Release Zaxxon Hotfix 6 - Beta 1 released!

[peelie]

another xfce4 bug i guess? - keyboard settings does not work intermittently

 

[skeezix]

Does the screen still gets dark after 10 Minutes without pushing buttons or Touchscreen with the new Hotfix? I had this problem in Hotfix 5 during watching videos. Pretty annoying because there was no option to turn it off. I had to make a autostart option manualy, afaik it was not a screensaver but a powersave function of the system.


I really recommend to include this in an options dialouge or already disable it. Same for the tearing in Videos. Since no player-side option works here to fix tearing (vsync) I had a long search in the web. At the end it turned out that the "compose" function of XFCE does this tearing. I found no other way than disableing the compose function. Of course it would be better if it can be fixing so that it works with compositing on.


Last thing I still havn't managed in Hotfix 5 is to reduce the "grid spacing" of the desktop Icons so that I can add more icons without resizing them (I KNOW that you can resize the Icons to get more on the desktop but thats not what I mean). The Spacing of auto arranged Icons is pretty big, alot of free space left and right so there should be an option to get the icons denser together.

Compositing is on? I don't know what xfce does with compositing offhand, probably just translucent windows? And if so, that seems like somethign we totally dont' really need to be doing by default on a mobile like the Pandora.. I'd rather that was _always off_ if its causing other issues like tearing or slowing the display


Oh, fade to black .. I seem to recall thats built into the kernel and has no option to enable/disable, but I coudl be 100% wrong there; tried fiddling with xfce options? time to bug IRC


jeff

 

[sukhi2011]

There are problems with composite,it shakes left to right very fast,so it's not working right even using it with overlay the color fades black to color only s-video and overlay s-video works fine.


It's a shame that composite still doesn't work properly,which need to work on hard to get it up and running.


Tv out works great on my 32" samsung tv and 42" toshiba regza no problems there and it looks awesome on both tv's only difference is it looks sharper on samsung tv because smaller are better than bigger screens,the pandora screen looks alot better than my samsung tv,when looked at some neo geo games such as blazing star,graphics looked amazing on pandora than the tv's.


The problem with pandora is that it uses s-video is average quality with to much brightness plus it's bit blurrish and composite is darker and low quality image,it would have been better if it had hdmi port not s-video or composite,s-video was used on gp2x consoles,why is it we still using s-video rather hdmi,nowadays everything is hdmi.

 

[NoeleyC]

I'm able to run Agitated Avians fine on this release, had a problem previously where I had to remove the appdata directory, but not on this hotfix release. I can't get Panorama to run though...

 

[milkshake]

LOL

 

[skeezix]

More to point, the chipset we have has a limited number of output options; we use the high resolution option for the LCD, and so cannot use it for HDMI; this leaves the tv-out options to the loweer spec options.


jeff

 

[Michoko]

Same for the tearing in Videos. Since no player-side option works here to fix tearing (vsync) I had a long search in the web. At the end it turned out that the "compose" function of XFCE does this tearing. I found no other way than disableing the compose function. Of course it would be better if it can be fixing so that it works with compositing on.

Hi,


I tried to disable compositing with this:


Section "Extensions"


Option "Composite" "Disable"


EndSection


In xorg.conf. But it didn't seem to improve things with the panplayer beta. Is it supposed to work also with it, or only with regular preinstalled mplayer?


But I agree anyway, it should be disabled by default in the OS. That and the possibility to disable the screensaver (right now I'm reluctant to install the new hotfix because of all those tweaks I did by hand, and that I can't remember how to apply again )


Thanks!

 

[Mr_Loon]

Does the screen still gets dark after 10 Minutes without pushing buttons or Touchscreen with the new Hotfix? I had this problem in Hotfix 5 during watching videos. Pretty annoying because there was no option to turn it off.


...

To sort this out I followed the guide from Lomax on this thread


NB It does appear to be crucial that the new entry in xorg.conf follows the same formatting convention (tabbing between entries) as the existing entries. I tried a little experiment with my RMA'd Pandora where I used spaces instead of Tabs and had the same problem as Prometheus, Following her excellent guide allowed me to sort it out.


It would be real nice for anyone wanting to use their Pandora for playing video if an option to turn this feature off was included in a future hotfix.

 

[fusion_power]

Compositing is on? I don't know what xfce does with compositing offhand, probably just translucent windows? And if so, that seems like somethign we totally dont' really need to be doing by default on a mobile like the Pandora.. I'd rather that was _always off_ if its causing other issues like tearing or slowing the display

No, composing off per default. I just activated it for some nice Desktop Effects. I didn't know that this stuff has such stupid side effects. ^^" I wasted alot of time to find the connection between compositing and the tearing (happens on PCs too ).

To sort this out I followed the guide from Lomax on this thread

great, exactly what I already did.


