List of software issues/bugs


jeffrey

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Jan 24, 2011
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I received my Pandora a few days ago. I made a list of software issues/bugs I encountered. I want to get this list out there before I learn to ignore, forget, or fix the problems myself. Even if some of these are easy fixes or just plain preference, I want to at least throw in a vote to make it work my way by default. I'm running the Hotfix 5 release candidate.


XFCE Menu:


-With the stylus, it seems to take two clicks to open a submenu. It should only take one click.


-With nubs, it sometimes takes two clicks to open a submenu. Submenus should open merely by hovering over the item.


-There seems to be more delay when opening the XFCE menu via the Pandora key versus opening it by clicking on it. If there is a delay, it shouldn't be any longer when using the Pandora key.


SD-Mass Storage:


-If I have Minimenu as default on startup, SD-Mass Storage doesn't work, even if I switch to XFCE after starting. It appears to work correctly on the Pandora, but my computer doesn't see it. If I have XFCE as default on startup, then SD-Mass Storage works fine, even if I switch to Minimenu after starting. Is there a service that doesn't start if Minimenu is default? (BTW, this theory could use some double checking.)


-I seem to have put something on my SD card that, perhaps after being run, doesn't allow my SD card to be unmounted. Would it be possible, if SD-Mass Storage fails to unmount my SD card, to have it give a list of processing that are stopping it? Maybe it could even give an option to kill the processes right there.


XFCE:


-It doesn't seem possible to hold clicks on the desktop. For example, I'm unable to drag icons or make a rectangular selection with nubs. This is odd.


-Some default applications' windows do not fit on screen. For example, the wireless network editor. This should not happen for applications that are included on the Pandora by default!


Settings:


-Many settings have sliders controlling big numbers (e.g., CPU speed). Left/right arrows should change slider by 1 at a time and up/down should change by 10 at a time.


-These might already be available, but I haven't found them yet. Each nub should have the following settings:


-Speed (I do see this)


-Acceleration


-Deadzone


Minimenu:


-There's an option to have subcategories represented as either folders or tabs. Can there also be an option to just ignore subcategories and include applications in their main category? (There would be no folders and no subcategory tabs.)


-Is there an option to show the last category that was viewed and have the last icon that was selected be selected when coming back to Minimenu?


-Would it be reasonable to have a one-to-one correspondence between the way Minimenu and XFCE menu categorize applications? Then, for example, making a change to one menu would affect the other menu.


Other:


-The minimum brightness setting is too bright. Is it possible to make the screen darker before it goes black?


-Would it be possible to have pnd files be explorable/manipulable by GUI by default?


-It should be possible to see CPU speed at all times (except when in a fullscreen application). Minimenu should show CPU speed at the bottom, and XFCE should have a CPU speed panel item. The reason for this is that I don't want to forget to change CPU speed back to 500 after setting it to 900, for example.


For anyone who's made it all the way down here, I have a request. If anyone knows offhand where to find any config files that could fix any of my above issues, please let me know their path. If I manage to fix anything on my own, I'll add my fix to this thread.


Thanks!
 
-With nubs, it sometimes takes two clicks to open a submenu. Submenus should open merely by hovering over the item.
You may want to be careful with changing this one. I'm pretty sure it behaves as it does by default because you can easily slip when using the nubs (and probably also because they recalibrate almost all of the time, which can make this a more likely occurrence), and with a hovering approach for submenus, this would likely be very frustrating to use.


I'm afraid I don't know how to change it, though (though as above, I'm glad of the default behaviour). I've just had a poke around in the Xfce4 Settings Manager on my main computer (I'm currently without my Pandora, so I can't check for it there), and don't see anything that would enable or disable this (which is a shame, as I wouldn't mind enabling it on this machine). Sorry about that.

-Some default applications' windows do not fit on screen. For example, the wireless network editor. This should not happen for applications that are included on the Pandora by default!
This is a lot better than what happened with the original EeePC, at least, where it affected almost everything. :lol: Just a tip until/unless this gets tweaked: Hold down the left shoulder button or Shift (they do the same thing), and drag the window - this will let you move it outside of the confines of the screen. (On a standard Linux system you'd hold Alt and drag the window instead, just to make this a bit more of a universal tip that you can apply elsewhere. :p )

-The minimum brightness setting is too bright. Is it possible to make the screen darker before it goes black?
If you're using the hotkeys for this, then I'm pretty sure it is possible, yes. There's a brightness slider in, I *think*, the Settings menu in Xfce, but again I'm currently minus Pandora so I'm going on memory here.

