Freerunner issues

[Dale Maggee]

> 1. Disabling standby sounds like a good (but temporary) solution. BTW,
> how long does the battery last in such cases?
>   

This is something I've been trying to figure out. It's highly dependant 
on how many times the screen gets touched (and thus turns itself on for 
a few seconds) in your pocket, which will depend on how much you move 
around and how secure it is in your pocket. In my experience and from my 
estimates, I would say you should get 3-4 hours, though I have 
personally had it disconnected from power for about 5.5 hours in this 
fashion (for most of that time it was in my jacket pocket hung over a 
chair, thus not moving very much at all - fewer screen touches). Your 
mileage *will* vary.

On this note, I'd love to come up with a way to disable the screen 
powering back up until I push one of the buttons or something, to stop 
the screen from turning on everytime I hit a bump on my motorbike. 
Another solution would be some kind of flip down screen protector like 
on my ipaq, which prevents the screen from being touched by keys / 
inside of pocket / etc:

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/ppct-ipaq6900-preview-large-01.jpg

> 2. Also, is there a way to disable or enable 'ringtone'? I need the
> phone in silent mode most of the times during the day (so, right now
> the standby kind of helps :) ).
>   
I don't believe so via the gui, but you could probably achieve this 
through the use of the alsa states. i.e:

to create a "silent" state:
1. run alsamixer, and fiddle until you've muted the ringer volume
2. alsactl -f ~/silent.state store

then to put the phone in silent mode, use:
alsactl -f ~/silent.state restore

to put it back into normal nonsilent mode:
alsactl -f /usr/share/openmoko/scenarios/stereoout.state restore
> Not so important one: I hope to load the 2008.8 into the sd-card and
> have a dual boot configuration. Let me know if this is not possible,
>
>   
take a look at:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Moving_current_system_from_flash_to_SD

I haven't tried it yet though...
> This solution is interesting:
> http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-August/025388.html
> will give it a try, thanks!
> I hope it works with the official freerunner distro, i.e. 2007.2 also.
>   
Yeah, I have this page bookmarked for me to try playing around with when 
I have time, I'd be interested to know how it turns out.
> 5. Also, is there a wiki page or something where 'how tos' for
> tweaking of settings are mentioned? Like the standby idle-time,
> silent-mode, screen brightness, etc?
>   
there are lots of wiki pages with lots of little tidbits scattered 
through them... ;)

finding them seems to be a whole other matter, the search isn't great by 
all accounts.
> 6. I have installed media player, debug tool, gps, calc, calendar, ...
> The phone's become slower - boot time is higher and application (eg.
> dialer) loading takes a lot of time. Is this normal? It sure was
> faster before I updated/installed those.
>   
I haven't seen this, and I have a similar raft of apps installed, except 
I've not seen any debug tool in the repos...?

Granted, it's not the fastest thing I've ever seen, but I don't think 
it's much/any slower than it was when I got it.

HTH,
-Dale