Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Update:

Got everything installed and running. Logging out of Mer leaves a window with ae-menu.py as the title up. Clicking on the x doesn't close it. Also shifts status bar apps to the left 2 places, leaves a blank box.

Closed it by killing python-launcher daemon processes.

Other than that, works fine.

Thanks for the hard work.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

lemmyslender: Interesting, I use "killall python" to get rid of the status bar icons. You are using python-launcher to run python apps, so they don't close properly. I'll fix that. Thanks for your help!

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Hiya. I tried using the image installer after installing the deb, but it seems to only want to download the image to mmc1 or mmc2, neither of which have enough space. However, my rootfs has about 6GB of space. I suppose I could manually download the image, but how about supporting the rootfs as a destination in your tools?

cheers,
fnord

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Well, not so much me using it as my tablet :) I just click the buttons and whatever happens, happens.

Quick question, it may have come up in the easy Debian threads: I imagine that if I take your disk image for the partition, unzip it to a partition, change my chroot to point to the partition, I can use it from within maemo (just like the image file) *and* boot to it, provided I have the right boot menu setup?

I already have installed mer on an sd card (external) and can boot to it. If I have that card in, can I "easy-mer" to it as well?

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

You should grab PenguinBait's GParted Hack and change the sizes of your SD card partitions. 6GB is far, far too big for your rootfs (this is Maemo, not Windows), especially if you are out of space on your FAT partition! :D

If you insist on downloading and extracting it to your rootfs, then you'll have to do it manually, sorry. :(

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

I can't promise anything. I confess that I have never installed bootable Mer, so I don't know. If your user name in Mer is "user" with the correct UID and GID (29999 or something -- it must be the same as Maemo), you should be able to use it as an Easy Mer partition in Maemo. But I can't promise anything.

I can say that it should be safe to try it, as long as you don't try to use "synchroot" because that might mess up things in Mer.

If you do try it, report your findings!

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Fascist! ;-)

I guess I can see your point, though. Its just that I have no real use for FAT partitions and I can't see why I shouldn't keep an image in the rootfs. I've got 2 * 8GB cards in there.

On second thoughts, perhaps you're right. Hmm.

fnord

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

So far:

Changed chroot to point to partition on sd card. Didn't work (as expected), also probably because it was Mer 0.12. Blanked the partition and replaced with the latest rootfs from the first post.

Easy Mer works fine. I can boot to the partition as well. First boot asked for user/password as normal. However, wifi doesn't work? No status bar icon, won't find networks (using connection manager). Powerbutton doesn't work either, powerlaunch problem? Need to pull the battery. Reboot into Maemo, can't run Easy-Mer. It will work fine again if you fsck the partition first.

Started to install Mer 0.13 last night. I'll get that setup and give it a try and report back.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

OpenOffice Gtk's File Chooser is still crashing,

Any guesses what additional package needs installling?

--denis

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

I can verify that this error is occuring.

So, I tried replacing the file mentioned in the error:

/usr/lib/openoffice/basis-link/program/fps_gnome.uno.so

with the one from OpenOffice 3.0 in my Debian partition, which is found in:

/usr/lib/openoffice/program/fps_gnome.uno.so

...and the file chooser in Mer OOO opens just fine.

So the problem is in the current version of Ubuntu Jaunty armel OpenOffice.org. :(

How to use the attached file:

1. Mount your Easy Mer rootfs on /debian, either by using "sudo debian" to start the chroot or qmount.
2. As root, untar the file to the proper location:

Code:

---

cd /
tar xzvf /home/user/MyDocs/fps_gnome.uno.so.tar.gz

---

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Standard Mer installation doesn't work with Easy-Mer. I tried creating the user "user", uid=29999. Easy-Mer loaded, but bad things happen. I got the top toolbar, a side toolbar, duplicate blank menu items, other stuff. Had to pull the battery to reboot. Messed up my theme. Easily fixed.

Re-installed Easy-Mer. Booting into it still doesn't load powerlaunch or wifi applet. Looks like a dbus issue? Runs fine from within Maemo.

One question: all my menu items, buttons, etc have messed up labels (tana_fi_utilities instead of Utilities, etc). This has been the case even with a fresh install. Boo
ting into it, the labels are fine. Problem/Normal/Fix?

Battery app shows full. Clicking shows battery status not found. I do have advanced power installed in maemo (this is causing a conflict, correct?).

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Thanks!

Are you also observing the problem that upon launching OOO3 does not longer put an icon on the task sidebar?

OOO3's database program is also crashing, the Java problem previously reported.

When I played with configuring an easy-mer v12 about a month ago, I swear I had observed Abiword working fine, ie., interacting Ok with the Hildon keyboard and not going into CPU looks... well, under v13 of mer, Abiword is again unuseable... but more annoying I can't get Abiword to work ok even under mer v12... I have no idea what has changed. There was an update of your scripts, I think, but that should have little bearing on these problems... I'd be curious if Abiword works at all under a native mer setup.

