PA on WeTab & ExoPC

[Uwe Geuder]

Hi!

I haven't been following this list before, but searching the
archives did not produce any hits. If the topic has been handled earlier
please excuse and give me a pointer.

I wonder whether it makes any sense to use PA on a WeTab and/or ExoPC?
Does anybody do that and is the platform still actively developed or is
that HW just stuff for the museum?

I finally installed PA during the Christmas break, first on an
ExoPC. After it became unusable after 2-3 days (don't remember which was
the exact problem, something from the list below) I digged out a WeTab
and installed it there. However, it did not go much better. Since then
the devices have mainly collecting dust, because at best they could
offer a hard-core debugging experience.

The worst problems are:

- In some phase start-up time increased drastically from the not so good
  but probably normal 2-3 minutes to something like 15-20
  minutes. Currently both devices are in that state. From the log
  I spotted some D-Bus problems, not sure whether they could cause the
  extensive delays.

- In some phase auto-suspend started to activate itself after ~3 seconds.
  Again this happened to both devices. After throwing the device into
  the corner (not physically) for a couple of times I got over it a few
  days later, not really sure how.

- Touch is extremely unreliable at times. Probably 70% of the time it
  works nearly perfect or at least well, but the remaining 30% is awful.
  It accepts either no touch at all or at a completely random location.

  From the net I found that touchscreen firmware can be updated: 
  http://wetabz.blogspot.fi/2011/03/upgrading-touchscreen-firmware-to-1006h.html
  Can I find out under Mer what version I have? 
  Has anybody done the update successfully under Mer?

- Connecting to WLAN with WPA has become a nightmare. Only serious
  fiddling with a combination of network manager and my own manual
  instance of wpa_supplicant were successful recently. 
 
- The power button does not work anymore. Well, systemctl poweroff is
  not so difficult to type, even on the virtual keyboard...
 

I have run "zypper up" at at least 2 occasions, yesterday I got about 90
updated packages. But at least the 15-20 minute startup time remained
unaffected (I read that others turned their devices unbootable, so
probably mine was a good update...) Unfortunately I have not kept any
history what got updated and when. So I guess if I don't hide the
devices in the lowest layer of the electronic garbage pile soon, I
should make a fresh installation. Are the repos configured in the
October images still the ones to use are do I need different ones?

All insights welcome!

Uwe


P.S. I don't expect a 100% working product, but the boot time and the
touch mess are more than I am willing to tolerate. Of course if others
are actively working on these issues I might contribute a bit from time
to time, but mainly testing and taking logs. Realistically I don't have
the time to dig really deep.