2008.8 raster + zecke, great useability, and remaining flaws

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:21:19 +0200 Daniel Selinger <slite at gmx.at> 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 changeable via illume-config. I
> also would love to have the qerty button visible by default.

btw- i've improved things a lot - asu.dev has the latest updates. :)

> 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 at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community


-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>