-It should be possible to see CPU speed at all times (except when in a fullscreen application). Minimenu should show CPU speed at the bottom, and XFCE should have a CPU speed panel item. The reason for this is that I don't want to forget to change CPU speed back to 500 after setting it to 900, for example.
I second this wholeheartedly. It would be incredibly useful for the odd apps that don't set the speed and set it back again afterwards.


I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. I just figured that some of your points were worth a comment. :)
 
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Hi, with regards your point about the behaviour of the desktop, its true its not as you would expect, though I don't know the technical reason for it. To aid with dragging icons about is an alternative and effective method here http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/55574-move-desktop-icons/page__p__898467&#entry898467


As for the brightness issue, whilst not a software solution, someone recently made a topic here or on the old board about using photographic filter films applied to the screen like temporary screen protectors, which looked to do the job nicely and still retain a good crisp display.


edit: In addition I like your suggestion for the sliders control to step things in 10's etc. The cpu slider is pretty slow and I used to think it would be handier to have a range of speeds offered in say 100 or 50mhz increments on up/down and then left/right would fine tune it on the slider.


In the past Pleng made a CPU speeds PND that offers quite a few and they could be hotkeyed, so I forgot about it as it became quick to jump to 800 and then back again etc.


Would be nice to have a fast nub mode change by hotkey aswell and ESN has been suggesting a good method of re-mapping the keyboard via a gui and hotkey profiles etc, which I also think would be very useful additions.


I don't expect them though, as its someone else's precious time that's involved there and that's upto them to decide to spare.
 
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I'm really tired right now, so permit me to ramble :)

Settings:


-Many settings have sliders controlling big numbers (e.g., CPU speed). Left/right arrows should change slider by 1 at a time and up/down should change by 10 at a time.

For functioanlity we need in there 'right away, even if its rough', you get UIs like that :) (We're using a very rudimentary UI-toolkit, rather than writinh actual UIs and such for each function.) For instance, its a couple lines of shellscript to show up a dialog box, but if we do a custom dialog for each operation its quite a bit of code, that requires a coder, not a scripter. That all said, we do want to move to fancy looking control panels and such, its just we're making due with only a couple bodies on userland development fot now, so time is forever tight. Hopefulyl we get more bodies soon .. but I'm eternally tempted to knock together a fancy little CPU control panel at least, with great big thumb-touchable speeds etc :)

Minimenu:


-There's an option to have subcategories represented as either folders or tabs. Can there also be an option to just ignore subcategories and include applications in their main category? (There would be no folders and no subcategory tabs.)


-Is there an option to show the last category that was viewed and have the last icon that was selected be selected when coming back to Minimenu?


-Would it be reasonable to have a one-to-one correspondence between the way Minimenu and XFCE menu categorize applications? Then, for example, making a change to one menu would affect the other menu.

- you can have subcats as tabs, or subcats-as-folders -- in all cases, you can choose what cats/subcats to show _at all_ in the configuration section; likewise, you can set apps to show up in main-cat + subcat, or just in subcat.


---> default is to show app in main cat and its subcats, and then go to Configuration and turn off the subcats you don't care about (all of them, some of them, whatever.) Poof, you've got only the apps in the main cat, and not in subcat (folders or tabs.) -- so you can do what you want, but its a bit of effort to cruise around the config panels. (ie: IT is not possible to have simple options to please _every_ idea, so its improtant to me to have most ideas covered with the available options, somehow. And then the 'goals most often desired', to build those into the easier options. *Shrug* I may add a 'disable all subcats' option to the config panel to set them all to 'no', but for now, need to gather usage stats still.. with HF5 things are much more configurable so hopefully can start to get some good usage info from people :)


-- on re-entrance to mmenu, to show you the last cat/app selected, is a good idea; a couple people have suggested it, so I added to my to-do list. (ie: rifht now there is the 'default tab' config item, but what you want is a pseudo-item 'default tab: last tab I was at', that picks last app too. We'll see :)


