Qi - why only 3 partitions on SD card?

Torfinn Ingolfsen tingox at gmail.com
Fri Sep 25 21:27:33 CEST 2009


Hi,

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 6:59 AM, Paul Fertser <fercerpav at gmail.com> wrote:

> And in fact if anybody of those talking about bootmenu, multiboot and
> such really needed it he would have done it himself long time ago. I
> bet trying and tweaking all distros including Qtopia, Qtmoko, Android,
> H:1 etc etc took them 10x time required to build a minimal
> bootmenu.
>

Well, this (statements like those above) is why the shoemaker's children is
still running around barefoot. :-)
(For those not catching the reference - the shoemaker can make shoes for his
children at any time, he just never makes it a priority.)

Developers and users have different views of what is required to make a
device usable.
Unless the developers recognize that, and produce something that the users
find acceptable, the device in question will remain a gadget for developers.

I had hopes that I would be able to use my FreeRunner as a user one day,
heck I still have that hope. If that doesn't happen I (and probably a few
others) will be a bit dissappointed.

Hm, i have my "normal" one on uSD and in case i screw something up i
> just boot pre-installed 2007 from NAND by pressing AUX button at the
> right time (and yes, i can't manage it with 100% success rate but
> taking out the battery and trying again is not a big deal).
>

Lucky you. I have tried the "press AUX button" trick a lot of times, I can
_never_ make Qi boot anything other that the default (first) partition on my
SD card. Like this:
- I don't press anything, the default partition gets booted
- I press AUX (hopefully at the right time), and Qi never finshes booting
anything (not in 5 - 10 minutes anyway).

Someone said that Qi is unusable by "normal" users. I wanted to prove
> it wrong.
>

IMHO, you failed to prove anything.
I still say that Qi is unusable for normal users - it doesn't have a
reliable way for users to select which partition to boot.

To a user, it might look like this:
- U-boot wasn't working correctly with newer (bigger) kernels, so the
developer(s) abandoned it
- instead they created Qi to be newer, better, faster and so on
- Qi isn't living up to promises for users

I'm not saying that such a view is correct, but that is how it can look like
from a users view.

By derfinition, only developers can fix the software.
Now, will any developer step up and fix Qi (or U-boot) so that it will be
usable for users?

If no developer wants to scratch that particular itch, the FreeRunner will
remain a gadget for developers only.

-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen
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