Aw: Re: the hell of Maemo repos

On Nov 21, 2008, at 5:51 PM, Peter Flynn wrote:

> lakestevensdental wrote:
>> As it is, App Manager seems a rather crude work in progress that
>> displays the crudest information during the updating process -- it
>> doesn't even say what repository catalog is being updated during the
>> update process.
>
> Has anyone any idea where to start?

Yes, upgrade to Diablo, it has a much more useful Application
Manager. :)

If that's not an option, running apt-get update as root in xterm will
give you more verbose errors (I'm not sure if the Bora Application
Manager included logs, but you might poke around its menu a bit).

--
Ryan Abel
Maemo Community Council chair

On Nov 21, 2008, at 5:59 PM, lakestevensdental wrote:

> Mark wrote:
>
>> I also have to point out that the maemo site is always incredibly
>> slow, which can't possibly help any of these situations. It doesn't
>> matter whether I'm on my home desktop, my N800 on WiFi, or a school
>> machine on a very fast network, it always takes forever for pages on
>> the maemo site to be served, and frequently it times out first. Even
>> when pages do load, frequently there are elements missing. If the
>> repositories are similarly affected, that could create havoc with
>> anyone trying to update them.
>
> Ditto on the observation of poor Maemo server speed.

The server improvements are still ongoing (which Bergie and that Niels
character you guys seem to hate so much have been putting an insane
amount of work into).[1] In fact, the first major fruits of those
efforts went live just on Monday.[2]

. . . and, no, the repositories are not similarly affected.
repository.maemo.org has a massive akamai cache that keeps it running
quickly.


[1]https://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Fast_Server
[2]http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/maemo-org_goes_ragnaroek/

--
Ryan Abel
Maemo Community Council chair

Peter,

Process of elimination, or divide and conquer. Disable all minus 1 or 1/2 of
your catalogs in the App Manager. Does a refresh succeed? Re-enable or
disable more catalogs as required to until you narrow the offending catalog
that causes a failure to refresh.

Disclaimer... I'm running OS2008, and not sure if you can disable catalogs in
OS2007.

Good Luck! Steve

On Friday 21 November 2008 16:51, Peter Flynn wrote:
> lakestevensdental wrote:
> > As it is, App Manager seems a rather crude work in progress that
> > displays the crudest information during the updating process -- it
> > doesn't even say what repository catalog is being updated during the
> > update process.
>
> Some weeks ago, my App Manager (OS2007, N800) suddenly started to tell
> me it was "unable to refresh the list" when I clicked on Check for
> Updates. It rapidly downloaded something and then said "Unable to
> refresh list. Last refreshed list is shown."
>
> It's the kind of error that sounds like a permissions or space problem
> (although I have loads of space and I've never been anywhere near any
> permissions -- that I'm aware of).
>
> Unfortunately, it doesn't say what list it was trying to update, or
> where it is, or why it had a problem with it, so I have no way to
> conduct a further diagnosis.
>
> Until this point, it was all working fine, and all installs and upgrades
> functioned as expected. Even now, I installed the Mauku Twitter client
> OK, after clicking through assorted error message about not being able
> to update and refresh things.
>
> Has anyone any idea where to start?
>
> ///Peter

Ryan Abel wrote:
> Yes, upgrade to Diablo, it has a much more useful Application Manager. :)

I haven't got that far yet. Having avoided OS2008 on the information on
most forums that it basically broke too many things that worked in
OS2007, I need to look much harder at what will and won't work in Diablo.

Open to recommendations...

> If that's not an option, running apt-get update as root in xterm will
> give you more verbose errors

It certainly did, and I should have tried this earlier.
jalimo.org seems to have moved somewhere;
anderenen.de has gone 404
and I had a duplicate for catalogue-tableteer for some reason.

Now I can update stuff, but it says omweather 0.21.3 download is
corrupt, and that openssh-common 1:4.6p1-5.maemo1 is needed but
unavailable. Not a show-stopper, what's there works OK.

Thanks for the help.

///Peter

Ryan Abel wrote:
>> Yes, upgrade to Diablo, it has a much more useful Application Manager. :)

...and a bunch of other stuff is broken that previously worked...

>> If that's not an option, running apt-get update as root in xterm will
>> give you more verbose errors
>

...which is fine for advanced users, but not an option for the average consumer
end-user. Just getting root access is not trivial.

If you're going to sell a device that requires significant Linux knowledge to
use, that should be clearly stated in any sales information.

You want to "have your cake and eat it too". You want everybody and their dog to
buy the tablets because you want their money, but god forbid they should ever
try to actually do anything with them or expect any support...

