only get 0 while I should get 1. Can I also ask for some help there? Regarding the X being used, I am curious to know if there is a way to do live screen scaling (zoom function, where the whole screen is magnified) ? Ideally, it would be hardware managed, but that could also be done by software. See this if you don't know this function: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFQAqxoKyAE The idea would be to do as fast as possible for moving around, then when stopped on something, try to be as detailed as possible: http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2005-April/007640.html I am also wondering where/how the cursors are set. Matchbox theme is only changing some cursors. I found a sugar gtk theme fixing additional cursors as well, but it is not clear how everything interacts. That's because I am looking for a way to magnify the mouse cursor when a special keyboard sequence is pressed, to reveal where it is on the screen, along with a way of magnifying the whole screen to ease reading of content (ex: text from the internet, a small picture...) Finally, how can I interact in pen mode with the whole pad? Jim said it was possible, so I tried to run a cat on various /dev input devices, while moving my fingers on the left and right part around the zone used for the pointer. However, I can't generate any data. What's the problem ? Side question - is is possible to get data when two objects (ex: 2 fingers) are moving ? (either in the same surface, or one in the pen area mode and the other one in the mouse mode) Guylhem ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
Hello, On 8/17/07, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lets please be careful not to over-engineer. While Mike makes good points, we have this wonderful human social network we can depend upon as well. E.g., If I am downloading something from your machine, I can ask you to hold on a second until I finish. Let's take advantage of the fact that the kids are in the same community/school most of the time and not worry so much about corner cases until we have some more breathing room. Yet thinking before implementing can easily overcome future problems. I believethe idea of inibitors for the various power schemes should not be overlooked since their benefits can be important. In your example, a download activity could make the suspend wait an additional minute or two, explaining the user than its request was noticed, won't happen until the download/upload is over, unless it is overriden. If people are in the same class, of course, but what if the person is several hops away on the mesh network? Moreover, this interesting idea could also be applied to video playback/screen rotation requests, explaining that the screen can't be rotated or the playback will stop, etc. There's a great potential in such examples to go beyond the traditionnal power management done in GNU/linux. But anyway, if you think these cases are so special and supporting them will take too much time, write a quick shell script to test the concepts, play with it, and see if it helps you or if it's just a waste of cpu cycles. PS I have some more suggestions (ex: a maximal suspend mode to carry the machine without using it) but on a computer I don't have here - I will post a message a little bit later. Guylhem ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
On 15/08/07, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Fpr general comment and discussion, the following is a list of things cjb and I think should happen. What are we missing? Other opinions? Sorry for getting to the conversation late, it's been a busy week. Actions that OHM should do: o On momentary power button: turn off screen, suspend machine, leave keyboard and wireless on; keyboard/touchpad will cause instant on again. Yup. o On lid close on battery, should turn off keyboard, turn off screen Then should suspend to RAM, including disabling and powering down wireless Okay. o on lid close, on power, leave the machine on and running. Not turn off the backlight? o On lid open, turn on keyboard, reset keyboard, resume from suspend, turn wireless back on, tell NM to reassociate (maybe only after some delay), try previous association first, of course... Sure. o On ebook mode, should turn off keyboard Turn off as in twiddle some bit to power it down, or just stop the input events? o On lid open, should reset keyboard o on ebook to non-ebook mode, should reset keyboard How? o on external power supply on *or* off, should reset touchpad Which command? o rotate should probably be done by OHM. Totally agree. It's in the best position to enforce policy IMO. When we are suspended, and the battery wakes us up because it is low, then: For now, graceful shutdown after journal has been notified How do we notify the journal - OHM is system and the journal is session, no? May do hibernation if enough flash is available. Cool. Task: Tune the default DPMS parameters. Reset keyboard instructions are in trac. The big question is: how to do idle? X DPMS extension? X SS extension? cpuidle kernel patch, about to go mainline in Linux, with module to tell ohm the system has been idle? other ideas? In g-p-m svn I've been using the idletime extension for some time now. It works well, with a few little quirks, although it only gives the user-activity point of idle, rather than the machine state idle. Richard. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
