[Om2009 t5] Some issues & ideas

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi,

I've just upgraded my recently buzz-fixed Freerunner from Om2008 to
testing release 5 and so far, things look quite good. There's a couple
of minor issues I'm currently experiencing, though:

* I can log into home WLAN through Paroli's Wifi GUI and also ping my
router, but I can't reach any IP address on the internet.

* After an opkg upgrade (I think), paroli displays "loading" forever,
and then complains about a GSM timeout (and subsequently fails to load a
couple of other modules). This is currently my most critical problem as
it keeps me from using the FR as a phone... (Was the upgrade a bad idea
because it threw from testing to unstable?)

* I can set the time through paroli, but not the date.

* I'm not sure if it's just because I failed to install any extra
modules, but at first boot, I was asked to select a language from an
empty box. Are there any German l10n files/keyboard layouts, preferrably
opkg'ed?

* Docs: I've noticed the some docs on the wiki are rather outdated or at
least a bit confusing -- sometimes I just miss an explicit note saying
to what distro instructions apply. The same holds for some of the
software: although there are those "tested on" templates, they are
sometimes just blank. For example, I installed PISI for importing my
evolution contacts via a vcf file into paroli, only to find out that
PISI doesn't support paroli's contacts file format. Maybe this is
because opkg.org is being taking over the role of providing (up-to-date)
package descriptions? If so, I'd recommend moving any valid information
from wiki.openmoko.org over to opkg.

Also, the USB networking page should rather start with the "easy" part
(OS or Distro Specific & Automatic Configuration) and list the more
manual configuration only later on. If there aren't any objections, I
might try to work on that.

* I think proper syncing is badly needed. I'm not sure if there are any
standards for this, but ideally, when connecting the FR to my Ubuntu
system (via USB, Bluetooth or whatever), I'd like to be asked if I want
to sync my FR contacts and/or calendar entries with Evolution. (If there
are any standards, it would be cool if the same approach would cause the
same for Windows or MacOS.) Also, providing GPS/GPRS/Wifi/...
functionality to the host system would be great. 

* navit: It's good that it starts libgps automatically (as opposed to
older OM200x), but I find the libgps16/17 issue unacceptable. And
http://trac.navit-project.org/ticket/343 is just not satisfying.

As for me, I'm the casual Joe Hacker guy with some C++ experience, so if
there are any easy fixes (eg for the set date thing mentioned above) and
some guidance, I can try to help out a bit; same for translating.

Bernhard Reiter