--denis

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

I disable network-manager as part of my Easy Mer process. It doesn't work under Maemo, and I wrote my own little applet in Python to replace it (with daperl's help).

I don't have any idea why that's a problem. Again, I wrote my own battery application, but I didn't disable anything power-related in Mer.

No idea why that's a problem, either.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Wow. I think I know what's going on there. My Easy Mer partition has two little startup scripts in the Easy Mer rootfs:

/var/run/onfirstchroot.rc and /var/run/onfirstchroot-ext.rc

Copy those two files into your Bootable Mer partition and those bad theme things won't happen again. One of the things those startup scripts do is to "unhook" the user's Maemo home directory and Mer home directory. If you don't unhook them, then Mer tries to use the desktop settings from Maemo and then you get... well, what you described.

This sounds like a localization problem. Your tablet's locale probably doesn't align with Mer's locale. You have to change your locale as follows (from my blog):

Setting Locale:

Changing locales in Ubuntu is ugly, even "broken," as described here. This is what I do (from within the chroot) to get en_GB (my Maemo locale) set up in the chroot. From within the chroot:
Ah, that's my fault again. I forgot to add the "battery-status" package to my dependencies. In Maemo, as root, you can do "apt-get install battery-status" to fix that.

I think I've got lots of things to fix for a new version!

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

No... Works here, although not properly themed (another fix for the next version!)

Are you installing openoffice.org-gtk?

Someone reported that disabling spellcheck seems to have very positive effects on Abiword's performance. Any comments about that?

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

I noticed that about abiword on my french unit ... it became a lot more stable after turnig off spellchecking ... but still froze from time to time ... so i use OOo with Qole's Easy debian ...

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Perhaps an easy question... when I install Easy-Mer, I can no longer run Easy Debian... is there an "easy" fix for this? I hate to give up one to test another. Thanks again. Oh, and Qole, re my twit, I was the twit, it was a user error and your repository worked just fine. :(

Thanks for the great work you are doing. Makes the tablet so much more fun to use.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

thorbo:

You just have to change your /home/user/.chroot file. This is a settings file.

When you installed Easy Mer, your Easy Debian .chroot file got moved to .chroot.old.mer and the Easy Mer .chroot file took its place.

If you want to switch between Easy Debian and Easy Mer, just swap the .chroot files. First make a copy of the Easy Mer .chroot file (only do this once)

If you've been using your Easy Whatever, you'll probably need to close it before switching:

Now, you can switch with one cp command. To change to Easy Debian:

To switch back to Easy Mer:

You can also use both simultaneously, using qchroot.


For example, to run the Mer version of OpenOffice 3 Writer:
Or to use the Debian version of Abiword:

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Pulling the battery left the file system corrupt (ext3), it won't mount unless you force it or fsck first. My fault there. The second time I tried I ran powerlaunch from xterm and got the power button working to shutdown/reboot. No corrupt file system that way, no need to fsck.

I'll try the other things you mentioned. Thanks

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Ok, the missing taskbar icon for ooo3 was due to my having unistalled openoffice.org-gtk!

Re Abiword, disabling both automatic spell-checking and grammar-checking *does* seem to free much needed cpu cycles... but alas that's only the beginning of the woes with Abiword.

Example: load of a 20-page doc in spanish proceeds ok, even the language locale is set correctly... scrolling thru the documents is quick, so far so good!

Tapping on the text window to activate the hildon keyboard doesn't work... so I hit the center key on the D-pad and shazam Abiword hard-crashes!

Next test: with the above file opened, open another app, say osso-xterm, and switch to / from it... Abiword starts using close to 100% cpu usage.

In contrast, an app such as Gnumeric is a dream... quiick to launch, quick to open .xls spreadsheets and a mere stylus tap on an iinput field brings up the hildon keyboard. I wish Abiword were this well behaved!

--denis

Edit: When launching Midori, the following D-bus related warninng comes up, is it significant?

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

The dbus error is another thing to fix in the next version.... :o

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Pardon my newbieness, "from within the chroot" means:
1) Run Mer, run Xterm, execute the commands
2) mount Easy-Mer partition in Maemo, Xterm, navigate to mount point, run commands?

I have tried using en_US in Mer, logout, restart Mer, no change in labels? Or am I missing another step?

With some more fiddling, I think I could get the standard Mer to work with Easy-Mer (I copied the scripts, and that worked, but there were some other problems) so for the time being, I think I'll just skip it and work with Easy-Mer.

OO3 fails to put an icon in the menu for me as well (apt-get install openoffice.org-gtk).

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Well, the easiest way is to use the "Easy Debian" icon or from your Maemo terminal, type "sudo debian". This gives you a Mer root prompt.