-- in hf5 (you may have seen it), it should be really close to xfce; theres a few subtle differences, but for 99% of apps it should be the same (if the app is defined properly; if the app published bad categorization data, they may react differently, but should be close too .. dumping into Other :) -- minimenu does allow you to override the categorization easier, which _Also_ takes effect in xfce or other environments. I'll be workingon an xfce editor as well (so xfce folks don't have to enter mmenu to do this stuff).. but note that mmenu will permit non-standard categorties that you create, while xfce does not handle such things dynamicly -- xfce and most other environments full the Standard.. mmenu now follows the Standard, but allows user overrides to override the Standard. (so, if you allocate a Game to a Utility, it'll work in mmenu and xfce; but if you allocate a Game to FooBarBam it'll work in mmenu, but xfce will still Other-ize it.) -- all that aside, we're working on some ways to make xfce clever as well, just can't be as-clever as mmenu in this regard. (ie: mmenu being written by me specifically for pandora)

-Would it be possible to have pnd files be explorable/manipulable by GUI by default?


-It should be possible to see CPU speed at all times (except when in a fullscreen application). Minimenu should show CPU speed at the bottom, and XFCE should have a CPU speed panel item. The reason for this is that I don't want to forget to change CPU speed back to 500 after setting it to 900, for example.


For anyone who's made it all the way down here, I have a request. If anyone knows offhand where to find any config files that could fix any of my above issues, please let me know their path. If I manage to fix anything on my own, I'll add my fix to this thread.


Thanks!

- what do you mean by pnd files explorable/manipulable -- you mean open up the pnd and mess around within it? You can do this from the command line, but it is not somethign most people will ever do, so probably doesn't make too much sense to spend effort in that arena. (Of course, if someone wants to, they can go ahead and create a pnd to mount and unmount other pnds .. it'd be easy, as all the tools are included inside the firmware in a non-gui fashion.) pnds in general should not be messed with except by the developer .. users can use overrides (like as in mmenu) to override things, or they can mess around in the appdata 'overlay' that occurs to override parts inside of a pnd. But just to 'see whats in, in case I want to mess with it' .. that suggests 1) the dev swhould include better docs in his pnd, so bug the dev, or 2) you're a power user/developer, so know enough how to unpack and manipulate pnds already and don't need a GUI for it :)


- could maybe add a speed indicator to mmenu; in general, it doesn't eat up that much more better/risk, so not a big pripority, but if folks want, I can look into adding it. It'd break skins maybe, though.


- standard conf files are in standard places; pandora specific config files (ie: for libpnd and so on) are in /etc/pandora .. such as /etc/pandora/conf -- lots of things you can hack around in there. Note that libpnd is very clever .. you can - instead of hacking files in your firmware on nand, say - copy them to SD, and edit them _there_, and libpnd will pick up on the changed version there and use it; then if you blow things up, just eject the SD and you're back to defaults. Google "libpnd hub" to find the pandorawiki pages about libpnd.


jeff
 
Oh cool--I didn't expect to get so many thoughtful responses so fast! I'm going to handle this one post at a time.

-With nubs, it sometimes takes two clicks to open a submenu. Submenus should open merely by hovering over the item.
You may want to be careful with changing this one. I'm pretty sure it behaves as it does by default because you can easily slip when using the nubs (and probably also because they recalibrate almost all of the time, which can make this a more likely occurrence), and with a hovering approach for submenus, this would likely be very frustrating to use.


I'm afraid I don't know how to change it, though (though as above, I'm glad of the default behaviour). I've just had a poke around in the Xfce4 Settings Manager on my main computer (I'm currently without my Pandora, so I can't check for it there), and don't see anything that would enable or disable this (which is a shame, as I wouldn't mind enabling it on this machine). Sorry about that.
I see your point with the hovering, so I think I'll just take back my original thought. I do still think it should only take one click/stylus tap to open a submenu though. Side note: I've started noticing that if I'm in the menu long enough, it sometimes starts reacting to single clicks, which just seems weird.

-Some default applications' windows do not fit on screen. For example, the wireless network editor. This should not happen for applications that are included on the Pandora by default!
This is a lot better than what happened with the original EeePC, at least, where it affected almost everything. :lol: Just a tip until/unless this gets tweaked: Hold down the left shoulder button or Shift (they do the same thing), and drag the window - this will let you move it outside of the confines of the screen. (On a standard Linux system you'd hold Alt and drag the window instead, just to make this a bit more of a universal tip that you can apply elsewhere. :p )
Yeah, I think I tried Alt with no success. Thanks for the tip. I think this is one of those things where people might get used to it and stop noticing it, but it makes for pretty unintuitive interface.

