Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

Thanks for the link! I've seen that before but it was too long ago to remember.

I've tried e17 as well with the mobile UI (in Easy Debian, and an accordingly sized VBox window on my PC) and to me it seems to be the only UI Debian offers that might be suitable for a 3.5" touchscreen without using a stylus.
I was able to make some progress with LXDE but I can only either create a UI that works without a stylus or that leaves enough room for application windows, not both at the same time. Xfce was even worse.

btw. do you know the "bodhi-close" gadget created by Jeff Hoogland [1]? It essentially creates an [X] icon in the shelf (upper panel). I've found the source code here [2], but didn't compile it myself. In the VM I was able to use the Bodhi package in Debian.
In combination with a taskbar-like gadget like iTask [3] (not an official part of E17) the "illume-softkey" module (lower panel) becomes totally dispensable, which in turn frees up some precious pixels for applications.
Here's a screenshot of Bodhi running in a 800x480px VM with an E17 setup that I think might work well on the N900 screen [4]. It turned out whenever I tried to put something together in Debian that might work it ended up looking like Bodhi. So @Jeff, in case you read this: Thank you!

What's your preferred web browser in Debian on the N900? I believe iceweasel is too heavy and it seems some potential alternatives (midori, xxxterm) aren't actually maintained.
So far I'm leaning towards qupzilla and netsurf.

Thanks for the reminder!
As a very simple "solution", wouldn't it be sufficient to mute ALSA's lower-frequency equalizer controls? (of course that means crippling the sound even via the audio jack)
What's the critical frequency? I think I remember having read something about 125Hz, but that might be totally wrong.


[1] http://talk.maemo.org/member.php?u=27934
[2] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp...nt.devel/34506
[3] http://code.google.com/p/itask-module/
[4] https://wiki.debianforum.de/Datei:E17-bodhi.png

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

By using auto-hiding panels of quite big size (with adequately sized icons), you can create UI that works finger-friendly, and still leaves 799x479 pixels* for applications. If you configure it correctly**, panels will always show up on top of whatever is open, but *only* when you actually press a little outside of screen, on the edge where they should appear (it feels almost like having additional capacitive buttons, but of course it's side effect of our resistive screen sensitivity - pressing just outside screen border is recognized as swinging mouse outside screen, which brings up panel). You can have 4 separate panels with different content (running programs, shortcuts, resource monitors, etc).

For Easy Debian, I found such setup most lightweight and convenient, at the same time. I see no reason why it would work differently in native Debian. BTW, it's worth to configure Openbox to start some programs without "decorations" - especially the ones that have own way of closing, minimizing, etc. Saves another bit of screen estate.

/Estel

*Works properly only with lxpanel from Jessie - earlier, some bug allowed certain applications to ignore "always on top" settings of auto-hiding panel, and, for example, Chromium was always on top.

**The -1 pixel comes from the fact, that you need to leave hidden panel size of 1 pixel (before Jessie, min was 2 pixels, now it is 0), or Panel won't come up after restart. It's a bug - it should still appear, even when 0-sized when hidden. If it's ever get fixed, we can use full 800x480 pixels for programs.

// Edit

How about power-saving? I would expect that without Maemo's hack, it will use much more power (current) when totally idle and screen is disabled,as compared to Maemo/Hildon?

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

Hé hé hé :D something is cooking around! It smells goooooood :D!!!

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

You might be interested to know (if you don't already know it) that there is an EFL UI for ConnMan called EConnMan but you would need to build it as hasn't yet been packaged for Debian.

I have tried out few browsers. I installed Iceweasel and as you might expect it ate a lot of the memory but other than that there were no real issues and I was able to install some of my favourite add-ons. It's actually quite responsive for single tab/window browsing if you don't have a lot of other stuff running. It runs much better than it does in Maemo under Easy Debian (from what I remember).

Your right about Midori being a poor choice. It was recently removed from the repositories. It's back in there at the moment but it's scheduled to be auto removed again as there's a serious bug that needs fixing and no one's maintaining it. I ran into another bug when I tried it in that there was nowhere to enter a URL!

If you want a really lightweight browser then I recommend links2. It does display graphics, just don't expect anything fancy like JavaScript.

This might also be a good option.

I was thinking of something similar. It should be possible to detect whether there's something plugged into the audio jack and automatically switch to the appropriate profile. I'm not actually sure what the critical frequency is. I would very much appreciate it if someone can confirm it.

There are also the Nokia PA plugins as suggested by freemangordon which would work in the short term. I say short term as I would prefer universal solution that also works with hardfp and is open source.

Hopefully the Neo900 will have protection at hardware level.

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

Right. As I said, it isn't ready for everyday use but power saving is obviously something I'd like to address.

In the meantime, you can run pm-suspend to completely suspend the device, just don't do it with the 3.16-rc1 kernel as the device will hang.

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

A word of warning to E17 users using 3.16-rc1. The E17 power saving that kicks in when idle for a few minutes also triggers the hang (it looks like it's doing a full suspend).

You could try 3.14-rc3 instead. My biggest problem with that kernel is I get frequent network errors causing SSH connections to drop and package downloads to fail.

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

with regards to the pulseaudio issue, wouldn't the meego version have the required protection we could use for armhf?

edit: it appears they might, settings refer to it https://github.com/nemomobile/pulsea...lgs/xprot/set2

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

Bare in mind that the frequency threshold on the N950/N9 might not be identical to that of the N900.

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

I guess you're hitting https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/ke...f6600f77526078

Re: DebiaN900 - A set of scripts to facilitate the installation of native Debian (WIP)
 

I think he was referring to the version of meego adapted for N900.