User:Nicola.mfb

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Hi

I'm Nicola, born on 1973 in Paduli a little country of southern Italy.

I'm grauated in Informatic science, and since 1997 I'm working as system manager for the University Federico II of Naples. When I arrived I found about 40 servers, equipped with some proprietary Unix (and not Unix) OS, time after time I migrated all them to Linux, today about 400 servers are free, and 99% of them have community distro.

My mission is Linux everywhere, I use it on all my desktop, servers, wireless AP, ipaq, and finally on my phone too. While not struggling over all my devices I play accordion, flute and piano in an ethnic popoular music band, or take photos around the world.

On this page you may see what I'm thinking about the freerunner and what I'm doing for my lovely freerunner.

Contents

Distros

2007.12

I do not know it, when my freerunner arrived on september 2008 it was already deprecated so I flashed ASU after a couple of minutes. I did an error, because I lost the knowledge of some important features and ideas I was able to see only some month ago with Hackable:1.

Qtopia

Qtopia was the first distro I installed on the SD, it was FAST and complete, but no X11 applications.

ASU

A mix between E, QT and GTK, the idea was to provide a subset of qtopia on the X server togheter with all other X11 apps. So I swapped and put Qtopia on flash and ASU on flash to have more space to play.

FSO

"All development should go to FSO, ASU is deprecated" was the rule, and as I was excited to write my apps for my phone I deleted Qtopia, put ASU on flash and FSO on SD. There is not much to say on FSO images, they are not really distros, but a way to carry and use the FSO frameworkd.

SHR

In the mean while, SHR. born to recycle the 2007.12 code porting it to FSO, was growing, now it's quite all based on E* software. It's a very promising distro, but a lot of users are annoyed because it frequently breaks. The release of a stable milestone was announced several months ago, but we are still waiting, they sometime freeze unstable to a testing tree calling user to test and report feedbacks, and after a bit they delete it and freezes again. This happened a lot of time while peoples are asking for a stable distro. SHR application are based on python, so you actually have python apps, interacting with a python ophonekitd, interacting with a python frameworkd. The second problem is that flash/sd is slow, and phone functionalities are splitted between several apps, the load time of each of them is high, the result is a very slow device. Please to not blame me! I respect the efforts of SHR developers, but think that some decision must be revisited above all when we may see in the past better solutions!

OM2009

OM2009 was initially the new offical OM distro, as OM stopped developing actually it's based on volounter work. It has two strong points over SHR, the first is that it uses more legacy software to try effectively a stabilization for release, an example is the kernel as the last have serious problems on wifi, the second is that the main application, Paroli, is a semi monolitic python app, so the python load time is limited only on startup, and the big part of functionality are ready to use because they are in ram or is loaded easly with plugins.

Gentoo

My preferred distro on laptop and servers, but it's too slow on the device, the lack of precompiled binaries and freerunner customization make it usable only after some weeks of emerging/twiking.

Hackable:1

A very interesting distro, it uses hardware directly, stable underliyng system (debian lenny), and rivisited and improved 2007.12 code. No python in core parts, so very fast, it has some important features idea that I think it'absourd we losed in ASU/SHR/OM2009, for example the possibility to launch a stay on top window by holding the aux menu to kill applications and switch fullscreen windows! Try actually to close a fullscreen application on distro that use aux to lock and power to suspend! Luckily SHR has restored the use of power button to launch a dialog that make you kill applications or poweroff the system. The only problem of hackable is that it uses hardware and not FSO, so many applications FSO based does not work, developers has to drive the hardware without a central mediator as FSO. For example if two applications power the BT on at startup and close at exit, you cannot close the first and use the second, while the FSO resource system handles that for you. And the last, it uses an old 2.6.24 kernel, but actually it seems more stable than recents!

Debian SID

My actually preferred distro, has quite recent kernel and fso, tons of precompiled ready to use software, the best distro to try and test software and to develop new ones! One only problem, it's not targeted for freerunner (of course) so you have to customize it, and it upgrades slowly, but this may be not a defect :)

Neovento

Not tested yet

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Personal tools

Hi

I'm Nicola, born on 1973 in Paduli a little country of southern Italy.

