distro nightmares ... can fdom help?

Dale Maggee antisol at internode.on.net
Thu Sep 11 16:54:01 CEST 2008


Franky Van Liedekerke wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> (to be fare: I compare with my 4 years old sony ericsson P900 phone, and
> that one wins without problems for now)
> (Warning: no ranting please, I'm just summing up all current bugs I
> encounter and hope to get some pointers for fixes)
>
> For the moment I seem to be unable to find a distro where the basics work
> without issues (and I flashed/upgraded/installed already a number of times):
>
> - booting time: 2/3 minutes for asu. I can accept this for a beta
> functioning device, but I hope this gets better in the future. Yes, I know
> the wiki page for this ... luckely I don't reboot py phone too often
> - receive calls: calls arrive double on qtopia distro (not asu, no no sim
> card issue here), so for each call I end up having a missed call entry as
> well. Very annoying.
> - speaker: qtopia emits a very loud tone when on speaker
> - echo: the asu distro doesn't have the echo fix yet
> - choose a ringtone: ok, I can replace the wav file, but come on, no app
> available at all for asu?
> - alarm: I use my cell phone for wake-up calls, but ASU isn't reliable to
> give me the alarm. The phone unsuspends on time, but the alarm doesn't
> sound, or an undetermined amount of minutes too late. This seems to be the
> only phone in the world with this problem...
> - prevent the copying of sim-card contacts to your phone (qtopia and asu).
> Ok, I can remove them from the sim, or change the sqlite db on te phone, but
> this is a basic setting on any phone.
> - remove all contacts from the phone (qtopia and asu). Again I can just
> clean up the sqlite db file here, but a simple sql script executed by a gui
> would be nice.
> - mplayer: plays mp3 just fine, but qtopia or asu media players are unable
> to play back one mp3 fine without hickups or distortion (distortion can be
> fixed by editing the mp3 and decreasing the volume by 20dB). Is this
> gstreamer bogging down the phone or just bad mp3 decoding?
> - wifi: why on earth isn't wifi taking the nameservers given by dhcp? Is it
> the resolvconf issue that needs fixing here? Even my old archos 430 did that
> just fine from the beginning. Now I needed the usb0 connection working just
> to be able to get the wifi working, since no terminal app is installed by
> default on the phone. I did use the resolvconf wiki page to help me out
> here, but no dice for encrypted networks. Mofi maybe?
> - speed: asu reaction time is just too slow. Qtopia is reasonable here.
> - bluetooth: no app on asu, and the qtopia-x11 bluetooth app doesn't do
> anything.
>
> I haven't even tried image viewing yet, or gps ... I would have thought to
> be able to iron out bugs and such, but I was expecting basic working
> functionality. For now I have my freerunner lying on my desk at home, doing
> nothing at all ...
>
> Does the fdom version of ASU addresses some of the "plain" asu issues? Or
> any help solving some of these? I *really* want to show off my freerunner
> ...
>
> Franky
>   
You know, in the time you spent griping about these well known issues, 
you could have started writing a GUI to change your ringtone. Worse, 
people who are smarter than you or me could have spent the time they'll 
spend reading your message fixing issues instead.

You say that "This seems to be the only phone in the world with this 
problem", but it's also the only phone in the world where you can help 
fix these problems.

You're dealing with an early version of Open Source software, live with 
it, or help fix it. We all want to see pretty GUIs and the other issues 
solved, but whining is not constructive.

If you want to find fixes for these problems, try searching the lists. 
many of them have been discussed.

</flame>




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