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Re: Mer 0.12 released

I've been following the discussions of Mer for a while now, and with this latest version I decided to jump in and install it on my n810.

I got to the initial boot where it prompts for user, password, hostname etc. After that it hangs on the boot splash image. The white bar that crawls across the bottom reaches the full width, then... nothing. I let the tablet sit for fully an hour or more before I pulled the battery and boot back into Diablo.

Tried reformatting my card, then reinstalling Mer. Same results.

It sounds like most people had no problems installing and running this. Any clues?

thanks

Re: Mer 0.12 released

I have the same problem but with 770. No clues.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

The same happened to me when testing Mer 0.11 in my 770.
The problem was the swap partition. The original swap partition I had in my MMC working perfectly in Maemo, was detected but it didn't work.
I deleted, recreated and initialized the swap partition using GParted in my Ubuntu box and, don't ask me why, but then Mer started to work perfectly.
Hope it helps.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Hmm, then why would the swap partition will have any effect if I disable it?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Probably because it doesn't work in the 770 without swap.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Great job, Mer Team! While I voted "no", I would like to qualify it. I have been using Mer 0.12 for the last two and half days, and it is useable, but there are still some pretty glaring bugs, and some missing functionality. I would say it's at the point where extended use for testing purposes is reasonable, and it works well enough that I haven't had to boot into Maemo yet. I'm really impressed with the progress. The main thing I noticed is that it isn't fleshed out yet; what there is works well, for the most part, but it doesn't feel like a full OS yet. (I'm not criticizing, just voicing my opinion of its present state.) I think Mer shows a lot of promise, and with the entire Ubuntu repos available, and some annoyances from Maemo gone, my N810 will be a lot more useful to me.
Good things I noticed:
-Midori can handle full AJAX webapps (e.g. Google Maps is useable, if still a bit slow - microB almost dies trying to run that!)
-Battery life is acceptable (I haven't run any tests, and I think it might be a bit below Maemo's, but run time is quite good. (I always keep an external battery pack with an extra charge in it on the back of my belt anyway, though :P))
-Net Mer UI makes much better use of screen resources, as was planned
-The Blueman BT manager is full-featured, and generally awesome (I award 5 Internets to whoever decided to include that!)
Not so good thing(s) I noticed:
-The On-screen Keyboard does not hide itself when the N810's hardware keyboard is extended

All-in-all, a great release, and much further ahead than I had anticipated. Keep it up, and I'll keep testing!

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by MSchievelbein (Post 283061)

4) easy-deb-chroot gave me an error 'unable to install' but then when I looked, it appeared to have installed both easy-deb-chroot and easy-chroot packages.

You're trying to install an chroot in a system that already allows you to install most (barring GNOME) applications available for Ubuntu?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by meizirkki (Post 282983)

1. Click the dialog or press Esc (the Back Button)

2. Control-panel item would be nice, but here's a workaround: Goto xterminal, type sudo nano /usr/bin/start-hildon, scroll to the end and remove line, that says something like "maemo-invoker blahblah /usr/bin/hildon-input-mehod"

3. Jaunty software are appearing in the Menu for me

Right on for all three counts. Thank you. I had forgotten back doubled as escape and after a reboot items were listed in the menu.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

I installed the mer 0.12 on my n770,but it is very slowly.Almost impossible to use.Is there any way to help tu use it ?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Vote: Not usable on a daily basis.

Besides the issue of HIldon shutting down and rendering the device useless; the taskbar area throws me off in that items just don't stay put.

I'll look at it again in a few days when I'm less emotional it.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by ARJWright (Post 283613)

Vote: Not usable on a daily basis.

For good measure - I'm grateful for all the reports in this thread. We do have issues and all of you do a great job at highlighting where our priorities need to lay and that honesty of the problems and you people testing it is what makes it possible to move closer to something you can actually use.

Responding to a few issues:

Quote:

Originally Posted by MSchievelbein (Post 282379)

My main complaint is that when I boot it, I have to hold the menu key and select Mer off my internal card

I believe it's possible to use cal-tool to set a boot id matching the one in /etc/bootmenu.d/*.item (qwerty12: what was this again?)

Quote:

Originally Posted by svs57 (Post 282544)

I go back to maemo.
1. Needs turn hardware keyboard. Al lot of Fn keys show wrong symbols

Currently Mer resorts to 'us' layout, but if someone would sit down for a day and write a control panel for it, in PyGTK or something, everyone would have the feature.

