Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, released a new
version (beta 1) for the Nokia N8x0 Internet Tablets recently. Here are my
first impressions after about 15 minutes of use:
- It supports the virtual on-screen keyboard now, so would be actually
usable on the N800.
- Panning the page is very fast! Unfortunately, opening pages is very
slow.
- It eats a lot of memory rather quickly and bogs down when the system
starts swapping.
- The user interface is going to be awesome, once the speed and memory
problems are fixed.
- Going back in history is cumbersome when you have to pan to the side of
the page. The hardware back button doesn't seem to work.
- It has a nice large icon, but there's no small version, and this makes
the application organizer in the control panel look weird.
JFFS2, which is the file system used for internal flash memory on NITs, compresses all data, which makes
free space comparisons weird. I had 5 megs free, freed up 20 more, then
installed Fennec (which, the Aplication Manager assured me, required 10 megs)
and ended up with 5 megs free.
I'd include a screenshot, but ad-hoc wifi doesn't work between my Thinkpad
and my N810 for some reason.
Last night I thought it would be fun to try to suspend my laptop with the 3G
USB modem still plugged in and connected. This morning when I woke it up I had
no keyboard.
Ctrl+Alt+F1 worked to switch to a text console (when I pressed it twice).
The text console wasn't garbled, which was nice. killall gnome-settings-daemon
or gnome-screensaver didn't fix anything. Suspending and resuming again didn't
fix things either (not that there's any reason why it should). When I noticed
that Ctrl+Alt+Backspace didn't work in X, I realized this wasn't an X grab
issue.
/var/log/Xorg.0.log has a series of errors like this:
(EE) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: Device has changed - disabling.
(WW) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: Release failed (Invalid argument)
Sadly, there are no timestamps. I think this was printed once on resume,
and then once on every VT switch.
xinput still lists "AT Translated Set 2 Keyboard" among its devices.
I remember now -- before suspending I had used sudo showkeys -s
in an xterm (trying to see the scan code of the ThinkVantage button). Could've
mucked up the keyboard mode?
Alt+SysRq+R (raw mode) didn't help, even when followed by more VT switches.
I think I'm gonna restart the X server. Or reboot the whole PC, Ubuntu
notifier is showing its reboot icon again...
Meta: I wrote this post on March 6, and then decided it
wasn't interesting enough to post. And then posted it accidentally on March
20.
Update: looks like bug
327175.
