My experience on my Nexus 7

[Konrad Neitzel]

Hi all,

first of all I want to thank you all for your efforts regarding the KDE Plasma active stuff. It was a great experience to install it on my Nexus 7 (32 GB, 3G).

I just want to share my experience with you. I wish I could do more but I fear that my time is to limited right now.

What did I do?
- I mainly followed the blog entry of Ruediger Gad which can be found at
  http://ruedigergad.com/2012/12/21/plasma-active-for-nexus-7-running-the-touch-optimized-plasma-active-linux-distribution-on-nexus-7/
- I used the files at http://files.kde.org/plasma/active/3.0/images/nexus7/

The first steps was done with plasma-active-nexus7-devel-mer-latest-2013-04-06.tar.gz
Later I also used the plasma-active-armv7hl-google-nexus7-devel-mer-latest-2013-06-06.tar.gz
I always did a zypper up to get everything up to date!

My Feedback to different parts (In (..) I try to give you the used tar.gz):

On screen keyboard
- (2013-04-06) The keyboard caused some trouble. When I tried it the first time, I was unable to enter a wlan password because the textfield always lost focus. That didn't happen when I reinstalled it later.
- (2013-06-06) The keyboard wasn't fully on top when I dragged the taskbar / application menu down. The area of the small screens of the running tasks was on top so I was unable to use the first row of keys. (e.g. I was unable to click a "e" - if there was a task in that area, I would have switched to the task). But everything else worked. I used the keyboard with multiple applications.
- (idea): I would like to be able to choose different layouts. So in the past I even loved on screen keyboards that have a full keyboard including a line with numbers so I do not have to switch between numbers and alphanumeric all the time. But that is just an idea - they keyboard was ok!

zypper
- (2013-06-06) The repositories wasn't set. Maybe I did something wrong but a zypper up simply gave me a message that the 2 repositories were not available. I simply solved it by copying the /etc/zypper/repo.d contents of the 2013-04-06 tar.gz.

Kontact Touch
- (2013-06-06) I wanted to configure my mails on the device. But I found no way to configure my outgoing mail settings. I tried to solve this by directly modifying the ~/.kde/share/config/mailtransports file. But I was unable to get my account up and running. Sending mails always results in a message that a STARTTLS command should be issued or that the SSL certificate was not trust. (I wanted to access outlook.com which works fine with kmail.)

Power Consumption
- (2013-06-06) It seems that the power consumption of the device is higher than with Android. (I didn't do any measurements but I had that feeling when I used the device.
- (2013-06-06) When the devices is used and a usb cable with power only is connected, the battery is charging. But the % value is not changed. (But after a sleep cycle, the correct value is shown.)
- (2013-06-06) When the device is used with a connect to a PC, the battery is not charged. That is a common szenario for my device: I simply use it as my personal assistant for my emails, contacts, im, ... And I directly connect it to my business system, so I have no problems with the battery.

Generic stuff
- (2013-06-06) I had small issues with the decide when the device had a black screen or was showing the "console output". In most cases plugging in a usb cable helped to get back to the desktop. But rarely I had to press the power button quite long to switch the device off / reboot it.
- KWallet is a little annoying. Every time I wake up the device I have to enter a password. The usage that I would like best would be to have a locked screen where I can enter a pin / password / whatever and then do not have to enter my kwallet password.


My personal view:
In my eyes the whole system looks really promising. I will work on the Kontact Touch configuration when I find more time again. It looks great and I like the approach. (Maybe the Nexus 7 does not have enough power but I would like such a small device with a full linux system and kde plasma active desktop.)

I hope you found my feedback a little useful. Sorry if there was nothing useful for you but I think that is the least that I could do.

With kind regards,

Konrad
 		 	   		  
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