-The minimum brightness setting is too bright. Is it possible to make the screen darker before it goes black?
If you're using the hotkeys for this, then I'm pretty sure it is possible, yes. There's a brightness slider in, I *think*, the Settings menu in Xfce, but again I'm currently minus Pandora so I'm going on memory here.
I don't see anything. There's a setting for desktop wallpaper brightness though. Also, it seems that the hotkey brightness function is connected to XFCE, because the panel brightness item's slider moves with hotkey presses.

-It should be possible to see CPU speed at all times (except when in a fullscreen application). Minimenu should show CPU speed at the bottom, and XFCE should have a CPU speed panel item. The reason for this is that I don't want to forget to change CPU speed back to 500 after setting it to 900, for example.
I second this wholeheartedly. It would be incredibly useful for the odd apps that don't set the speed and set it back again afterwards.


I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. I just figured that some of your points were worth a comment. :)
I appreciate your comments!
 
Hi, with regards your point about the behaviour of the desktop, its true its not as you would expect, though I don't know the technical reason for it. To aid with dragging icons about is an alternative and effective method here http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/55574-move-desktop-icons/page__p__898467&#entry898467


As for the brightness issue, whilst not a software solution, someone recently made a topic here or on the old board about using photographic filter films applied to the screen like temporary screen protectors, which looked to do the job nicely and still retain a good crisp display.


edit: In addition I like your suggestion for the sliders control to step things in 10's etc. The cpu slider is pretty slow and I used to think it would be handier to have a range of speeds offered in say 100 or 50mhz increments on up/down and then left/right would fine tune it on the slider.


In the past Pleng made a CPU speeds PND that offers quite a few and they could be hotkeyed, so I forgot about it as it became quick to jump to 800 and then back again etc.


Would be nice to have a fast nub mode change by hotkey aswell and ESN has been suggesting a good method of re-mapping the keyboard via a gui and hotkey profiles etc, which I also think would be very useful additions.


I don't expect them though, as its someone else's precious time that's involved there and that's upto them to decide to spare.

Thanks for the link. It's interesting to see that GTK itself is to blame for the desktop behavior.


I'll take a look around for Pleng's pnd--sounds useful!
 
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I see your point with the hovering, so I think I'll just take back my original thought. I do still think it should only take one click/stylus tap to open a submenu though. Side note: I've started noticing that if I'm in the menu long enough, it sometimes starts reacting to single clicks, which just seems weird.
I must confess, it's not until now that I noticed that you said that you had to click twice to open sub-menus! (I misread "two clicks" as "a click" somehow, back when I replied. :blink: Do pardon me, please.) Mine just requires one click, always.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'm really tired right now, so permit me to ramble :)
I prefer rambling anyway.

Settings:


-Many settings have sliders controlling big numbers (e.g., CPU speed). Left/right arrows should change slider by 1 at a time and up/down should change by 10 at a time.
For functioanlity we need in there 'right away, even if its rough', you get UIs like that :) (We're using a very rudimentary UI-toolkit, rather than writinh actual UIs and such for each function.) For instance, its a couple lines of shellscript to show up a dialog box, but if we do a custom dialog for each operation its quite a bit of code, that requires a coder, not a scripter. That all said, we do want to move to fancy looking control panels and such, its just we're making due with only a couple bodies on userland development fot now, so time is forever tight. Hopefulyl we get more bodies soon .. but I'm eternally tempted to knock together a fancy little CPU control panel at least, with great big thumb-touchable speeds etc :)
Well there you go hitting me with some perspective! I suppose little tweaks are pointless when bigger, better things are planned for the future.

- you can have subcats as tabs, or subcats-as-folders -- in all cases, you can choose what cats/subcats to show _at all_ in the configuration section; likewise, you can set apps to show up in main-cat + subcat, or just in subcat.


