installing opie
Opie is a "desktop" environment for linux-based handhelds.
This is a stream-of-installation report. To sum up: the bad news is that opie is rough and there's very little information about using it. The good news is that there's a lot of potential. In the meantime, it looks like we live with crashes and reboots, and pray to the mailing list gods for happy answers and to spare us from spam.
Onward.
Install seemed easy. Added the feed url:
http://opie.handhelds.org/feed/ipaq/
ipkg update
ipkg install task-opie-complete
ipkg said it wouldn't install, because some dependency was missing, but suggested I try again with the option: –force-depends (or something similar).
I rebooted and got the pen calibration screen. Touch the cross-hairs, and you're rewarded with Opie. Opie looks pretty darned good.
But there are no letters. Only icons. Can't write.
I'm not the only person who has had this problem. Quick check of the mailing list archive for June (http://www.handhelds.org/pipermail/opie/2002-June/date.html) shows somebody else with the same problem.
The answer is:
"please read the ml archive, or look into the wiki. Thats really a FAQ. The 3850 has a 180 rotated display. So you need the rotated fonts."
ipkg install qt-embedded-rotation
OK, the reason it isn't part of the task-opie-complete must be that it's only needed on the 3800.
The wiki FrontPage is in a typewriter font – that is, it's hard to read. I missed the "View the OpieUserManual to learn about how to use OPIE."
http://opie.handhelds.org:80/wiki/index.php3?OpieUserManual
The user manual says run ipkg and then:
"Then you can either run /etc/init.d/qpe or reboot your ipaq."
That's actually:
/etc/init.d/qpe start
But now there are letters on my screen. I'm so pleased.
I tap the icon that appears to be Konqueror (the web browser). It is. I want to put in a url, but discover I don't know how to enter characters. There's no keyboard-like entry on the menus, and scribbling on the screen has no effect, and there's no icon that would represent toggle to scribble-mode.
The wiki points to an "under construction" opie manul at:
http://www.studyshare.net/guests/tim/index.html
Alas, only the intro and install pages have been started (as of 020621). "Methods of Input" gives a 404 Not Found.
I peruse the opie packages directory.... There's a lot of important stuff listed here that doesn't show up on the ipaq just now. I install a bunch: handwriting recognition, keyboard, media player, etc.
I try qpe start, but boy, things are messed up. Icons and menus are totally flaky. One second they're there, the next second their gone. I try to launch Minesweeper, but get checkers instead. I finally get Minesweeper to launch, but it just doesn't work. I can't tap the little squares, most of the time. I reboot.
Rebooting seems to work. I flip around a little, but the icons are stable.
I download some mp3s to try the media player. I was just running a shell-script to play mp3s before. Alas, the player won't play an mp3, it will only play a list, and I don't have a list, and there's no hint of how to make a list. I would have thought you could select mp3s in some kind of file system browser, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
So I browse to the /tmp directory where the mp3s are – I have to change the settings in the file manager to show symlinks, because /tmp is the extra 32MB of memory. I tap/hold an mp3. It asks if I want to open it in the media player. (Duh.) But the media player won't play. "No decoder found – Sorry, no appropriate decoders found for this file: /tmp/bigten.mp3" OK. (Not OK, but that isn't an option.)
A media player that doesn't know how to play mp3s isn't much good to me.
Aha! You have to install one or two other packages with it:
ipkg install opie-libmadplugin
ipkg install opie-libmpeg3plugin
The bad news is that the player is beyond me. I'm not smart enough to add an mp3 to a playlist, or save a playlist. I still can't just pick an mp3 to play. When I use the file manager to pick an mp3, the last mp3 I listened to seems to go away.
I thought I would save a playlist with one song – and then see if I could add to it – but when I try to save a play list, I can't enter characters on one dialog, and there's another dialog in which I can only enter one character before it goes away.
Sigh.
I thought the ipkg dependencies were supposed to make sure I get the packages I need. Maybe something went wrong, or maybe opie-task-complete just isn't very complete.
There are many good things about opie. Please don't imagine that I'm only complaining. I managed to get a setting that turns off the light after a little while. That seems tremendously worthy to me. The light comes back on when I tap the screen. This is fine.
The whole thing looks pretty good. I even like the just-hatched-dino graphic.
Being accustomed to Palm's grafitti, the handwriting recognition is rather strange to me. But I think they have it right to slide out an area designed for writing, and let me stil point by tapping in the view area. The handwriting help "trainer" is pretty scary, but having gone through it once, it was easy enough to make characters.
There's lots of freakiness... The opie text editor has an OK button in the upper right corner that minimizes the window. Minimize is good, but it shouldn't be called OK. Konqueror doesn't have OK or minimize. This is bad. Opie devotes so much energy to its tabs and icons, I don't want to start apps from the menu, I want to switch back over to the tabs, and tap a big icon.
Opie wastes fewer screen pixels than ICE, but still isn't quite right. The menu bar wastes a bunch of rows of pixels above and below the menu choices and the icons. No reason for that. The bottom bar seems to be a little more efficient.
What I'd wish for is to combine the title bar and the taskbar. You would then have drop-down menus for applications (start-menu-like), task-switching, and applets. I'd also like the scrollbars to be about half their current size. ICE is pretty clever to make the window title a drop-down task-switcher.
Copyright © 1998-2002 J. R. Boynton