Hi, On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 16:01 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote: When we are suspended, and the battery wakes us up because it is low, then: For now, graceful shutdown after journal has been notified May do hibernation if enough flash is available. I guess what we want here is to notify to each activity that they should save their state to the datastore. Correct? How much time do we have until the system really shuts off? Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Some discussion on education
Just as videophones have not taken off in industrialized nations, video chat is not a killer app. I have used teleconferencing as a business tool, and it will have a place in the XO program. But what we really need is quite different. There have been computers in schools for 30 years. But they have never been integrated into the curriculum, because it was impossible to make an assumption about how much computer time students would get, and it was impossible to make an assumption about what software would be available. Now we can create textbooks containing interactive models of phenomena. We can give children real-world datasets to analyze. We will have powerful data acquisition capabilities using the camera (including microscopy), and using the sound input port as a high-speed A/D converter feeding a digital oscilloscope, and so on. This gives us an opportunity and a responsibility to look at the curriculum anew. The time-honored divisions of subjects and sequences of ideas that made sense for paper-and-pencil learning do not necessarily make sense when the computer can do the heavy lifting. Just as one example, trigonometry used to be a semester course, and no doubt still is in many places. That probably made sense when surveyors in training had to learn to solve dozens of triangles a day with no greater aid than a book of function and log tables, but it is absurd in the age of scientific calculators and computers. The essential mathematical content of trigonometry can be reduced to two or three pages, including proofs. (It's not my opinion. Saunders Mac Lane complained about trig in Mathematics: Form and Function, after reducing it to less than three pages.) Calculus is still treated as a high-level high school subject, but primary school children can grasp the notion of the direction of a curve: just put a ruler up to any convex object. They can equally grasp the concept of the area under an arbitrary curve. Draw it on paper, cut it out, and weigh it. Leave the formulas and the proofs for later. When we have the basic ideas in place, we can use them for many purposes. Then when the students get to the calculations and proofs, they know what it's all about, and will grasp it much more readily. The Internet gives unequalled opportunities for language learning through online literature, songs, movies, mailing lists, chat rooms, voice broadcasts, Voice over IP, and video conferencing. We really have no idea how to take full advantage of all this. There is much more of this sort of thing. I think we need a separate list to discuss it properly. On 8/16/07, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, Elijah, http://squeakland.org/pipermail/squeakland/2007-August/003717.html This discussion might make you think that claiming a video chat app as the killer app is not a very compelling pitch as an educational project... video chat alone, not so useful. video chat combined with lots of other practical collaborative tools? pretty great, pretty humanizing, very supportive of lots of other activities. Thank you for the comment. While XO will have (if it is successful) a lot of off-school and recess time, the primary use case I thought should be the at school (even it is under tree). The video chat wouldn't match the latter very well. I don't say it is useless, but cannot be the killer app, and we shouldn't think so. If I understand correctly, the position of the OLPC is that making curriculum and organized materials are primarily the responsibility of the client governments. However, we, the software developers, should think about making software tools for developing these materials (yes, that should be possible on XO), rather than simples games that are only useful for 5 minutes each. -- Yoshiki ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar -- Edward Cherlin Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury WIRE AFRICA http//www.wireafrica.org/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/cherlin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