It's fairly simple: List of keyboard layout to activate, and a script starting when Hildon starts that sets the keyboard layout. 'setxkbmap -layout <layoutname>' is the one to set the layout.

Quote:

Originally Posted by svs57 (Post 282544)

4. Can't find sound modules.

Sound is working but not documented, as they rely on a rather shady way of getting the DSP tasks for now.

Grab a updates repository line from your Maemo-Diablo's /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hildon-application-manager.list (i think), put it in the Maemo sources.list, apt-get update; apt-get install tablet-sound; remove the updates repository line again -- and then shut down your tablet (no reboot, halt completely, this will crash Mer on next boot otherwise, don't ask me why this happens), and boot.

Next time you boot you will have DSP tasks (but you will have to unmute it using an ALSA mixer. ALSA is muted by standard for who knows what reason..)

We still have trouble with PulseAudio however. Does anyone in the community have any experience with PulseAudio drivers, and want to take up a day's task of converting osso-esd's DSP driver to PA? The osso-esd DSP driver is -really- simple to figure out how it works.

Quote:

Originally Posted by svs57 (Post 282544)

5. Don't like that soft keyboard open when hardware used.

Did you know that powerlaunch is not just a more advanced power menu? It is actually a full scripting language for making tablet behaviour (reacting on events, etc). If someone spent a day realizing how powerlaunch works, and used the gconf hooks in HIM to deny soft keyboard opening, we'd have this too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by paulkoan (Post 282597)

It needs fbreader, pidgin, skype and claws to be good to go for me.

FBreader, Pidgin and Claws - with 0.13 we will have a Scratchbox-free environment ready for all of you (OpenSUSE Build Service). You could get those apps building like you would on a Debian machine, help adapt the packages to Mer (it's often very simple), and we'd all have those applications.

Quote:

Originally Posted by benny1967 (Post 282648)

would it still be useful to file "user-level bugs" (=I can describe what happens, but not why) about such things or would that only generate useless noise ATM because you're aware of these issues, anyway? (Or would rather have more qualified bug reports at this stage of development?)

All bug reports (provided they're for the most recent version) are more than welcome. Bug reports are also a place you can look at to see if there's anything you can help fix.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ekul (Post 282697)

3. A tool to add items to the mer menu would be very nice. Even if it's just a cli app that takes a .desktop file and category as arguments and generates a menu entry it would be great since currently you have to launch jaunty software from xterm
4. The font size used for the mer and applications is very small. If it were larger finger usage would be a lot easier.
5. On behalf of lefties everywhere a left-handed version of the default theme would be much appreciated. The scroll bars on the left hand side goes a long way towards making the device much less frustrating

3. - we could have a simple script that after packages are installed try to send a message to Hildon to update the applications menu. I believe HAM does that already. Anyone in the community who can do this?

4-5: Yes, admittedly - and everything is able to be changed in the theme. The theme is freely adaptable - we can even do a hildon-theme-layout-mer-lefties so any themes depending on it would have left hand scrollbars.

Or someone could make a simple control panel to indicate handedness, and add to the ~/.osso/current-gtk-theme.gtkrc (not exact name, too lazy to look it up atm, but there's a gtkrc file everything stems from) - I think it is just a one-liner to add left-handed scrollbars?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ARJWright (Post 282975)

- widgets in the status bar area seem to all be float:left; really makes it disconcerting when you have only 4 active, and the clock isn't right aligned. Customization is good, but eh... might be a bit too fluid in that respect.

- got a crash of Hildon desktop which pretty much rendered the device useless. There was nothing but the background on the screen. I'll have to see if I can reproduce it to better help there. Was running Midori over Wi-Fi with the slider closed at the time.

Marquee widgets being float:left - I'd love them to act better, but I'll be honest, I'm an idiot when it comes to GTK. I understand the framework somewhat and I can patch some things, but fact is, if any of you in the community are able to help out with even simple GTK (sadly not PyGTK when it comes to hildon-desktop) things, help with tiny spots that need fixing, please do participate. GTK coders are hard to find it seems, but they do exist in this community (or we wouldn't have fantastic applications like we do).

Quote:

Originally Posted by MSchievelbein (Post 283061)

1) Is there a way to make it so that the screen does not dim after 30 seconds. I do a lot of document reading and it dims before I can even finish a page.

