Release SuperZaxxon Final released!

[hmc]

And Web browsing (as other RAM-hungry apps) can be improved by using swap and zram. I'll give that a try.

I did not have a single crash of a browser on my 256MB unit with a 512MB swap file on SD.

@all: I would appreciate if someone could answer my open questions:


Can I use any qualitative 5V 1A (or more) charger with the Pandora?

You can use it, it won't do any harm.


However, I don't know, if 1A is enough to charge the battery, when the Pandora is working.


If it does, it would do so very slowly.

How to run a memory test on the Pandora?

The simplest one:

free

;-) I don't know any other memory test method, possile on Pandora.


What about this "memtest" usitility, present on many boot CDs? This seems to be Linux-based. Can this be compiled for Pandora, too?

How to test for a continuos network connection / stream (with standard UNIX CLI tools) ?

What about using ping?


What level of checking do you need? It should be easily possible to assemble a bash script with a for loop, executing a ping command, ans issuing a desktop notification or a zenity dialog box, once ping is unsuccessful.


If you like, I can write such a script.


Daniel

 

[Asmo]

The hint to take out the battery for chip-recalibration is important, I think this hint should be added in the initial post the SuperZaxxon Final thread.

Second this.


After taking the battery out briefly, my charging LED came on when the power was connected and 100% charge reached once more.

 

[EvilDragon]

Ah, so removing the battery really did work?


Okay, I'll add that to the first post and on the main website

 

[White Demon]

I am having better luck with my battery issues when I take the battery out overnight too.


It appears to report the charge levels a lot more accurately now.

 

[porg]

The QuickStart Guide contains some errors. Discussion here.

 

[porg]

Preliminary report: Concerning charging and wifi it looks now a lot better after I had the battery outside. This little task seems to have large effect.


More thoroughly report will follow, after I will have had some days of experience and testing with it.

 

[HolySmoke]

[…]


How to test for a continuos network connection / stream (with standard UNIX CLI tools) ?

You can continuously stream useless TCP packets with `yes` and `netcat` as follows:

nc -l -p 6060 > /dev/null

on one machine and

yes | nc $otherhost 6060

on the other (replacing $otherhost with the hostname of the other machine).


This will stream data from the host executing the second line to the one executing the first and immediately discard it.

 

[porg]

@HolySmoke: Thanks for the hint for nc! That was a fun way to test


I did this:


Sender: for ((i=1;i>=0;++i)); do echo $i ; sleep 0.01; done | nc $receiver 6060


Receiver: nc -l p 6060 | egrep 00$


In order to have some visual control as well.


You could also generate a file on the sending side (with tee) and receiving side and make a diff afterwards.


What was also fun were setups like this one:


Sender: find ~/Music/ -type f -name "*.mp3" | nc $receiver 6060


Receiver: nc -l p 6060 | strings


Receiver: nc -l p 6060 | egrep -a "ArtistName"


etc

 

[THB]

I have two pandoras both running the latest superzaxxon final, one is a 512mb the other a 256mb. If I overclock to 800mHz and leave the pandora sit for a while running firefox they guaranteed lock up every time after afew minutes. This didnt happen with previous firmware.

 

[porg]

@THB. That's probably because Firefox and other web browsers on the pandora are quite RAM-hungry.


Try to create a swap file or partition.


For me web browsing is way more stable since I enabled swap.


See: http://pandorawiki.org/Swap


Though there are still some websites/situations which cause a crash, but much more rarely.


Detailed report on this will follow after a certain time, as promised.

 

[porg]

My thorough 'SuperZaxxon Final' feedback
after some days of intensive testing.


Summarized: After the battery removal and reinsertion, things work way better! Little effort for great effect!


MAIN ISSUES:

Charging: USB-charging now always charged until 100%. Nevertheless the charging-status-LED was not always ON in all charging occurrences. I think it's related wether there has been a standby before or not.

WiFi: Now works fine as well.
WAN test 1: Pinged Google's 8.8.8.8 every 0.1 seconds for 3.5 hours with almost 0% packet loss (sent 125179, received 124461)!
WAN test 2: Downloaded 310 MB wesnoth PND with MilkyHelper successfully. No interruption problems!
LAN test: Sent sequential numbers from my desktop via continuous TCP stream to the Pandora for 2 hours 15 minutes. Zero losses! Used nc aka netcat thanks to @HolySmoke 's hint.

UPDATE 2014-10-06: As determined through the course of 2013, the WiFi problems originate from bad power management, in particular with some routers and radio silence timing negotiation.