Sorry for not being more clear.

If, when you do apt-get install from the Mer prompt, you get locale errors (it complains about LANG and not being able to find en_US and stuff) then locales are your problem. If not, then I don't know what's going on.

I'll try to get a new version together to fix a bunch of these problems...

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

qole

Thanks for the help and pointers. I've followed your post/blog and several other ideas dug up from google. None fixed the locale problem with my labels. Odd since if I booted into,you Easy-Mer image on a partition, they were all correct. OO3 still wouldn't put an icon in the menu though.

Last ditch effort, fresh install, changed maemo from English (US) to English (GB), rebooted. Easy-Mer works fine now. Don't know if tha tells you anything though.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Nice job on the deb, worked like charm on my 0s2008 n800. :)

Tested it yesterday and only problem was that downloads seemed to corrupt on noname sdhc fat-formated disk. But when I downloaded it by hand (wget -c url) to my cloned /-partition which is ext-formated, it worked and uncompressed ok.

Other than that, the mer desktop looks interesting, thanks qole for letting us test mer without repartioning/rebooting nit :cool:

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

I'll try to get a fixed up new version out the door this weekend.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Qole,

Any update for Easy Mer yet? Haven't seen anything in the app manager.

Thanks

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Very sorry, it has been very low priority... :o

I've been mainly spending my time on building a new deck for my house in time for my wife's birthday... I just got a metric ton of old rotten wood hauled off to the dump so I can start putting up the new structure this weekend...

I will try to spend some time this weekend applying the bugfixes that you guys helped me find to the current Mer version (0.14) and packaging everything up...

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Thanks for the quick reply.

I just did a deck last spring. Took longer than I thought it would (I actually tore down the back deck and rebuilt it in the front, so I had to dismantle carefully, then built a new back deck).

No hurry, I was just wondering. It's more convenient than rebooting.

One other problem I found, perhaps not related? After exiting Mer, I can no longer use Tear bookmarks to launch Tear in Maemo. I have tear bookmarks installed and use it from the side bar. Select a bookmark and lauch tear. If I reboot, this works correctly until I use Easy Mer again.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

So I'm actually working on this again, using a fully-installed, bootable Mer 0.15 partition... Next version of Easy Mer will allow correct booting to Mer as well as Easy Mer chroot...

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Can't wait to give it a spin. Being able to use the same partition to boot from and chroot into would be great (with the easy setup of course).

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Here's the rootfs for the partition. Just plain Mer 0.15 with tweaks to work in a chroot.

http://qole.org/files/easy-mer-015-1.tgz

You need to change, in Maemo, /usr/bin/mer-switch to run start-hildon-easymer instead of start-hildon... (no longer necessary when using easy mer 0.15 deb)

I am camping for a couple of days, but I'll try to get my updated .deb out the door asap...

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Thanks, I'll d/l and try when I get home. Golf night tonight.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

New deb available in my repo, along with the image file (download with the installer). Hopefully the bugs are squashed.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

You're alive! This is a Good Thing[TM].

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Qole,

Installed the rootfs linked to above earlier in the week. Worked with the old Easy-Mer. Booted to it as well - wireless device not ready? no wifi available. I didn't play with it too much though. No other problems that I noticed.

Installed the new version of Easy-Mer - forgot to edit my .chroot file on first launch. Got that fixed and booted into it no problem. A suggestion, now that Tear is included in Mer, you shouldn't need a menu item for it (nevermind, your menu item uses the Maemo Tear, with bookmarks, etc :) ) Maybe get rid of the Quit command? Every now and then I hit that instead of Logout and have to reboot to get back to Maemo.

I still have an issue with using TearBookmarks on the Maemo sidebar. It works fine until I run Easy-Mer, then it will not lauch Tear from a bookmark. It will still open a new window and bookmark editor though. Rebooting cures this until I run Easy-Mer again.

I'll play more later. Thanks for this great program.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

on my app.manager I still find verison 0.13.1 is it ok or will install an old version of mer?

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

pinguino89: the version is 0.15.1, update your application manager.

lemmyslender: thanks for the bugtesting. I don't use Tear bookmarks, I'll have to install it to find out what's breaking there. The wifi problem is also an unknown, maybe because I installed Mer to my N800 and you have an N810? The Quit removal suggestion is a good one.



I have very limited experience in this area, but I suspect it is better than being dead.

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

ok thanks, probably the program have ben updated less than a minute after i've updated the app manager :):)

Re: Prerelease: Easy Mer
 

Qole -

I have an N800 as well. I just tried rebooting into the Easy-Mer partition. Network icon (2 computers) shows up. Clicking on it yields menu with no wireless networks listed, just grey text indicating device not ready.

I have quickly looked but don't see any Mer info on restarting the wireless connection. Also what is the root password for the image, or do I need to set one?