My Pengpod 1000 problems

[mad]

I having a few problems. some have been addressed in the tips post but some are not even mentioned so I'm not sure if it's just me.... I understand that really this is an ongoing project and it's early days but the linux installation is so full of holes it's embarrassing. Maybe with a few months work it will be a customer ready product.

1. linux often doesn't boot I am aware that nothing shows on the screen for a few seconds after turning on. but I often have to reset the tablet before it will turn on?? android works much more reliably.

2. turn off is disabled on the linux desktop?? I have to use the command line and then it won't reboot. Even 'sudo shutdown -r now' fails miserably

3. The screen rotations sometimes corrupt the display. ie two clocks displayed in different corners at the same time???

4. anybody got a method of turning off the mouse pointer in linux?

5. Minimal linaro image? is it supposed to do anything or are we to use it for a base to build on. I can't get it to boot to anything, not even a command prompt. Would like a custom desktop like enlightenment or even nodm but think I'll have to rebuild everything myself?? was hoping it would work as well as the images for the mele A1000 which have been faultless but obviously there is a lot of work to be done.

6. Android.. is it always this slow or is this image not fully optimised for the chipset or slow due to developer options? any tips on speeding it up? The chrome browser for example is much much slower than the chrome browser installed under linaro and I'm talking by a factor of 10 for displaying the same web page.

All in all it's a stab in the right direction and I'm glad somebodies done it. Any help would be appreciated.

[ceeseven]

Don't have my peapod (peacock pod;)) yet so I can't say much, but

method of turning off the mouse pointer in linux

I'm no expert there but two things come to my mind:
1. make the cursor timeout really short (100-300 ms)
2. download or make yourself a transparent cursor theme
maybe there's an easier way I don't yet know of.,.

Minimal linaro image? is it supposed to do anything or are we to use it for a base to build on.

I would strongly guess so. You don't have to build manually, there is an apt repository.

Android.. is it always this slow

Slow default browser is a known android bug. Try turning on 2d acceleration in developer options. Also, people say opera is pretty fast.

[khanning]

I've definitely noticed some of the same issue's as you so your not alone.

I haven't been able to get reboot working, but to fix the graphical shutdown option:
Open a terminal and type:

sudo nano /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy

Find the section that looks like:

<action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop-multiple-users">
<description>Stop the system when multiple users are logged in</description>
<message>System policy prevents stopping the system when other users are logged in</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

and change to:

<action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop-multiple-users">
<description>Stop the system when multiple users are logged in</description>
<message>System policy prevents stopping the system when other users are logged in</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

Press Ctrl+X then y then Enter to save the changes. You can now shutdown without having to authenticate as user linaro.

Hiding the cursor:
I've tried both compiling and installing a transparent mouse pointer, and using unclutter with no success. I'll post if I find something that works.

Battery in Linux
The built in LXDE battery indicator doesn't work. I think its because it relies on ACPI. You can run the following two commands from the terminal to get the current battery stats.

Battery level:
cat /sys/class/power_supply/battery/capacity

Full Battery stats:
cat /sys/class/power_supply/battery/uevent

I'm sure there are some alternative battery indicator tools that would let you specify where the stats come from I just haven't looked yet.

[ceeseven]

I've tried both compiling and installing a transparent mouse pointer, and using unclutter with no success. I'll post if I find something that works.

One more reason to get a full e17 up. e17 has a checkbox in mouse options "show mouse cursor", uncheck it and your cursor is gone.

[NLion]

I just received the PengPod700 and it also has omissions, fails and bugs, thats to be expected, the linaro images we are using are a couple weeks old, when they began duplicating the sd cards. There must have been some improvements from that time to now. Also, is linux, you should expect to get your hands dirty to make it perfect. (But you are right, some omissions are pretty sucky).

However, the real problem is the lack of documentation, as Neal and his people has been very busy shipping the tablets, they haven't put up the guides, howtos, or the newest sd images. Neal, give us the docs and we will try to fix the problems. I'll give them a week or two to get their stuff together, and put up all the info. Hope that is enough.

[npeacock]

Thanks for the support. That is exactly what is going on, we spent today shipping orders and dealing with customs, missing phone numbers, etc. I'm working on getting some of those guides up right now.

