Release Hotfix 5 - RC2. Last one before going final

[maxxdoutvdub]

anyone had problems booting rc1 or rc2 from sd? ive tried on both 32 and 8 gb sd cards. tried both extracting the tar/zip and copying the nand. i always get as far as the gui then it wont respond to keys or register the touch screen. im running rc2 off the nand just fine and hf4 boots fine from sd on both cards. anyone else? this has been driving me nuts...

 

[jeffrey]

Would anything good or bad happen if I were to copy my home directory to an SD card before flashing and then copy it back after flashing?

 

[Jey123456]

some hidden config files might have been changed in the rc2, but anything you added yourself wont cause any issues.

 

[jeffrey]

some hidden config files might have been changed in the rc2, but anything you added yourself wont cause any issues.

I tried it with all files, and nothing exploded. I probably shouldn't have overwritten new configs in case what you said happened.

 

[John D.]

So does that mean we are finally going to see HW accelerated video?

Wrong. It just means that a better mplayer is used and some restrictions that were set on the kernel side (meant to possibly help saving a little energy since it would have been unusable so far anyway) were removed. The new mplayer "just" has better decoders embedded, that are faster. There is *NO* usage of the DSP as of the moment and if it ever will be used is still open.

This sounds ominous. Why will the DSP never be used? I remember lots of discussions surrounding the DSP from a few years back and in the GP32X forum - I thought it was a matter of having the new kernel take advantage of the DSP. WizardStan actually put it well once that going to a new kernel would be like Windows upgrade from Vista to Win7. Complicated, but possible.

 

[raneyac]

Has anybody been having issues with wifi after applying HF5? I had my pandora delivered like a week ago and wifi worked great out of the box but nowi can no longer connect to my schools network. To go back to HF4 do I just download the pnd hereand flash it?

 

[doragasu]

To use the DSP, we need kernel support AND coders need to spend a lot of time learning how to use it and port code. Using the DSP is somehow similar to writing code that makes good use of the SPEs in the CELL processor (PS3 CPU). It's not an easy task.

 

[skeezix]

This has more to do with the fact that the pandora is using a full functional desktop OS while Android is a smartphone OS, which is designed around "freezing" applications to allow the CPU to turn off entirely, as much as possible. These ARM CPUs can be turned off entirely, idling at 0mhz, and a smartphone OS as well as it's devkits are built around it.


Power management on the Pandora can improve, but it will never really reach Android level for idle, but actual runtime will be much higher if both are watching movies or gaming nonstop. Suspend to RAM will be significant though.

I'm sorry but that just doesn't hold water. Maemo on the Nokia (spit! on them) was as close to a standard linux distro as you could get (pretty much Debian with a custom wm) and the Internet Tablets had the same power saving characteristics as my new 101, allowing for the smaller battery.


Also, taking into account the larger screen and bigger battery, Archos' runtime is pretty much in the Pandora ballpark, so operating system discrepancies seem to have only a minor effect.


I am aware of the driver issue, but nobody seems to do anything about that. I once asked if I could donate money towards its progress (not being a developer, that's pretty much the only option left to me), but noone ever replied.


Oh, and Craig, 50 seconds lag time for a handheld? That's just lame...

Theres only a couple of bodies _in total_, already maxxed out; can't squeeze any more juice from the orange, as I'm fond of saying


We should make a list of drivers that are problematic and see if theres been any resolution; also once moving to newer kernel in awhile for the next non-hotsync firmware, maybe that'll buy us some of this.


jeff

 

[skeezix]

Would anything good or bad happen if I were to copy my home directory to an SD card before flashing and then copy it back after flashing?

We're actually thinking of building an option into the firmware to copy homedir's to SD, and restore from SD, so you can do this before/after a flash and not lose anything


jeff

 

[myownlittlworld]

2 big bugs that should be squashed before HF5 goes final!!


Tested with HF5-RC2 and a never-booted Pandora:


1. HF5 won't boot from an EXT2 formatted SD card. It should. It boots fine from a FAT32 formatted SD card, but wiping my entire card before booting the first time was depressing.


2. The first-boot password setting screen seems to allow you to type passwords that you can't type when logging in. I tried inserting a question mark into my password from the initial boot password selection screen (Fn + X = "?") and couldn't type my password correctly at the login screen. Now, this could just be me being stupid, but I doubt it typed it wrong twice. It'd be awesome if someone could verify that one.

 

[maxxdoutvdub]

ahhhh haaaa, so its ext2 it wont boot from. ill try with fat right now... i must have missed that part...

 

[Galaxis]

ahhhh haaaa, so its ext2 it wont boot from. ill try with fat right now... i must have missed that part...

While I have my boot.txt on FAT (first partition), the system itself is on ext2 (second partition) and boots using ext2load - works fine with HF5-RC2. Have to admit I never tried booting directly from ext2...

 

[Mash]

ahhhh haaaa, so its ext2 it wont boot from. ill try with fat right now... i must have missed that part...

Can't confirm that. My HF5 RC2 is booting fine from an ext2-formatted card.


Did you flag your ext2-partition as bootable? I did, but i'm not sure, if that makes the difference...


EDIT: i've downloaded this file and extracted it to my sd-card:


http://openpandora.org/firmware/pandora-rootfs.tar.bz2

 

[maxxdoutvdub]

well thats whats weird, i can get it to boot from both multi partition with fat first and ext2 second and also from single ext2. im fiddling with just a fat32 partition right now but no luck yet. on the first two configurations it boots all the way to the OS then it wont register keys or touch screen. this happens with a newly extracted rootfs and also with my nand copies. it happens with both my cards and one is brand new. i cant imagine what im doing wrong here. luckily i have a job that doesnt require my full attention and i have two laptops and my pandora in front of me so i can mess with it while i work.

 

[gruso]

Locking this, as the full release is out now.