User talk:Theo

Revision as of 11:48, 24 September 2008

Three weeks with FreeRunner This is the third week with the FreeRunner GTA02, and to this date it is of no better use to me than a brick. I have installed different versions of the OM2008, Qtopia and Debian, but none of these installations are working to any satisfaction in my world. This is of course a product in development thus one cannot expect things to work flawlessly compared to an ordinary phone. But then again, after more than one year of development I do at least expect the following to work:

• Make calls
• Receive calls
• Have a good enough audio quality
• Receive SMS messages
• Send SMS messages
• Be able to connect with ssh through USB

And I haven't even listed "long enough standby time" as an issue. If these things cannot be met, it's more or less impossible for me to keep my SIM card in the phone.

om2007.2 The phone came with this Distribution installed. After making my first call, getting complaints about the people at the other end finding it unbearable to hear a clear echo of their own voice I gave up and installed the new OM2008.8 version

om2008.8 Well, here the first problem is to be able to enter your PIN code for your SIM card. There is about no way to understand how you are able to change the keyboard to write numbers. It took a while to figure out how to change the keyset and finally input the PIN code. Beware to accidentally write the wrong number. If doing so you will end up having to battle against the input field and preview display field as they become un synchronised.

After winning that battle and finally being able to make calls I noticed the volume level was at the top level distorting the sound and letting you share your phone call with the public. wherever I have been searching there is simply no menue or levers to adjust your speaker and microphone level making it unusable.

Qtopia 4.3.3 When using the standard theme, you can at least make phone calls, but no matter how you try to adjust the volume on the speaker, it will stay at the top level. Changing to the second theme available makes things even funnier. There is no dial menue in sight wherever you look.

Debian Even though this one looks promising, I am still struggling with the simplest of things which is to get the pointer aligned with the screen after having done an apt-get upgrade of the basic installation. People are giving lots of nice hints about what values should be in the /dev/etc/pointercal file, but no matter what I put in there, only a portion of the screen is needed to access the phole display. Most people are refering to the touch screen events being received through /dev/input/event1, but no such device exists in my Debian installation.

About Debian

Hello Theo,

Your feedback about Debian sounds strange. Did you follow this procedure? My FreeRunner has been running Debian for three weeks and I never experienced such pointer related problems.

--

_Gilles.

Reply: About Debian

hi Gilles,

thank you for your very quick reply. Yes, I have used that page to be able to install Debian on it. It took me quite a while to find any working kernel to go with it though. At the moment, the OS itself works fine through USB. The problem lays solidely with the touch screen and xfce. The funny thing is that the /dev/input/event1 device xorg.conf is refering to doesn't exist under /dev/input. Only event0,2,3,4 and mice... Even so the touch screen works, but only uses a portion of the screen to address the whole display making the screen useless. :-(

As of writing I am starting to suspect /dev/input/mice might actually be the disguised /dev/input/event1, giving a bit of light in this dark matter...

Did you do an apt-get upgrade of your unit? Because that's when the screen problem started. --

/Theo

Part two: About Debian

I have sent this to the smartphone-userland forum, but nobody has replied

I have the same kind of problem that can be read about on the internet, that only a small portion of the touch screen is used to point all over the display. This weird behaviour started after doing an apt-get upgrade.

Most people recommend to use ts_calibrate to fix the issue, after setting the parameter  TSLIB_TSDEVICE="/dev/input/event1" But when looking into /dev/input/ there is no such thing as event1, there is event0,2,3,4 and if using them ts_calibrate will not recognize it as the touch screen. I have also seen recommendations such as /dev/input/touchscreen1 (or similar) but it doesn't exist as well. This means I have no clue where the xserver listens to the touch screen input.

Trying to configure the screen by using all kinds of different pointercal values recommended all over the Internet hasn't made things work any better, nor has trying to tamper with ts.conf. I notice that it pointercal is actually read as different parameters change its behaviour slightly, but nothing works. These ones I have used so far:

poinercal             -132      19425   -2039232        -25919  -218    23835853        33070 pointercal_current -67  38667   -4954632        -51172  121     46965312        65536 pointercal-fso  557   38667   -4654632        -51172  121     46965312        65536

pointercal         -132    19425   -2039232        -25919  -218    23835853        65535 calibrated-qtopia       -158    19425   -2071883        -25955  -290    24063475        33118 calibration_tip      0     80000    -8000000   -80500       0 74500000 65536

I have also tried to copy the old libts* files as some person did recommend that as well to solve the issue, but no success.