Mark

On Nov 22, 2008, at 5:08 PM, Peter Flynn wrote:

> Ryan Abel wrote:
>> Yes, upgrade to Diablo, it has a much more useful Application
>> Manager. :)
>
> I haven't got that far yet. Having avoided OS2008 on the information
> on
> most forums that it basically broke too many things that worked in
> OS2007, I need to look much harder at what will and won't work in
> Diablo.
>
> Open to recommendations...

Ignore trolls and upgrade. :) Seriously, you get a whole 70 extra
megahertz for _free_, not to mention improvements pretty much
_everywhere_.

>> If that's not an option, running apt-get update as root in xterm will
>> give you more verbose errors
>
> It certainly did, and I should have tried this earlier.
> jalimo.org seems to have moved somewhere;
> anderenen.de has gone 404
> and I had a duplicate for catalogue-tableteer for some reason.

Hey, I'm glad it helped. :)

> Now I can update stuff, but it says omweather 0.21.3 download is
> corrupt, and that openssh-common 1:4.6p1-5.maemo1 is needed but
> unavailable. Not a show-stopper, what's there works OK.


Seriously, upgrade. Bora is old, slow, and unsupported.

--
Ryan Abel
Maemo Community Council chair

On Nov 22, 2008, at 5:27 PM, Mark Haury wrote:

> Ryan Abel wrote:
>
>>> Yes, upgrade to Diablo, it has a much more useful Application
>>> Manager. :)
>
> ...and a bunch of other stuff is broken that previously worked...

"bunch of stuff" isn't a useful metric for your argument. There was
some stuff, yes, but most of them have been fixed, and the advantages
far outweigh any setbacks.

>>> If that's not an option, running apt-get update as root in xterm
>>> will
>>> give you more verbose errors
>>
>
> ...which is fine for advanced users, but not an option for the
> average consumer
> end-user. Just getting root access is not trivial.

Which is why Diablo's Application Manager does this error handling for
you! Moot argument, please stop trolling.

--
Ryan Abel
Maemo Community Council chair

Ryan Abel wrote:
> Ignore trolls and upgrade. :) Seriously, you get a whole 70 extra
> megahertz for _free_, not to mention improvements pretty much _everywhere_.

A lot depends on what the improvements are :-)

> Seriously, upgrade. Bora is old, slow, and unsupported.

So long as I can flash back to it if the stuff I need doesn't yet work
in Diablo, I'm happy;

Java
SaxonB8
TeX
Emacs
Calendar
Contacts
Gizmo
Claws
Xterm
PDF reader
Gnumeric
Xchat
CUPS
Abiword
Pidgin
Mauku

///Peter

On Nov 22, 2008, at 6:53 PM, Peter Flynn wrote:

> Ryan Abel wrote:
>
>> Ignore trolls and upgrade. :) Seriously, you get a whole 70 extra
>> megahertz for _free_, not to mention improvements pretty much
>> _everywhere_.
>
> A lot depends on what the improvements are :-)

Pretty much everything, but I can only recommend that you upgrade, I'm
not out to convince you. You'll have to do your own research (the
topic has been covered extensively in many places, so information wont
be hard to come by).

>> Seriously, upgrade. Bora is old, slow, and unsupported.
>
> So long as I can flash back to it if the stuff I need doesn't yet work
> in Diablo, I'm happy;

http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_tablet_firmware

> Java
> SaxonB8
> TeX
> Emacs
> Calendar
> Contacts
> Gizmo
> Claws
> Xterm
> PDF reader
> Gnumeric
> Xchat
> CUPS
> Abiword
> Pidgin
> Mauku

All of these things work fine (in fact, most of them work a lot
better) in Diablo. The only one I'm not sure about is SaxonB8, but I'm
sure a little googling will turn up what you need. . . .

--
Ryan Abel
Maemo Community Council chair

On Saturday 22 November 2008 03:53:04 pm Peter Flynn wrote:
> Ryan Abel wrote:
> > Ignore trolls and upgrade. :) Seriously, you get a whole 70 extra
> > megahertz for _free_, not to mention improvements pretty much
> > _everywhere_.
>
> A lot depends on what the improvements are :-)
>
> > Seriously, upgrade. Bora is old, slow, and unsupported.
>
> So long as I can flash back to it if the stuff I need doesn't yet work
> in Diablo, I'm happy;
>
> Java
> SaxonB8
> TeX
> Emacs
> Calendar
> Contacts
> Gizmo
> Claws
> Xterm
> PDF reader
> Gnumeric
> Xchat
> CUPS
> Abiword
> Pidgin
> Mauku
>
> ///Peter

I use in diable on n810

calendar
contacts
gizmo
claws
xterm
pdf reader
gnumeric
xchat
abiword
pidgin


tim