3)Should we be installing applications from Extras and elsewhere using the default installer or apt-get? The default installer does not seem to handle dependencies. When I try to install Canola or advanced-power or some others, they give me dependency errors and do not install. Would synaptic work with MER ?

1) Yes - if we extend Advanced Backlight to be a control panel for this as well, and move out the functionality from DSME (which is now open source too). rm_you seems to have stepped up to the challenge. We might even see ABL on X86.

3)

Right now the default installer does not show anything but user/. Simple reason for this is that we want to show the Hildon applications up front. But also, if we actually do show -all- the Ubuntu packages, Hildon Application Manager will slow to a grinding halt (because of the sheer size of the repositories). But consider this - you can grab all of it through apt-get install, - and when you port an application to Hildon, you never have to worry about library porting problems anymore.

As part of 0.13 (i hope) we will start trying to build Maemo.org extras as well, using OpenSUSE Build Service, so we don't have the dependency problems.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sleepy_sanchez (Post 283079)

I have the same questions as benny1967. Should we file such usability bugs and small requests like "a restart option when hildon-desktop crashes" in maemo bugzilla

Yes, yes, definately. Also, you might not know this, but if you see the "Hildon desktop crashed" box, you can (because of powerlaunch) probably click power button to get the power menu, or hold power until LED blinks, and press dpad down to reboot.

Quote:

(insert anything about 770)

Rule of thumb: always make sure to have swap and that first boot wizard find it. Get me /var/log/first-boot-wizard.log if things break, and /home/username/.xsession-errors. Make sure 'dmesg' does not have any I/O errors in it.

Anyway, my point with most of this is:

The skills to make these leaps with little effort, exist in this community. Mer has made it this far with a huge bunch of small efforts and a small group of dedicated individuals that almost deal with Mer from morning to night.

Help us out and even your small effort will lead to something everyone of us can enjoy to use, - and feel a sense of ownership of, as you helped created it.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stskeeps (Post 283637)

Thans a lot for all this informations and for our work on Mer !
I hope to give a new life to my old 770 with Mer ;)
I tried to grab add the updates repo from my N810 Diablo list : at tableteer but mer cannot access this repository if I remember correctly there was a user/pass set by HAM for those special repo ... Is that the repo you refered to ?

Fred

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by fredoll (Post 283649)

I hope to give a new life to my old 770 with Mer ;)
I tried to grab add the updates repo from my N810 Diablo list : at tableteer but mer cannot access this repository if I remember correctly there was a user/pass set by HAM for those special repo ... Is that the repo you refered to ?

Ah, sound doesn't work on 770 yet. That's a more difficult topic :/ But yes. But Mer uses the Maemo apt, so it authenticates the tablet properly.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

I suppose I should look into the OS2008HE repo ?
and try and grab tablet-sound from there ...
What do you think ?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by fredoll (Post 283667)

I suppose I should look into the OS2008HE repo ?
and try and grab tablet-sound from there ...
What do you think ?

Well there's no OS2008HE repo - tablet-sound is our stuff but it depends on osso-dsp-something-modules. I can't recall how that looks in 770.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

You're right : OS2008HE uses chinook repo ...
Thanks for answering this

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

I believe it's possible to use cal-tool to set a boot id matching the one in /etc/bootmenu.d/*.item (qwerty12: what was this again?)

You can set the default boot item by doing:

chroot /mnt/initfs cal-tool --set-root-device ask:<bootmenu ID>

Bootmenu ID is found in the .item file, installer creates something big like "mer internal p2", but i'd recommend changing it to something simple like "mer"

My ID for Mer in internal card is just "internal", so i have done following

/mnt/initfs cal-tool --set-root-device ask:internal

"ask" means it will show the bootmenu without pressing any key

Re: Mer 0.12 released

just a short question,

How can i switch the keyboard layout to german?

Thanks,

Erni35

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by Erni35 (Post 283865)

just a short question,

How can i switch the keyboard layout to german?

Thanks,

Erni35

setxkbmap -layout de

Re: Mer 0.12 released

do i need reinstall os every time when new mer released, or apt-get upgrade will be enought?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by x-demon (Post 283873)

do i need reinstall os every time when new mer released, or apt-get upgrade will be enought?