---> default is to show app in main cat and its subcats, and then go to Configuration and turn off the subcats you don't care about (all of them, some of them, whatever.) Poof, you've got only the apps in the main cat, and not in subcat (folders or tabs.) -- so you can do what you want, but its a bit of effort to cruise around the config panels. (ie: IT is not possible to have simple options to please _every_ idea, so its improtant to me to have most ideas covered with the available options, somehow. And then the 'goals most often desired', to build those into the easier options. *Shrug* I may add a 'disable all subcats' option to the config panel to set them all to 'no', but for now, need to gather usage stats still.. with HF5 things are much more configurable so hopefully can start to get some good usage info from people :)
I think the most important thing for me, aside from having things in sensible categories, it to have an "optimal" number of items in each tab. My Network tab, for example, doesn't need to be split out into FileTranfer, IRCCLient, and WebBrowser subcats, because I only have one or two things in each subcat. On the other hand, my Games tab might be better off split up into multiple tabs (or maybe folders). Just to throw an idea out there, it could be interesting to have categories auto-split into subcategories if the threshold for the number of items is exceeded.


I can see where things can get tricky trying to support the most useful options without getting too complex. Maybe at some point you'll just find an optimal/favorite approach, flesh it out, and forget about pleasing everyone. I imagine that a system that does a few things perfectly probably ends up pleasing more people in the end anyway. This isn't necessarily directed at you though. I just randomly starting thinking about how interesting the idea of categorization really is.


Thanks for explaining things. I should be able to play around with settings and options for hiding to get something that works intuitively for me.

- what do you mean by pnd files explorable/manipulable -- you mean open up the pnd and mess around within it? You can do this from the command line, but it is not somethign most people will ever do, so probably doesn't make too much sense to spend effort in that arena. (Of course, if someone wants to, they can go ahead and create a pnd to mount and unmount other pnds .. it'd be easy, as all the tools are included inside the firmware in a non-gui fashion.) pnds in general should not be messed with except by the developer .. users can use overrides (like as in mmenu) to override things, or they can mess around in the appdata 'overlay' that occurs to override parts inside of a pnd. But just to 'see whats in, in case I want to mess with it' .. that suggests 1) the dev swhould include better docs in his pnd, so bug the dev, or 2) you're a power user/developer, so know enough how to unpack and manipulate pnds already and don't need a GUI for it :)
I see your point. I guess when I'm using my Pandora, command line feels so much farther away than when I'm using my laptop :)

- could maybe add a speed indicator to mmenu; in general, it doesn't eat up that much more better/risk, so not a big pripority, but if folks want, I can look into adding it. It'd break skins maybe, though.
I think the thing here is that CPU speed changing is an integral part of using the Pandora for some people. Just like a desktop computer doesn't need a battery indicator, a laptop does. That might not be a perfect analogy, but I don't think it's too far fetched.

- standard conf files are in standard places; pandora specific config files (ie: for libpnd and so on) are in /etc/pandora .. such as /etc/pandora/conf -- lots of things you can hack around in there. Note that libpnd is very clever .. you can - instead of hacking files in your firmware on nand, say - copy them to SD, and edit them _there_, and libpnd will pick up on the changed version there and use it; then if you blow things up, just eject the SD and you're back to defaults. Google "libpnd hub" to find the pandorawiki pages about libpnd.
Oh cool. I'll do that right now. Thanks for all the help!
 
I see your point with the hovering, so I think I'll just take back my original thought. I do still think it should only take one click/stylus tap to open a submenu though. Side note: I've started noticing that if I'm in the menu long enough, it sometimes starts reacting to single clicks, which just seems weird.
I must confess, it's not until now that I noticed that you said that you had to click twice to open sub-menus! (I misread "two clicks" as "a click" somehow, back when I replied. :blink: Do pardon me, please.) Mine just requires one click, always.

Interesting. I wonder what going on with mine. I admit that, if it was working normally when I first got it, I was having so many issues just adjusting to the controls that I maybe never noticed doing something to change the behavior.
 
Here´s the PND that Pleng created for cpu speed changes http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/54583-quick-change-cpu-speeds/


Conveniently each speed has a separate entry under usr/share/applicatios so you can right click and use the launcher commands to hotkey it via the keyboard manager. Its alot faster than the slider of op_speed.sh to switch about etc.
 
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Here´s the PND that Pleng created for cpu speed changes http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/54583-quick-change-cpu-speeds/


Conveniently each speed has a separate entry under usr/share/applicatios so you can right click and use the launcher commands to hotkey it via the keyboard manager. Its alot faster than the slider of op_speed.sh to switch about etc.

Downloaded!


I have to admit I got sidetracked since the weekend and didn't get a chance to search for it, so your link is very much appreciated.
 
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