Elisa, OpenSuSE fun

Not really U810 specific but there are a few wrinkles to getting elisa working on OpenSuSE 11.0 with the packman packages. The elisa chaps seem to have got the bit between their teeth so this is for 0.5.2 - which may well be superceded and fixed by the time you read this. Anyway, installing the packages with yast results in a non-working situation so the following needs to be done...

• Install IPython - not vital, but helpful for debugging since you can bring up a python shell inside elisa and poke around a bit
• Install python-cssutils since it seems to have dropped out of the dependencies
• You can purge twisted and go back to the yast-installed version since it now seems to be happy with latest version
• Insert a __init__.py file into /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/elisa and /use/lib/python2.5/site-packages/elisa/plugins. This file can be hauled out of the source code in the tar file on the elisa download page.

Once this is done all works OK though it does seem to struggle on the U810 and will lock up some times on heavy activity. In these respects the 0.3.5 release was better - but there is a lot of work under way so we shall see.

Update

No, I haven't gone away - it's just that I'm actually using the U810 for real work rather than messing about with it. It works well enough to be very effective - I now have to stop pressing the Super (Windows to the plebs out there) key when using cursor keys on conventional keyboards.

Lots of things to do...

• Compile the keyboard lights driver
• Elisa 0.5.1 is out
• VMWare server - yes it works OK and the efficient memory page recovery means 1GB is not too onerous
• Patch mesa with the xrandr rotation fix
• Look at coordinate rotation for the mouse - I think this is something xrandr should do too but doesn't seem to
  

U810 Elisa and another resource

This chap has cooked up a tablet mouse driver and a patch for the keyboard lights - nice work - though I disagree about what to do with the Ctrl-Alt-Del button!

Elisa now works - it doesn't like python-twisted 8.10 which is what comes out-of-the-box with OpenSuSE 11.0. Simply go into Yast|Software Management and remove all the twisted-* packages (tell it to ignore all the dependency warnings, we're going to put it back!). Then download the 2.50 version from the twisted site into a directory of your choice.

Unzip it, then go into the top level directory and do a make build followed by a make install and there you are.

~/.elisa/elisa.conf even has a touchscreen setting which lets you whizz through lists depending on the speed you stroke the screen - though the poor U810 struggles a bit when you go too fast.

Beware that elisa defaults to having it's caches/databases in ~/.elisa so if you want to share it between user accounts you'll want to adjust that to avoid duplication. The Album cover retrieval from Amazon is a bit hit and miss too.