I'm grauated in Informatic science, and since 1997 I'm working as system manager for the University Federico II of Naples. When I arrived I found about 40 servers, equipped with some proprietary Unix (and not Unix) OS, time after time I migrated all them to Linux, today about 400 servers are free, and 99% of them have community distro.

My mission is Linux everywhere, I use it on all my desktop, servers, wireless AP, ipaq, and finally on my phone too. While not struggling over all my devices I play accordion, flute and piano in an ethnic popoular music band, or take photos around the world.

On this page you may see what I'm thinking about the freerunner and what I'm doing for my lovely freerunner.

Distros

2007.12

I do not know it, when my freerunner arrived on september 2008 it was already deprecated so I flashed ASU after a couple of minutes. I did an error, because I lost the knowledge of some important features and ideas I was able to see only some month ago with Hackable:1.

Qtopia

Qtopia was the first distro I installed on the SD, it was FAST and complete, but no X11 applications.

ASU

A mix between E, QT and GTK, the idea was to provide a subset of qtopia on the X server togheter with all other X11 apps. So I swapped and put Qtopia on flash and ASU on flash to have more space to play.

FSO

"All development should go to FSO, ASU is deprecated" was the rule, and as I was excited to write my apps for my phone I deleted Qtopia, put ASU on flash and FSO on SD. There is not much to say on FSO images, they are not really distros, but a way to carry and use the FSO frameworkd.

SHR

In the mean while, SHR. born to recycle the 2007.12 code porting it to FSO, was growing, now it's quite all based on E* software. It's a very promising distro, but a lot of users are annoyed because it frequently breaks. The release of a stable milestone was announced several months ago, but we are still waiting, they sometime freeze unstable to a testing tree calling user to test and report feedbacks, and after a bit they delete it and freezes again. This happened a lot of time while peoples are asking for a stable distro. SHR application are based on python, so you actually have python apps, interacting with a python ophonekitd, interacting with a python frameworkd. The second problem is that flash/sd is slow, and phone functionalities are splitted between several apps, the load time of each of them is high, the result is a very slow device. Please to not blame me! I respect the efforts of SHR developers, but think that some decision must be revisited above all when we may see in the past better solutions!

OM2009

OM2009 was initially the new offical OM distro, as OM stopped developing actually it's based on volounter work. It has two strong points over SHR, the first is that it uses more legacy software to try effectively a stabilization for release, an example is the kernel as the last have serious problems on wifi, the second is that the main application, Paroli, is a semi monolitic python app, so the python load time is limited only on startup, and the big part of functionality are ready to use because they are in ram or is loaded easly with plugins.

Gentoo

My preferred distro on laptop and servers, but it's too slow on the device, the lack of precompiled binaries and freerunner customization make it usable only after some weeks of emerging/twiking.

Hackable:1

A very interesting distro, it uses hardware directly, stable underliyng system (debian lenny), and rivisited and improved 2007.12 code. No python in core parts, so very fast, it has some important features idea that I think it'absourd we losed in ASU/SHR/OM2009, for example the possibility to launch a stay on top window by holding the aux menu to kill applications and switch fullscreen windows! Try actually to close a fullscreen application on distro that use aux to lock and power to suspend! Luckily SHR has restored the use of power button to launch a dialog that make you kill applications or poweroff the system. The only problem of hackable is that it uses hardware and not FSO, so many applications FSO based does not work, developers has to drive the hardware without a central mediator as FSO. For example if two applications power the BT on at startup and close at exit, you cannot close the first and use the second, while the FSO resource system handles that for you. And the last, it uses an old 2.6.24 kernel, but actually it seems more stable than recents!

Debian SID

My actually preferred distro, has quite recent kernel and fso, tons of precompiled ready to use software, the best distro to try and test software and to develop new ones! One only problem, it's not targeted for freerunner (of course) so you have to customize it, and it upgrades slowly, but this may be not a defect :)

Neovento

Not tested yet