Sadly we're doing some major reconstruction work right now but eventually you won't have to :P (we are moving to new repositories)

Re: Mer 0.12 released

oh, ok. I installing e17 now, since it not very fast process, i doesn't really want to reinstall system =D

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stskeeps (Post 283637)

Or someone could make a simple control panel to indicate handedness, and add to the ~/.osso/current-gtk-theme.gtkrc (not exact name, too lazy to look it up atm, but there's a gtkrc file everything stems from) - I think it is just a one-liner to add left-handed scrollbars?

Implemented as part of my theme switching control panel applet (which uses timeless' perl script for the actual choosing and switching of the theme}

http://trac.tspre.org/qwerty12/temp.png

(Ignore it saying toolbar - I fixed the string later)

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Heads up: 0.13 will not support 770, Beagleboard, Pocket Loox out of the box.

This is not part of us not intending to support those platforms, we just need to make kernel packages for the devices and put them in OBS - and we don't have time left to do that - Hopefully they'll be back under 0.14 sprint.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Silly question: How do I enable USB OTG/host mode in Mer 0.12?
Can I change the keyboard-layout (both USB keyboard and on-screen) to German qwertz?

Keep up the great work! :)

EDIT: Found host mode in the forums: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...light=usb+host
But how do I change the keyboard layout?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Hello guys, I'm not sure if this is the right thread to post this suggestion, but here goes:

You know the Viliv S5, it has been talked about in the forum and stuff, and today I saw this video: http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009/0...v-s5-umpc.html
It's basicly how windows 7 is running on it + the things that don't run dew to M$'s software.
So, could you guys package a nice working mer and send it for a test and maybe review to sites that deal with UMPC's. I think it'd be a great boost of popularity for the great project.

And what do you think?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by borghal (Post 285989)

But how do I change the keyboard layout?

setxkbmap -layout layoutname

(i know of fisenoda, de, us, others probably exist)

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by n3x (Post 286745)

So, could you guys package a nice working mer and send it for a test and maybe review to sites that deal with UMPC's. I think it'd be a great boost of popularity for the great project.

And what do you think?

Sure, if we had a Viliv S5 to port onto to make sure it worked.. :)

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stskeeps (Post 286793)

Sure, if we had a Viliv S5 to port onto to make sure it worked.. :)

Couldn't it be installed over a simple Ubuntu 9.04 like an additional DE?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Mer cannot be installed like any other DE because some Maemo packages are heavily conflicting with gnome stuff...

I have once tried to put Mer on top of jaunty, result was Mer backround centered on the screen

Re: Mer 0.12 released

I hope Mer eventually gets the conflicts resolved, because really, Mer should be an installable desktop environment from vanilla Ubuntu. That would be awesome beyond words.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by qole (Post 287200)

I hope Mer eventually gets the conflicts resolved, because really, Mer should be an installable desktop environment from vanilla Ubuntu. That would be awesome beyond words.

Yeah, that might just happen. You'd want to see this.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stskeeps (Post 287203)

Yeah, that might just happen. You'd want to see this.

Yes, exactly like that. I'm glad there are other people thinking like I do.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Not sure if it is to be posted here, but partly it is right.
I've almost finished python daemon for working with BME server socket, so there will be no need in hald-addon-bme. Thanks for BME Protocol, but unfortunately it has some errors in message structs descriptions and black spots:

Code:

struct emsg_battery_info_reply {

    uint32      status; // I guess it's the reply status, 0 means all is OK, -1 means error

    uint32      a;

    uint32      flags;

    uint16      c;

    uint16      // Battery capacity. Have no another battery, so check needed, but seems to be it.

    uint16      temp;   // Battery temperature measured in Kelvin 

    uint16      instaneous_battery_voltage; // Instantaneous battery voltage (mV)

    uint16      // Lowest TX-Off voltage (mV)

    uint16      // Lowest TX-On voltage (mV)

    uint16      // Closed switch battery voltage (mV)

    uint16      // Open switch battery voltage (mV)

    uint16      k;

    uint16      l;

