What will next firmware release for N900 brings?

2009-12-18T23:27:00+01:00

What will next firmware release for N900 brings? That is common question asked by too many people. Some of them wants impossible things, some wants magic, some mention realistic things. But what really will be included? That’s other story…

I can write what I found in bugtracker (numbers at the end are internal build numbers):

bug 3675: backup will loop nearly infinitely for directories containing pairs of symlinks that do not point to descendants because backup is following them — 2009.47-5
bug 3728: Modest reports email username / password incorrect when it is correct — 2009.43
bug 3762: Performance is unusable on IMAP accounts with a large number of messages in one or more folders (e.g. INBOX) — 2009.46-16
bug 4851: libosso assumes that all ARM platforms has VFP instructions. — 2009.50-5
bug 4917: wdgt_va_full_12h_time, wdgt_va_12h_hours should be replaced by wdgt_va_full_12h_time_am/wdgt_va_full_12h_time_pm and wdgt_va_12h_hours_am/
bug 4976: Add option in modest to add/not add new contact when replying to mail — 2009.50-7
bug 5161: Fix some compilation warnings in GNOME version — 2009.46-16
bug 5309: Don’t show “Update All” if no updates are available — 2009.45-14
bug 5314: Easy to enter ~ ^ ‘ ` ” symbols with 3rd row of special character view — 2009.44-5
bug 5315: 3 Mobile SIM card rejected — 2009.47-20
bug 5341: Can’t disable email notification - makes notification unusable if you receive lots of mail — 2009.50-7
bug 5343: “More…” applications launcher does’t allow scrolling — 2009.44
bug 5347: address book cannot import vcards from benq/siemens phones properly — 2009.47-17
bug 5384: Confusing empty window shown after deleting unavailable catalogue — 2009.45-14
bug 5388: Allow keyboard input to jump to an entry in a list (“type ahead”) — 2009.51-8
bug 5413: microb doesn’t trigger onchange — 2009.46-2
bug 5415: Contact widgets move to active desktop after merge — 2009.45-8
bug 5493: When ISO sensitivity is set to automatic, ISO EXIF value in resulting image is 0 — 2009.47-17
bug 5505: DTMF tones are not sent through SIP — 2009.43-2
bug 5518: Bluetooth DBUS UI dialogs - wrong args in the example code — 2009.47-5
bug 5523: High latency between UI and SIP events being sent — 2009.45-7
bug 5527: Page is not rerendered when JavaScript actions increase page length — 2009.46-9
bug 5545: Artifacts (visual noise) when tapping screen in Screen Calibration — 2009.46-16
bug 5597: First Synchronization between N900 and Exchange 2003 Server always fails — 2009.49-5
bug 5601: libsdl: Task switcher area can be a dead area — 009.47-17
bug 5602: IP address field in WiFi advanced settings partially hidden (“Recuperar automáticamente direccíon IP” string too long) — 2009.44-5
bug 5603: Vertical photos from other devices should fill more space when shown in portrait. — 2009.43-2
bug 5605: “Already at minimum / maximum font size.” not translated — 2009.44-5
bug 5607: Call forwarding settings not being saved — 2009.46-5
bug 5626: Button style in Bluetooth file receive applet is wrong — 2009.47-5
bug 5633: No hint that it is impossible to paste an strings containing non-numeric characters into a phone number field — 2009.44-5
bug 5676: Audio does not sync with video (and is ultimately unsyncable) — 2009-44.4
bug 5687: “Update” progress bar pane misaligned — 2009.45-14
bug 5688: Improve zooming — 2009.46-9
bug 5694: Application Manager moves to background after start when quickly clicking — 2009.46-5
bug 5725: docpurge is not aware of /opt — 2009.46-7
bug 5744: Volume slider doesn’t notice when you plug in headphones — 2009.45-7
bug 5761: Bluetooth GPS reconnect dialog refuses to go away after clicking “No” — 2009.47-5
bug 5768: Inconsistent layout on similar Sharing/VOIP applets — 2009.45-7
bug 5857: Inconsistent keyboard behaviour when configuring a static ip address — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
bug 5868: Games do not respect master volume (“sound effects” enabled though) — 2009.51-5
bug 5870: Long emails can’t be read - distorted output on screen after scrolling — 2009.50-7
bug 5879: Media player track search only matches the beginning of title/artist — 2009.42-9 (not included in 42-11)
bug 5911: Shaking device switches between landscape and portrait modes — 2009.47-9
bug 5945: URL proposals in browser disappear after some hours — 2009.50-7
bug 5948: N900 needs to be rebooted if media player fails to play video (h264dec) — 2009.45-7
bug 5972: Race condition with hardware shift key — 2009.46-7
bug 5993: Home view blurs on triple-tapping the launcher grid icon — 2009.47-17
bug 5998: Skype does not allow entering DTMF tones — 2009.44-2
bug 6004: N900 sometimes ignores USB data cable — 2009.46-16
bug 6017: Clicking the dashboard icon highlights it but does not open the dashboard — 2009.51-8
bug 6039: Hanging application menu requires system reboot — 2009.46-5
bug 6060: Application manager finishing an installation in background blocks keyboard input — 2009.51-8
bug 6100: The menu item “copy” in the browser menu does not work — 2009.46-2
bug 6107: Background image settings not restored — 2009.43-9
bug 6138: Skype Support>Report problem leads to an error page — 2009.47-17
bug 6139: skype: Call does not support DTMF tones — 2009.47-17
bug 6203: Rotation in 42-11 is not as smooth as in 41-10 for some third party apps — 2009.47-23
bug 6261: Delete dialog text missing a space — 2009.42-5 (not included in 42-11)
bug 6268: The required #include directives are not documented for Hildon — 2009.51-8
bug 6269: Can’t reuse the name of a bookmark that has been deleted — 2009.50-7
bug 6349: New email notification leads to blank email instead of email itself — 2009.47-23
bug 6361: ‘base’ and ‘more’ applications are visible sametime (messed) — 2009.51-8
bug 6470: Charger not recognized when plugged in when in Touch & Key lock — 2009.42-2 (not included in 42-11)
bug 6530: Drops WLAN connection to Linksys WRT610N after 10-15 minutes — 2009.48-5
bug 6544: USA localization displays distance in kilometers — 2009.49-2
bug 6570: Double-tapping “Inbox” sometimes opens ‘empty’ Inbox — 2009.46-16
bug 6612: File manager fails to show folder sizes beyond 999,9 MB — 2009.45-14
bug 6622: nokia messaging doesn’t synchronize selected imap folders — 2009.45-7
bug 6669: Browser window checkerboards and repaints when navigated to from multi-task view — 2009.47-5 probably fixed it
bug 6675: after failed pairing to bluetooth car kit bluetooth can’t be turned on — 2009.51-0
bug 6752: Low power/battery beep does not sound if you’re on a call — 2009.46-5
bug 6770: Can’t delete route waypoints in Map application — 2009.47-1
bug 6771: Currently active connection should be first in Connections list — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
bug 6792: FM radio transmitter does not play while USB cord is connected — 2009.51-5
bug 6807: Wrong default region in E-mail accounts dialog — 2009.48
bug 6811: Incorrect entries in the Birthday Smart Calendar — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
bug 6877: Pin / lock code entry dialog reveals digits on backspace — 2009.43-9
bug 7027: Changing to next week is very slow — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
bug 7067: gtk-icon-theme-name unset — 2009.43-5
bug 7073: Changing password on Exchange 2007 makes MfE go crazy — 2009.42-5 (not included in 42-11)

