I finally figured out what was wrong with my SD card (I noticed that the imagewriter utility was doing a slightly different dd command, and at first I thought it was wrong, and stopped it to do the dd by hand, but realized maybe I was wrong and let imagewriter re-try -- sure enough, I was wrong, it worked fine).
There's still lots of rough edges here. To be fair, I know Ubuntu-UMPC is still rather new, so I expect lots of rough edges. The following criticisms are meant to be constructive, and not flames. And, to be clear, this is on a Q1 Ultra Premium. If you'd like me to post these somewhere else, please say so. Not everything is finger friendly, not even all of the scroll bars. It's kind of annoying to have to pull out stylus or fiddle with the mouse-joystick a lot. It would be nice if the midbrowser had inertial scrolling (it stops dead when I let go of a dragged scroll, instead of continuing on like it had inertia ... for examples, see drag scrolling on the iPhone or on Android). It also seemed to frequently get confused between "dragging" and "clicking" (I go to swipe, but I happened to land on a link, so it goes to the url, despite the fact that I was clearly making a dragging motion). Or it recognizes a click, but only to move the mouse there ... not to actually click the URL. (and, note, I'm not saying I dislike that the mouse has been retained, both the hardware mouse/joystick and the mouse pointer -- I like that the mouse and stylus/finger modes are being blended where they can ... I'm finding it to be much more useful than what Maemo did) It would be nice if the pop-up menu in midbrowser would show you the application menu (File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools, Help). I can't even figure out how to set my start page in midbrowser (and, no, "about:config" isn't good enough -- that's hardly a friendly interface). Given the choice between "partial drag scrolling" in Midbrowser, and "fully accessible options/menus/preferences" in Firefox, I'm about to give Firefox a try. I can see a couple possible solutions here: 1) Make an easy to select method for making the menu and bookmark toolbars visible. Perhaps a button on the toolbar at the base of the screen. OR ... there's an unused "Menu" button at the top edge of the screen. Ubuntu-UMPC recognizes the vol- and vol+ buttons there (and the UDF button, though I don't know what exactly that does), so why not fully utilize that Menu button by making it something like a toggle for the visibility of an application's menu bar? 2) Make the usual menus visible on the pop-up menu from right clicking the browser pane. 3) Make a System->Preferences app/panel that acts as the menu/settings/preferences system for Midbrowser. 4) Does Firefox control the same config files as Midbrowser? That would at least allow you to set configurations and preferences in a friendly manner. Bug: I was playing the included freecell, and it killed X. Ubuntu re-started X in a safe mode (800x600), but it wouldn't let me go back to the full display. To do that I had to restart the system ... but it wasn't clear that that would restore the full display. Speaking of that, screen rotation is broken. It doesn't swap the mouse axes (axises?) ... so you're left with an awkwardness of trying to navigate the pointer up/down using left/right movements, etc. And the touch screen is similarly out of whack. I'd love to see this get resolved, for some full document type reading. Are there any camera applications? Either for the webcam on the front, or the portrait camera on the back? It'd be nice if the systems administration apps had a front end for formatting different storage devices (and this is really an "Ubuntu in general" issue, as I know it happens on the laptop I built just for evaluating Ubuntu until I could install Ubuntu-UMPC on my Q1UP ... but it's even more important on the Q1UP, and on other mobile devices, as it has a built in SD card reader). I know I can format a floppy by right-clicking on the desktop icon ... but: 1) that doesn't help with SD cards (they don't list the "Format" option) 2) that forces me to put things on the desktop, which I abhor. I greatly prefer a clean desktop. Goes back to my NeXT days. (is there a way to make the file browser right-click menu for a storage device include the format option? and a way to tell the system to not put devices on the desktop?) 3) I have no idea if there's anything similar for removable USB hard drives/etc. It would be nice if there was one "Storage Device Manager" application that was a front end for: format/newfs floppy drives, format/newfs SD cards, format/newfs hard drives (including removable USB ones), burning CDs and DVDs (from a .iso, from a .img, from a .tar or .tgz, from a directory to use as the CD/DVD root, etc.), and for making .iso and .img files. Maybe also for managing RAIDs (since it's a "storage manager"). Note: it only needs to be a front-end, so it could invoke other, more specialized, applications if they already exist, I'm just saying: you should be able to go to one place, preferably in the systems administration menu, and get everything you need for managing your storage devices in that one place. I know I saw a recent discussion here about re-mapping the arrow keys. I'd like to see a preferences panel for that. Make it more friendly for those of us who want to use them as actual arrow keys. Or perhaps even just wanting to program them for different cases. (I think I recall that there's a way to make application specific key mappings as well, under X11, but I don't recall what it is/was ... but having that in the preferences panel would be nice too "build a new keymapping, named Y, to associate with application Z"). Under Maemo there's a way to run shell scripts from the top toolbar (there's a "system/memory load" status bar widget you can use, and its pop-up/drop-down menu has a way to add non-interactive shell scripts so that you can easily run routine scripts). Is there something similar I can do on Ubuntu-UMPC? For example, on Maemo I had a script that would use a passwordless ssh key to scp down a bunch of "local" html files from a central location. This made all of my devices (home workstation, work workstation, N810, phone) all have the same basic start up page and group of local reference pages. Without putting something on my desktop, nor open a terminal window, how can I easily set up a way to run that script from the Ubuntu-UMPC GUI? All of that said, there were a TON of things that were straight forward and "just worked". I'm very happy, overall, with my Ubuntu-UMPC experience, and it was well worth buying the Q1UP just for running this platform. -- Ubuntu-mobile mailing list Ubuntu-mobile@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-mobile
