Elisa revisted

It appears that upgrading Elisa from the Packman packages is a little hit-and-miss. The best thing to do is:

1. Uninstall Elisa and Pigment (use Yast Search and uninstall everything with "elisa" or "pigment" in the name!)
   
2. Erase contents of /usr/lib/python/site-packages/elisa
3. Install the new Elisa (and Elisa-with-plugins) packages which should pull everything else through via dependencies
4. Also a good idea to erase elisa.db and .thumbnails from your .elisa-xxx configuration directory
   

Then wait a while after starting as the media scanner goes off and indexes/thumbnails everything - this makes the old U810 grind a bit.

More U810 thoughts

The U810/U1010 has pads for two Mini PCI-e slots underneath the bottom cover but most only have one in place. Looking at the dissection photos on the Internet it seems that there are no chips or support components missing - just the socket - so it should be feasible to solder a new one in - the pads are easy to reach and the pitch isn't too small.

Getting said socket isn't too easy though - RS Components has them scheduled for October. It looks like the exploding demand for eee PC's and the like has drained the world's supply of Mini PCI-e sonnectors - later eee's also come with only one of two possible sockets in place.

The other alternative, in the same vein as many eee PC mods, is to tack a USB socket in place of the PCI-e connector (using the USB lines that are available on the PCI-e pads). That would be a nice place to put a USB key as an SSD or maybe a TV tuner... Now I just need to find a nice point I can source 5V from - with all the eee PC hacking out there I'm surprised there hasn't been a bit of U810 activity in this area.

I have also got a Compact Flash to 1.8" ZIF convertor (off ebay) to try out using CF as an SSD alternative - slower but actually designed for low power consumption so may well benefit run-time. The first couple of CF cards I tried weren't recognised by the BIOS. To test that it wasn't the convertor I got hold of an Icy Dock USB caddy from Scan - obviously designed for displaced iPod drives! The cards worked fine in this mode - I suspect it is because most CF cards claim to be removable ATA devices and some BIOS's will only accept fixed devices. Transcend is one of the few manufacturers whose CF cards switch to "Fixed" mode when operating in IDE, rather than CF, mode so I'll get hold of one and try it. Sandisk, Kingston and Intuix are brands which do not - from experience. Under Linux you can use hdparm -i on a CF card to find out if it is Fixed or Removable mode.

Elisa 5.3 seems to be an awkward release to get up and running - I had to edit the source code (to bypass a "not implemented yet" error) to even get the main screen up so I'll park that for now until a later release.

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.

OpenSuSE 11.0

OK, I was going to wait for OpenSuSE 11.1 but I weakened and am putting 11.0 on now. :)

First surprise - the touchscreen works during install - albeit with a slight scaling issue, possibly because the install runs in 800x600 stretched mode but very promising.

11.0 will help as the code I found for the keyboard lights is for a later kernel than 10.3 stock. If I'm going have to do a kernel recompile (which I haven't needed to do since 1998 with Slackware!) I might as well go for a new OS install (which will almost certainly take less time than a kernel rebuild on the U810). It will also clean up the cruft from various experiments...

• Banshee - whose existence in a market with Amarok et al already there seems a bit of a mystery. Plus it requires an unbelievable amount of Gnome bits to work.
• The gstreamer dependency mess between OpenOffice and Elisa

Now the fun and games begin...

• Wired networking fails to work unless you add the following boot parameters to /boot/grub/menu.lst
• pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off
• The autodetected touchscreen settings seem to be uncalibrate-able so the evtouch installation needs to be done. However, the build for OpenSuSE 11.0 has the calibration parameters in out.txt mixed up - they should be renamed as follows: x0/y0 -> x6/y6, 1 -> 7, 2-> 8, 6 -> 0, 7 -> 1, 8 -> 2
• Display brightness works out of the box although the keyboard buttons only move it up/down one notch (other programmatic changes work fine)
• Suspend to/from disk works fine
• Package management is a LOT faster which makes fiddling a whole lot more fun.
• Installation detects the Atheros wireless and inserts the ath5k module but it doesn't appear to work. The madwifi repsoitory doesn't contain a correct package for the kernel I'm running (latest patch) so I need to compile it. Ho hum, now the download link for source doesn't work from the OpenSuSE Atheros page - what I want is the latest trunk version and all is well.
• Elisa is now upset by the new version of python and/or it's libraries (damn!)
  

U810 Elisa

I am giving up on MythTV for now - although the core works quite well, the plug-ins are too inconsistent in terms of input handling at the moment. For example, some keys are inherited from the core and others not - and the input mapping plug-in seems to only cover some of the aspects. Mouse/touchscreen behaviour also seems to vary with plug-in so the whole affair, while usable, is rather unsatisfying. I think more time is needed for some of the core features to make it to the plug-ins so will revisit it later.

As another aside - I don't understand why Gallery, Video and Music all have different navigational interfaces when they all provide the same basic functionality. Oh well.

Looking around I found elisa which looks promising if a little ..erm.. pre-release at the moment but often OSS projects are quite usable pre-release and there has been some good press. Sooooo - how to install...

The PackMan repository has a package but before we go ahead, it has a dependency on a more recent version of gstreamer than is shipped with openSuSE 10.3 which is in the PackMan rather than the OpenSuSE repository. So go into Yast and remove the old gstreamer010-* packages. There will be dependency squeals for OpenOffice and Amarok but ignore them - we're going to put it back! Now we can install elisa which should also pull down all the updated gstreamer packages too. One bug - the elisa packages dependencies will only pull down the elisa-plugins-good - it also needs elisa-plugins-bad (naughty!) but you'll have to add that manually.

OK, elisa fires up fine and looks nice but it doesn't yet have configuration within the app itself so it's off the edit files with a text editor...

...but it does seems to play nice with the touchscreen.