I'm not sure why it is not enough just do disable compositing from the settings dialog. However, with this entry in the config, compose is disabled and can't be enabled again from the desktop settings. So I guess the entry works. But the point is, that the user shouldn't mess around within config files, it should be more userfriendly. So I recommend to fix this stuff in the next Hotfix, same for the screen-off thingy. Little stuff like this makes the difference IMHO in how userfriendly and useful a system is.

 

[skeezix]

notaz has some ideas and I think ED is working on a script for next HF beta to allow toggling preference of the screen-blanking


jeff

 

[sukhi2011]

The videos still don't work with xv just with x11 as previous firmware and vlc stills shows black screen,their is no improvements watching videos on tv.


Ok it's 4 year board,so why didn't they waited a bit longer so we could hdmi instead of s-video,but still s-video quality isn't to bad,movies and games look outstanding on tv.

 

[mcobit]

Waiting longer?????? Are you serious????

 

[_David_]

I installed HF6 B1 yesterday and everything is working fine for me It seems a little bit faster too...

 

[DaMummy]

The videos still don't work with xv just with x11 as previous firmware and vlc stills shows black screen,their is no improvements watching videos on tv.


Ok it's 4 year board,so why didn't they waited a bit longer so we could hdmi instead of s-video,but still s-video quality isn't to bad,movies and games look outstanding on tv.

and you people wonder why i troll at times....

 

[EvilDragon]

There are problems with composite,it shakes left to right very fast,so it's not working right even using it with overlay the color fades black to color only s-video and overlay s-video works fine.


It's a shame that composite still doesn't work properly,which need to work on hard to get it up and running.

It does work properly, I even measured the TV Out composite with a video waveform to make sure it's okay ;


What you explains sounds like you have a PAL TV and switched TV Out to NTSC or vice versa.


Tried that?

The problem with pandora is that it uses s-video is average quality with to much brightness plus it's bit blurrish and composite is darker and low quality image,it would have been better if it had hdmi port not s-video or composite,s-video was used on gp2x consoles,why is it we still using s-video rather hdmi,nowadays everything is hdmi.

SVideo out it is pretty good quality, only topped with RGB or YUV.


HDMI out would only really make sense with HD output, for standard PAL or NTSC resolutions, SVideo is almost as good as HDMI.


However, PAL and NTSC signals will mostly ALWAYS look bad on flatscreens, as they are optimized for HD and not for lower resolutions.


Only the really good ones look fine.

 

[Asmo]

You can also use the SD Installer and run HF6b1 off SD Card.


Grab the image needed for the SD Installer here


Don't forget to grab the latest kernel as well in this case.

I used the sd installer and the files you provided for this on the hf6 beta page and also once that had proccessed swapped the curnal on the vfat partition for the one you provided seperatley... was that right or wrong?


kernel*

This does need a little illumination for the uninitiated - does the SD installer extract the up to date kernel from the tar.gz file (possibly misinterpreted implication of Dave1234's post HERE) and the new one ED posted is only needed for those performing some manual setup? Ed's post implies the new kernel is a requirement if you are about to use the SD installer, without any real indication of when, where or why. A few heads being are being scratched. Enlighten us!

 

[Dave1234]

This does need a little illumination for the uninitiated - does the SD installer extract the up to date kernel from the tar.gz file (possibly misinterpreted implication of Dave1234's post HERE) and the new one ED posted is only needed for those performing some manual setup? Ed's post implies the new kernel is a requirement if you are about to use the SD installer, without any real indication of when, where or why. A few heads being are being scratched. Enlighten us!

You are correct: the kernel used by the SD installer is extracted from .tar.gz file. You should not need a separate kernel file.

 

[StreaK]

BTW. About editing lxde categories: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/60165-atari-800-emulator-almost-final/page__view__findpost__p__955581

 

[MarioPandio]

The separate kernel file is only of use, if you wish to purely replace the ROOT (ext2) partition of an already created SD card that you priorly used the SD Installer to make. You just wipe out the ROOT partition, then untar the new HF6beta1 image into that partition and use the kernel uImage file that ED has provided, to overwrite the old one in the BOOT (Fat32) partition. Then it all works.


Its just to save backing up and restoring the huge data partition if your using a large card, as the SD Installer is really geared towards making a fresh bootable SD card from a new blank SD card.


edit : typo

 

[Asmo]

You are correct: the kernel used by the SD installer is extracted from .tar.gz file. You should not need a separate kernel file.

Thanks! The last line of the OP sort of baffled me (and 1 or 2 others it seems).

The separate kernel file (.....) Its just to save backing up and restoring the huge data partition if your using a large card, as the SD Installer is really geared towards making a fresh bootable SD card from a new blank SD card.

Very clear. The fog has lifted.