Walter Bender wrote: Lets please be careful not to over-engineer. While Mike makes good points, we have this wonderful human social network we can depend upon as well. E.g., If I am downloading something from your machine, I can ask you to hold on a second until I finish. Let's take advantage of the fact that the kids are in the same community/school most of the time and not worry so much about corner cases until we have some more breathing room. Perhaps I was unclear, I was referring to another program *on the same machine* needing the machine to remain active in order to complete a task. That is, things such as: * playing music in the background while you read * downloading a file from the school server which you need for homework while you are reading the assignment/textbook * recording an audio stream while you are taking notes in write (i.e. interviewing someone) * upgrading the OS/downloading updates while you are working in class that is, all single-user on a single-machine use cases. No social networks involved. These are all fairly common use cases. We see the same basic inhibit_suspend operation in media-players on Linux or Windows wrt screen savers. You don't want your machine going to sleep in the middle of recording your interview, so the recording activity needs a way to say hey, I'm working, don't go to sleep right now (assume we've got a signed activity that can do background record for a moment). I'm not saying that the implementation needs to be there today, I'm just saying that we likely need to eventually move toward an implementation that uses need-based signaling rather than direct manipulation of the whole computer state by any activity. Something as simple as a decorator icon on the home view, (e.g. a bed with a circle-plus-slash over it for western audiences) should be sufficient to let the user know which activity is inhibiting suspension. Hope that's clearer, Mike ... On the original topic of the thread (what the power manager should do): I'm guessing eventually we'll want some of the logic currently in the read activity to migrate into HardwareManager. That is, allow for signaling inhibit_suspend( ) and allow_suspend()[3], rather than directly setting suspend, such that a given activity can declare that it must be allowed to continue processing in the back-end. Then you'd want something like suggest_suspend() so that a foreground activity can tell the system hey, I don't expect to do anything for a second or two, if no-one objects, feel free to suspend. From there, a second level does a suggest-suspend from Sugar (or whoever) on no-cpu, no-network (other than the autonomous routing), no-input, for a given period. No opinion on where/how to put that. HardwareManager should likely send dbus events so that activities can watch for resume, suggested-suspend, or what have you and adjust behaviour accordingly. Example usage scenario: switch a per-second clock-updating timer to a per-minute timer. Hope this helps, Mike [1] http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/read-activity;a=blob;f=readactivity.py;h=3eeb858cc5ea1dc67a60faee90628100479509be;hb=HEAD [2] http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=hardware-manager;a=blob;f=hardwaremanager.py;h=3154b17553621cc41fa947cbff2756372e6e37ec;hb=HEAD [3] with allow-suspend happening automatically after a short-ish timeout if the activity doesn't re-assert the inhibition -- Mike C. Fletcher Designer, VR Plumber, Coder http://www.vrplumber.com http://blog.vrplumber.com ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Autoreinstallation now saves user directory by default.
Dears, I did exactly like the autoreinstallation wiki page, but the machine doesn't activate. I tried everything, but nothing. How can I active my board. Best regards, Gian C. Scott Ananian escreveu: On 8/15/07, Zephaniah E. Hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 04:32:53PM -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote: I've turned on the preserve the contents of the user's directory feature in the Autoreinstallation image, and updated the wiki instructions at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Autoreinstallation_image Does this/can this do ~root in addition to ~olpc? It does not. I'm not sure it's a good idea. It does, however, do all of /home. Do others on the list have strong feelings about what can/should/ought to live in /root? --scott ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Does sugar web browser support extensions?