Web browsing stability: Way better, after enabling swap partition, and I think the zRam also contributes to the improvement!
Discussion to include SwapTools.pnd to the OS so that all users — also less tech-savvy — can benefit from swap. Please join the discussion there, or follow up here.
There are however some situations which make Chromium crash. Also my old search-engine-import hint now fails, maybe someone can help? I.e.: In some Google Maps web apps & mashups, i.e. FlightRadar24.com . Changing the map position via navigational-keys works fine, but as soon as you click-and-drag the map to change the position, Chrome crashes. In Jumanji this site works overall a bit slower but click-n-drag and all other features work crash-free.


OTHER / MINOR ISSUES:

FS#227 - Delete button won't delete, and function lock doesn't work either

Lock-Key: Some input still works.
Fn-U and FN-I (Screen brightness down/up): This is desirable.
Right-nub with default setting (left/middle/right/double click): This is a bug in my opinion.

DEL-Key (Shift-Backspace) still not working. Must-fix for final version.


FS#253 - Switch GUI: Intelligent automatic choice
This one should be implemented in 5mins by a experienced bash/zenity dev.
In terms of user experience, I hate to loose that 10 seconds unnecessarily while each GUI switch.


FS#249 - File Browser Thunar - After 2 nub double-clicks unreactive to further mouse + keyboard input

FS#250 - File Browser Thunar - Trashing file crosses filesystem boundaries!
Annoying if basic file browser features fail, but learned to work around.
Seems too much implementation effort for fixing I guess.
Release 2 will bring improvements here hopefully.

 

[porg]

Charging my Pandora again, this time with conky displaying an output (would love to have it output to a file, but I don't know what to put in the config file).

I have 2 ideas for you:


1) Most system parameters can be read from somewhere in /sys/devices anyway.

 while true; do date >> /media/sdcard/charging.log; cat /sys/devices/some-parameter >> charging.log; sleep 1 ; done

2) If you want to use Conky, and let it write to a textfile, look at these variables in Conky's appdata profile, they sound, that they could do what you want.


out_to_console

 

[freds_shadow]

I don't suppose there's a mirror or torrent for this? I can't seem to download it. The first two times it stopped at 17kb, then 70mb, and now, trying a different browser and even wget it either doesn't start or hangs after a short while.


While other things download fine I have problems connecting and staying connected on both my Pandora and my computer when I try downloading this.

 

[porg]

1) As written in my previous posts in this thread, downloading often got stuck on my Pandora BEFORE first taking out the battery. After that WiFi was way better.


2) It might be that *.pandora.org itself is slow. Certainly the case if that also happens on your reliably fast Desktop computer. There is no mirror or torrent that I know of. Try a HTTP download manager which can resume the file download. There are plenty of them available as GUI apps. For CLI use curl or wget with their resume switch activated. See their man page.

 

[Tom`]

Has anyone made any progress on the nub issue?

 

[FRZ]

downloading, downloading, downloading...

 

[porg]

@Tom: What do you mean by "nub issue"?


That the nubs are still active after the lock is activated?


To this I can say, that skeezix commented in the bugtracker, that he is looking into the code to handle this.


If you talk about a different nub related issue in SuperZaxon Final, then I don't know about it.

 

[notaz]

Has anyone made any progress on the nub issue?

could everyone affected please try this:


http://notaz.gp2x.de/tmp/uImage_sz_nub_test


copy it to your SD card, then boot the pandora and start a terminal, then type this command:

sudo cp /media/yoursdcard/uImage_sz_nub_test /boot/uImage-3

sync

Now shutdown pandora and try a fresh boot.

@Tom: What do you mean by "nub issue"?


That the nubs are still active after the lock is activated?


To this I can say, that skeezix commented in the bugtracker, that he is looking into the code to handle this.


If you talk about a different nub related issue in SuperZaxon Final, then I don't know about it.

Some users are reporting that one of the nubs simply doesn't work unless old kernel is booted. Neither me nor ED can reproduce it.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Tried the nub test kernel with the first final SZ on my non-wifi OP.


So the right nub worked after suspend-to-ram, which is a progress here.


But after the second suspend-to-ram, impossible to wake the OP up :/.


I hard rebooted, and this problem doesn't happen anymore.


I plugged the AC on, went into low-power, and the right nub is gone !

 

[EvilDragon]

I wonder - does that issue only occur on old CC Pandoras?


Haven't had a customer complaining about that via mail...