};



struct emsg_bme_bulk1_reply {

   uint32     status; // I guess it's the reply status, 0 means all is OK, -1 means error

   uint32     unknown1;

   uint32     unknown2;

   uint32     unknown3;

   uint16     // Elapsed model time (min)

   uint16     // Tx-Off battery voltage (mV)

   uint16     // Tx-On battery voltage (mV)

   uint8      // Battery power state

   uint8      //  Batmon4 internal flags2

   uint8      // Batmon4 internal flags3

   uint8      // Charging method

   uint16     // Present Phi value (mV)

   uint16     // Present Delta Phi value (mV)

   uint8      // Charging mode 

   uint8      // Previous charging mode 

   uint8      // Charger type

   uint8      // Previous charger type

   uint16     // Instantaneous battery voltage (mV)

   uint8      // Number of charger checks (0-9) ?

   uint8      // Charger recognition state

   uint16     unknown4;

   uint16     // Instantaneous charger current (mA)

   uint16     unknown5;

   uint16     // Charging time (min)

   uint16     // Average Vchar (mV)

   uint16     // Equivalent DC charger current (mA) 

   uint8      // Battery full flag (0 or 1)

   uint8      // HW Cha PWM value L ??

   uint8      // Cha PWM value L ??

   uint8      unknown6;

   uint16     // Open switch battery voltage (mV)

   uint16     // Closed switch battery voltage (mV)

   uint16     unknown7;

};

Next thing is to think about calculating the battery percentage, 'cause there are enough values to use. And I guess I really should write it in pure C with D-Bus messaging. Any ideas and help appreciated.

And Advanced Power (and Monitor) are fully ported to Mer now. Next release will be fully working on Maemo and Mer.

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by 412b (Post 288023)

Code:

struct emsg_battery_info_reply {

    uint32      status; // I guess it's the reply status, 0 means all is OK, -1 means error

    uint32      a;

    uint32      flags;

    uint16      c;

    uint16      // Battery capacity. Have no another battery, so check needed, but seems to be it.

    uint16      temp;   // Battery temperature measured in Kelvin 

    uint16      instaneous_battery_voltage; // Instantaneous battery voltage (mV)

    uint16      // Lowest TX-Off voltage (mV)

    uint16      // Lowest TX-On voltage (mV)

    uint16      // Closed switch battery voltage (mV)

    uint16      // Open switch battery voltage (mV)

    uint16      k;

    uint16      l;

};



struct emsg_bme_bulk1_reply {

   uint32     status; // I guess it's the reply status, 0 means all is OK, -1 means error

   uint32     unknown1;

   uint32     unknown2;

   uint32     unknown3;

   uint16     // Elapsed model time (min)

   uint16     // Tx-Off battery voltage (mV)

   uint16     // Tx-On battery voltage (mV)

   uint8      // Battery power state

   uint8      //  Batmon4 internal flags2

   uint8      // Batmon4 internal flags3

   uint8      // Charging method

   uint16     // Present Phi value (mV)

   uint16     // Present Delta Phi value (mV)

   uint8      // Charging mode 

   uint8      // Previous charging mode 

   uint8      // Charger type

   uint8      // Previous charger type

   uint16     // Instantaneous battery voltage (mV)

   uint8      // Number of charger checks (0-9) ?

   uint8      // Charger recognition state

   uint16     unknown4;

   uint16     // Instantaneous charger current (mA)

   uint16     unknown5;

   uint16     // Charging time (min)

   uint16     // Average Vchar (mV)

   uint16     // Equivalent DC charger current (mA) 

   uint8      // Battery full flag (0 or 1)

   uint8      // HW Cha PWM value L ??

   uint8      // Cha PWM value L ??

   uint8      unknown6;

   uint16     // Open switch battery voltage (mV)

   uint16     // Closed switch battery voltage (mV)

   uint16     unknown7;

};

I'd like to see it working with other battery monitors too, since i use other desktop-environments too :) ("normal battery monitors [KDE and GNOME ones]" with hald-addon-bme can only show 25%,50%,75% and 100%)

Re: Mer 0.12 released

still no word in 0.13?

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Quote:

Originally Posted by [[ cold ]] (Post 288599)

still no word in 0.13?

Been reloading the 'New Posts' every 10 minutes waiting for it... Should we create a Meraholics thread? :D

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Sorry, we have 0.13 delayed until Qt finishes building on armel :P We messed up in planning :)

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Well, just as long as it comes out before the Pandora *and* the N900, much will be forgiven :-)

Re: Mer 0.12 released

Qt is finished now right? At least according to the Wiki page (and Stskeeps)!

I see there is still no sound though. Oh well...