Impressive list isn’t it? I have to admit that this shows me one thing — integration of Maemo5 in OpenEmbedded will be done sooner then later. Why? Because I want to get such stuff as fast as possible without waiting for official firmware releases.

Will all those bug fixes end in next firmware? No idea as this is not granted:

(Note: 2009 is the year, and the number after is the week.)

A future public update released with the year/week later than this internal build version will include the fix. (This is not always already the next public update.)

Please verify that this new version fixes the bug by marking this bug report as VERIFIED after the public update has been released and if you have some time.

To answer popular followup questions:

Nokia does not announce release dates of public updates in advance.

There is currently no access to these internal, non-public build versions.

And one more thing — xulrunner 1.9.2 (version used by Firefox 3.6-pre) was tested on N900 and may land in one of next releases (rather not first one).

Embedded package managers sucks

2009-07-02T14:08:00+02:00

Years ago someone wrote IPKG in pure shell. It can be still found in some distributions. Then it was rewritten into C and this version we used in OpenEmbedded derived systems. It had some bugs, we patched some of them, from time to time there was even upstream development done for it.

Then Openmoko arrived and forked IPKG — new project got OPKG name. It was written by OpenedHand and Openmoko developers. Their main goals were:

callbacks for GUI package managers
GPG signed repositories
fixing bugs

Many things got changed, OE patches got merged, new bugs was added. Those who use CLI version of opkg (so far the only usable client) lost some functionalities — for example there is no progress bar when packages are fetched.

For last few months OPKG is in unmaintained mode again and I think that this is some kind of curse on embedded market package managers.

Some time ago I discovered that when many (>50) packages needs to be upgraded then opkg segfaults during process and this is not a matter of going out of RAM as I have ~400MB free. Today it did not gave value of PATH for post install scripts… I wonder what else can be found ;(

What are other options? So far I know two — dpkg + apt or rpm + yum. First one costs few megabytes of space, second one require also Python so it is not acceptable for most of our targets. Both also require rebuilding of everything :(

Annoying software bugs

2007-02-20T12:47:00+01:00

There is no software without bugs. But there are bugs and BUGS. Second ones are annoying, well known and no one work on getting them fixed. Few examples:

FireFox/Iceweasel — many people use it, many people want to kill their developers. Why? It leaks memory, it eats memory, it can take 6GB of memory just because there is no more memory available in system. Problem exists in 2.0.x but also in 3.0 trunk version. No solution developed.
KMail — flagship of KDE PIM. It can fetch mail, send mail and do many other things with mails. And it can handle OpenPGP/GnuPG signed/encrypted ones. But a way how it handle them is horror. Whole UI freezes, no updates for several seconds just because someone decided to sign all his mails. Bug was submitted over 5 (FIVE) years ago, there was one major KDE release and many minor ones but bug is still present. No one even marked is as important.. No comments

I can live with first bug as for most of time I use Konqueror. But solving second one needs to wait until Mailody will get more usable so I will be able to switch to it. I lost faith that KDE PIM will get into more usable state then it is now.

Marcin Juszkiewicz - bugs

What will next firmware release for N900 brings?

Embedded package managers sucks

Annoying software bugs