Dan, I want to know better about the sugar web browser and learn how to create extensions for it (port some firefox extension too). I installed firefox2 in my XO emulated and I think every extension (addons) will work fine there (google bar works fine), but I think firefox2 is not the default browser and it will be a large software (size) to have installed in the real laptop (am I right?). Web activity is in python and you wrote that I should use pyxpcom. Can you tell me something about pyxpcom? sorry for my writing, I'm brazilian :) I may be talking a lot of stupid things because I'm learning about olpc, I hope you correct me thanks On 8/15/07, Dan Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 15:43 -0400, Samuel Klein wrote: what was the reason not to support firefox addons again? Well, it's not really a decision, but more of a side-effect. The best and most flexible embedding technology to use is pyxpcom. We're embedding a Gecko engine into a different app, and this is of course not firefox. We are not using XUL as the UI toolkit, which is likely what most firefox addons require. It's sort of like Epiphany. You can't put firefox addons into epiphany because epiphany is actually native and doesn't use XUL. We are shipping xulrunner though, so it's conceivable that whenever a xulrunner-based FF comes out it'll just run with the xulrunner we've got, but be completely unsugared. Dan firefox runs smoothly on my B4... and it's pretty great to have access to Google Gears, for instance. SJ On 8/14/07, Noah Kantrowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you mean normal Firefox add-ons. It does not. We use a simpler core called XULRunner. It does support extensions of a sort using PyXPCom, though I don't (yet) know much about those. --Noah On Aug 14, 2007, at 3:00 PM, Kleber Infante wrote: Hi all, I saw in a post that Sugar web browser does not support extensions. Is that true? If it´s true, what can be done? I would like to know how to install an extension in XO browser. I wanna try to port an Firefox extension to sugar browser. thanks ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Kleber Manoel Infante (Corujito) Bach. Ciências da Computação 2003 USP - São Carlos ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 12:57 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Hi, On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 16:01 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote: When we are suspended, and the battery wakes us up because it is low, then: For now, graceful shutdown after journal has been notified May do hibernation if enough flash is available. I guess what we want here is to notify to each activity that they should save their state to the datastore. Correct? How much time do we have until the system really shuts off? Heh. We'll probably have to have a protocol saying it's ok now. You'll potentially have seconds or up to a minute. - Jim -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 11:46 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote: On 15/08/07, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Fpr general comment and discussion, the following is a list of things cjb and I think should happen. What are we missing? Other opinions? Sorry for getting to the conversation late, it's been a busy week. Actions that OHM should do: o On momentary power button: turn off screen, suspend machine, leave keyboard and wireless on; keyboard/touchpad will cause instant on again. Yup. o On lid close on battery, should turn off keyboard, turn off screen Then should suspend to RAM, including disabling and powering down wireless Okay. o on lid close, on power, leave the machine on and running. Not turn off the backlight? Of course turn off the backlight. o On lid open, turn on keyboard, reset keyboard, resume from suspend, turn wireless back on, tell NM to reassociate (maybe only after some delay), try previous association first, of course... Sure. o On ebook mode, should turn off keyboard Turn off as in twiddle some bit to power it down, or just stop the input events? o On lid open, should reset keyboard o on ebook to non-ebook mode, should reset keyboard How? There is a keyboard command, that I think is in the trac issue on the topic, on how to reset the keyboard; but there are actually two cases here: 1) resetting the keyboard/touchpad when it has been powered up; this all versions will do. We should do this anytime external power is applied or removed, or other major physical changes. 2) CTest and production touch pads can be set into a special extremely low power mode, and save some 16mw, IIRC. Bringing them out of this state does a reset. This is what we should do either when the machine is suspended and the keyboard touch/pad is inaccessible. It turns out that while I'd been thinking of delaying bothering to go for this minimal power savings, we have a problem in ebook mode where the buttons can be pressed by accident if you squeeze, and it's too late to think about physical changes to the machine. So to fix that problem, we might as well go ahead sooner rather than later. o on external power supply on *or* off, should reset touchpad Which command? o rotate should probably be done by OHM. Totally agree. It's in the best position to enforce policy IMO. It's really something a window manager, in combination with hints should solve. When we are suspended, and the battery wakes us up because it is low, then: For now, graceful shutdown after journal has been notified How do we notify the journal - OHM is system and the journal is session, no? May do hibernation if enough flash is available. Cool. Task: Tune the default DPMS parameters. Reset keyboard instructions are in trac. The big question is: how to do idle? X DPMS extension? X SS extension? cpuidle kernel patch, about to go mainline in Linux, with module to tell ohm the system has been idle? other ideas? In g-p-m svn I've been using the idletime extension for some time now. It works well, with a few little quirks, although it only gives the user-activity point of idle, rather than the machine state idle. Machine state idle is more complex, and may involve detailed knowledge of whether USB devices are installed, for example. Adam Belay's et. al.'s CPUidle work may (part of) be the solution here. There is a patch for 2.6.22, and I think it's now in the -mm tree (or maybe Linus's tree). So we can probably eventually arrange to notify OHM when the system seems to be in a decent state for suspend on idle, and when it is not. - Jim -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: accessibilities first tests - many questions
On 17/08/07 11:56 +0200, Guylhem Aznar wrote: Hello, The only things I don't know yet how to do with the DCON : - how to disable the smoothing algorithm applied in color mode We didn't enable this ability in the sysfs/ interface. I have never been too clear on what the actual practical uses are for something like this, so the control never got added. In a pinch, you can use the i2c-tools utilities to write to the device directly (use at your own risk!) - how to reduce the framerate (for ex for ebook reading, but it could also be handy in text mode) This is difficult to do - since it would involve synchronizing with the video driver which with X and the framebuffer driver will invariably result in a screen glitch (note that just switching the rate on the DCON itself doesn't cause a glitch - its the software that is braindead here). But we don't have any support for this in the kernel. I have done some shell scripts to test my stuff (ugly but handy, esp Regarding power management, I have a problem with the DCON freeze before suspend to ram: the display looks like frozen, but when I query the freeze file just before and right after the suspend, I only get 0 while I should get 1. Thats because the DCON driver does the freeze on its own while the system is suspending, and it restores it long before userspace gets unfrozen, so from your perspective, it will always be 0. Can I also ask for some help there? Regarding the X being used, I am curious to know if there is a way to do live screen scaling (zoom function, where the whole screen is magnified) ? Ideally, it would be hardware managed, but that could also be done by software. No. The hardware doesn't have any way of zooming the graphics screen, so you would have to do it in software, which is probably not ideal on the Geode. Jordan -- Jordan Crouse Systems Software Development Engineer Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: accessibilities first tests - many questions
On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 17:34 -0600, Jordan Crouse wrote: On 17/08/07 11:56 +0200, Guylhem Aznar wrote: Hello, The only things I don't know yet how to do with the DCON : - how to disable the smoothing algorithm applied in color mode We didn't enable this ability in the sysfs/ interface. I have never been too clear on what the actual practical uses are for something like this, so the control never got added. In a pinch, you can use the i2c-tools utilities to write to the device directly (use at your own risk!) - how to reduce the framerate (for ex for ebook reading, but it could also be handy in text mode) This is difficult to do - since it would involve synchronizing with the video driver which with X and the framebuffer driver will invariably result in a screen glitch (note that just switching the rate on the DCON itself doesn't cause a glitch - its the software that is braindead here). But we don't have any support for this in the kernel. Actually, if the frame rate drop is just done by the dcon when it is in control of the screen, it is glitchless; it's resetting the geode's mode which is glitchful, and we'll avoid that. - Jim -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: some first impressions
I've tried one SD card made by a local company. It's a bit thinker than the genuine panasonic one. So this results in that it can only be ejected out a bit and I have to use my finger nail to grab it out. (probably same situation as you) Usually there's a groove at the tail of an SD card top side. However, the access on XO SD slot is only on the bottom side... :( I tried a handy SD card in my system. I have a B2 case with a B3 board. There are a rubber flaps covering the entrance hole. The flaps are pointed in, so inserting the card bends the flaps open but extracting the card tries to close the flaps. If they stick (and they do) then closing the flaps makes them stick even more. I think the basic problem is that the flaps stick harder than the internal spring pushes. You can feel them if you poke the card in partway and then pull it out. My SD card has a grove on the edge of the card. It's about the right size for a fingernail. The XO case has a slight indentation for your finger. Unfortunately, it's on the bottom rather than the top so I can't get at the grove in the card. Mumble. Better have a pair of tweezers handy if you expect to use the SD slot. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