[npeacock]

Also a few things for the OP. I'm not sure what you mean about having to build everything yourself, apt-get should get you a pretty large variety of Linux packages with minimal effort.

Also about the rotation. Its a side effect of xrandr not supporting rotation, which I think is a driver issue. We have to work around it with a frame buffer rotation which isn't perfect and if you try to call two rotations before x manages to reset you run into the issues you mentioned. More on this later but in short, I put a lot of time in on that and never got xrandr working. I'm really hoping there is just some magic I don't know about X and one someone points it out xrandr will start spinning. I've got a g-sensor based rotation script all ready to go once that happens.

Also I'm not sure what you guys mean about turn off not working. I push the power button on the top of the tablet and then shut down menu pops up, no password required. If you want it to stay off, you should remove the SD card.

I hope that helps

[ceeseven]

Not really sure about that but I think the xrandr people don't do the touchscreen rotation any more, only the display rotation.

Xrandr is used to set the size, orientation and/or reflection of the
outputs for a screen. It can also set the screen size.

On another device (Intel classmate) I had to write a short script to rotate the touch input according to the display orientation (xsetwacom). If you added a manual touchscreen rotation (wacom/other?) to the g-triggered xrandr script the automatic rotation should work as expected.

[waterhead]

Not really sure about that but I think the xrandr people don't do the touchscreen rotation any more, only the display rotation.

Unless things have changed in the last year, it can control mouse and touch orientation.

First you need to know how the touchscreen is identified. Here is how I did it on my Azpen tablet:

Code: Select all

xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                  id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ ILITEK ILITEK Multi-Touch                   id=9    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Logitech USB Receiver                       id=12    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Logitech USB Receiver                       id=13    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                       id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard                 id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                                id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                                   id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                                id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ USB2.0-Camera                               id=10    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard                id=11    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳   SCISSORS Keyboard                         id=14    [slave  keyboard (3)]

Using that info, I created this script that will rotate the screen and touchscreen when run, and back again when run again:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

# Find the line in "xrandr -q --verbose" output that contains current screen orientation and "strip" out current orientation.

rotation="$(xrandr -q --verbose | grep 'connected' | egrep -o  '\)  (normal|left|inverted|right) \(' | egrep -o  '(normal|left|inverted|right)')"

# Insert screen calibration settings:
xinput set-prop "ILITEK ILITEK Multi-Touch" "Evdev Axis Calibration" 162 4940 54 2783

# Using current screen orientation proceed to rotate screen and input tools.

case "$rotation" in
    normal)
#    -rotate to the left
    xrandr -o left
    xinput set-prop --type=int --format=8 "ILITEK ILITEK Multi-Touch" "Evdev Axes Swap" 1
    xinput set-prop --type=int --format=8 "ILITEK ILITEK Multi-Touch" "Evdev Axis Inversion" 1 0
    xinput set-prop --type=int --format=8 4 "Evdev Axis Inversion" 1 0
    ;;
    left)
#    -rotate to normal
    xrandr -o normal
    xinput set-prop --type=int --format=8 "ILITEK ILITEK Multi-Touch" "Evdev Axes Swap" 0
    xinput set-prop --type=int --format=8 "ILITEK ILITEK Multi-Touch" "Evdev Axis Inversion" 0 0
    xinput set-prop --type=int --format=8 4 "Evdev Axis Inversion" 0 0
    ;;
esac

That touchscreen is the "ILITEK ILITEK Multi-Touch". I don't have my Pengpod yet, so I don't know what touchscreen it has.

EDIT:This forum sucks for posting code!!

[npeacock]

Thanks for the input.

We have the touch screen rotation solved by adding ioctl calls to the driver from the rotation program we created, pengrotate. I will be uploading the code for that soon. I did attempt to use the xinput set prop method you mention but it did not work, I think because the driver didn't support it. The driver uses absolute values, not relative if I remember right and that was the problem.

The real problem is that xrandr wont rotate the display, I didn't even get far enough with it to worry about how X would handle input once rotated. It just gave the same vague error message no matter what I tried. I managed to use the fbdev driver with rotation from the conf file. That is why it takes so long to rotate.

I think the underlying kernel from based on the Allwinner sources does not support rotation. I'm not sure this is the problem or really how to go about solving it but that is what I know for the moment. Feedback appreciated.