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:

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?)

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

just a short question,

How can i switch the keyboard layout to german?

Thanks,

Erni35

setxkbmap -layout de

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