I keep getting the Chinese message + ! (ie: some sort of failure.)
What I've done:
1) On a 1GB SD card (FAT 32), I've placed the mer-0.14testing2.SmartQ7 image.
2) Renamed the image to SmartQ7.
3) Placed into device. While device is off, hold down Menu/Function button and plug in charger. Device shows orange LED (for firmware flash mode, I assume.)
4) I get the "!" message.
5) Remove SD card, rename image to SmartQ5 on my laptop.
6) Repeat (3) above.
7) I get the "!" message.
I'm currently downloading the v2.0 Chinese firmware. I'll try it with that, but the download will take about 4 hours...
I'm doing this from a Xubuntu Linux machine -- could the FAT formatting on the SD card be wrong somehow? I suppose I could have a wonky SD reader in the device...
Do I need to use the SDUpdateTool on the image first?
Thanks for any pointers,
m a r
ps: just trying to get this thing up again -- borked my xorg.conf and it won't boot... any OS will do at this point...
When I fixed mine I had two images on the sdcard, same file but renamed one to SmartQ5. Followed Bezeen instructions precisely.
And yeah, that chinese language to english. I knew of that instruction page, but took me ages to work out where that file was to change.
Installation problem was the format on the card. Really strange -- I used cfdisk to make a new FAT32 partition, then mkfs.vfat to make a FAT32 file system.
Xubuntu saw the card, automounted it, copied files, etc. But when I redid the cfdisk, partition was missing. No matter how often I remade it, I couldn't keep a partition table.
But the SD card would work, appear in the file manager, mount, unmount etc. It even showed up as an exported Hard Disk when I connected the Q7 to my laptop via USB.
Weird.
Anyway, can't mount an SD card via my built-in card-reader to my Virtual Machine of Win2k to format it in Windows. What to do?
Answer: format the card in my digital camera, then ditch the folders. Voila.
Anyhow, once that was over with, Mer installed fine.
So far, it's alright. I've never loved Hildon. And Midori hangs on gmail -- just chokes. Probably because there's only 128 MB of RAM, I guess. Looking forward to the Tear browser -- I've heard good things.
I'll keep trying it out though. I'd like to pop more of the GPE environment on there. I assume it's not using GDM or the equivalent -- how is login managed?
It installs from ubuntu repositories, so it is not available in application manager. It might be necessary to configure by hand full screen/rotate/next page/prev page, but you get the same functionality as hildonized fbreader. Similar situation is for evince.
For mplayer, it might be best to apt-get install mplayer, but then copy mplayer binary and two modules s3c_mfc.ko and s3c_pp.ko from original image. This version uses hardware video acceleration so it can play higher quality videos.
My apt-get tests
Fbreader works - enter key to fullscreen (i will look into key on this weekend)
cbrpager works - but the icons build a tower in the middle of the screen and leave very little space for the pics -should be fixable...
mplayer - No releases for mplayer in jaunty armel have yet been published.
gxine - error with libglu1-mesa (a think it was) on test build 2 (0.14) a will try again on test b7
vlc - just to big (couldnt -f install vlc) after installing mer was broken - could have been "-f remove gxine" if a cant get xine to work a will try vlc again
evince - installed and opened .cdr (rar comics) i played around and a got a error (perhaps doing a little much at the same time - trying to install things and...)
some small things like unrar was easy to install - only hardware intensive apps like videoplayer gave me problem - so - just look at launchpad
and see if you find something you would like to try to install (sudo apt-get install *apps*)
a question:
has anybody any experience of libswfdec or gnash?
could you get youtube and other flash sites to work - i like to get my swedish tv site to work - it would be great to have this small device to catch up on the news...
My apt-get tests
Fbreader works - enter key to fullscreen (i will look into key on this weekend)
cbrpager works - but the icons build a tower in the middle of the screen and leave very little space for the pics -should be fixable...
mplayer - No releases for mplayer in jaunty armel have yet been published.
gxine - error with libglu1-mesa (a think it was) on test build 2 (0.14) a will try again on test b7
vlc - just to big (couldnt -f install vlc) after installing mer was broken - could have been "-f remove gxine" if a cant get xine to work a will try vlc again
some small things like unrar was easy to install - only hardware intensive apps like videoplayer gave me problem - so - just look at launchpad
and see if you find something you would like to try to install (sudo apt-get install *apps*)
a question:
has anybody any experience of libswfdec or gnash?
could you get youtube and other flash sites to work - i like to get my swedish tv site to work - it would be great to have this small device to catch up on the news...
Gnash also gets a error on libglu1-mesa_7.4-ubuntu3_armel.deb
is this related to the hw drives (whats not optimized yet) or can it be fixed with the right libs?
(vlc seems to break mer - installed vlc-nox and then on reboot i get stuck on login (ubuntu 9.04 * tty1 - * login: )
My unofficial SmartQ board will be up this Sunday (beginning of next week if I'm late). If some of you are interested in writing FAQ's and Tutorials, it would be greatly appreciated. For the moment, I'm collecting bits of information wherever I can but as I don't own the device yet (will do at the end of June), it's still a bit blurry for me...
I've tried;
mplayer
xine
vlc
does anybody knows any other videoplayer i could try...
Try mplayer as follows:
Copy from original firmware three files:
/usr/bin/mplayer
/lib/modules/*/s3c-mfc.ko
/lib/modules/*/s3c-pp.ko
run ldd /usr/bin/mplayer
See what libraries are missing, find to which packages they belong, and apt-ger install them (all are available).
After every boot insmod the two modules, make sure the device files are accessible to the user, and then you can use mplayer.
If those instructions are not enough, I'll add the details in a few days, when I get the chance to do it again.
