User:Neiljerram

Revision as of 02:01, 16 December 2009

I use Debian on my Freerunner. Following is a description of my setup, and of how well (or not) things are working with that setup.

Main points

Debian installed (again) on 10th December (2009, following major filesystem corruption of my previous Debian install).

matchbox window manager and keyboard. I'm kind of missing the E17 keyboard, but not as much as I expected to. The matchbox keyboard seems more usable than you'd think, given its size.

trayer, openmoko-panel-plugin and auxlaunch. Here's my .xsession:

#!/bin/sh
trayer --edge top --height 60 &
openmoko-panel-plugin &
zhone &
rm -f .auxlaunchpid
auxlaunch -dms &
exec matchbox-window-manager -use_titlebar no -use_cursor no

Some screenshots to show how it looks... I think the plainness of the top panel goes well with the sharp angles of Gtk+ apps.

• 

  zhone

• 

  auxlaunch

• 

  Simon Tatham's cube puzzle

• 

  aptitude-gtk

cellwriter is fun to have around. Once it has been started for the first time (which you can do from auxlaunch), it adds an icon to the top panel, and then you can click that to make cellwriter appear and disappear. So there is no need to decide whether to replace matchbox-keyboard with cellwriter in the openmoko-panel-plugin config; it's easy to have both. I made the following changes to the default config.

• Grid: 10 by 4 calls. Otherwise, when training, you can't get to some of the characters.

• Keyboard: 480 pixels wide. Obviously.

• Enable extended input events. Otherwise just doesn't work as an input method.

• Window docking: Bottom. Otherwise completely covers the app that you're trying to type into!

Queries/Ideas/Plans

auxlaunch should also support killing an existing window - for apps like TangoGPS which don't have a quit button anywhere. I wonder if anyone already has a patch for that?

Why doesn't the current app resize itself when cellwriter pops up, in the same way they all do when matchbox-keyboard pops up?

Why does http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnFreeRunner#ChoosingKernel say that the default kernel is 2.6.29, when I apparently have 2.6.28 (and didn't do anything special to get this):

debian-gta02:~# uname -a
Linux debian-gta02 2.6.28-20090105.git69b2aa26 #1 PREEMPT Tue Mar 3 20:22:28 UTC 2009 armv4tl GNU/Linux

Why does http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/2277 say that using a 2.6.28 kernel "makes the rest of the phone broken"? (Most things seem to be working for me with a 2.6.28 kernel.)