So does the WiFi work in any of these alternative OSes or is that still a no go?
You know, it occurs to me Archos is walking a fine line with this sort of thing, if they intend to enforce voided warranties due to the SDE. Because someone could make a stink about it- should they have a warranty claim denied- and point out that Archos is promoting this through their official channels.
If they were smart (if), they'd allow claims due to obvious hardware defects, but I feel they are totally within their rights to tell you "you break it, you bought it" with regards to software hacking. I'm pretty sure software is almost universally explicitly unwarranted, but it may get a little unclear legally speaking when you have firmware vs. application software.
andrew.barr wrote:So does the WiFi work in any of these alternative OSes or is that still a no go?
I've been testing Debian with gnome in my Archos 70 and wifi is working flawlessly... but there are other things not working. (Sound, Orientation, virtual keyboard not working with modal windows opened)...
andrew.barr wrote:So does the WiFi work in any of these alternative OSes or is that still a no go?
I've been testing Debian with gnome in my Archos 70 and wifi is working flawlessly... but there are other things not working. (Sound, Orientation, virtual keyboard not working with modal windows opened)...
Where did you find the image for Debian GNOME? Or did you build it yourself. Looking around the openaos.org website is extremely discouraging, not only are the instructions hard to understand (they are not well written and make references unfamiliar to outsiders), but there's a lot of "this is broken/that's broken" or even "this crashes all the time".
And I see I have to do a recovery flash of a kernel- something that I do not like the implications of. Preferably, any sort of fiddling wouldn't affect the main Android f/w at all. Which is why I was mostly ok with installing the SDE. Maybe I don't understand what it is that that involves, but I just have misgivings about installing a core component that will affect the entire device that was modified and built by someone who may or may not have understood what they were doing.
Am I missing the point? I honestly had hoped Archos would have pushed out their new f/w today.
andrew.barr wrote:So does the WiFi work in any of these alternative OSes or is that still a no go?
I've been testing Debian with gnome in my Archos 70 and wifi is working flawlessly... but there are other things not working. (Sound, Orientation, virtual keyboard not working with modal windows opened)...
Where did you find the image for Debian GNOME? Or did you build it yourself. Looking around the openaos.org website is extremely discouraging, not only are the instructions hard to understand (they are not well written and make references unfamiliar to outsiders), but there's a lot of "this is broken/that's broken" or even "this crashes all the time".
And I see I have to do a recovery flash of a kernel- something that I do not like the implications of. Preferably, any sort of fiddling wouldn't affect the main Android f/w at all. Which is why I was mostly ok with installing the SDE. Maybe I don't understand what it is that that involves, but I just have misgivings about installing a core component that will affect the entire device that was modified and built by someone who may or may not have understood what they were doing.
Am I missing the point? I honestly had hoped Archos would have pushed out their new f/w today.
Thanks. No kernel flashing, this is more acceptable. If you access their wiki from the blogpost, it defaults to French. I guess their web server has not heard of the Accept-Language header. It took me a second to see that there were language links off to the left.
Look. Speaking as someone who has bought handheld computer type devices for well over a decade (I had a Palm IIIxe, two weeks on two AAA batteries), and someone who has been searching for the "perfect" embedded Linux device for almost as long- I can tell you based on how this industry works- both the embedded consumer industry specifically and software in general- that I would not at all be surprised if Archos decided to leave us with Froyo and just maintain it with bug fixes. There are really only a couple of scenarios under which I imagine Archos could justify porting Gingerbread to Gen8: one is that enough is wrong with their Froyo port that would be fixed by pushing out Gingerbread that they would do that. Unlikely, but possible. Another is that they want to extend the marketable life of Gen8 and inject new life into their sales and buy themselves time before the next-gen hardware comes around. Since Gen 9 is announced, that's out. The only other reason I can think of that we'd get Gingerbread is that if it was straightforward enough to combine the efforts on Gen9 to give us Gen8 owners a little love at minimal cost. Beyond that, these devices generally get the s/w engineering work done up front or shortly after release and then they go into maintenance/bugfix mode. Which means most of the effort is spent squashing those last few impossible bugs over the next six months to a year before even less effort is spent...and so on. There are exceptions in the smartphone world, mostly on higher end Android devices (and of course iOS to some extent), but by and large the model of the industry is to not develop new features once the device has been on the market. Now, the incestuous involvement of the wireless telcos with the usual smartphone suspects has changed that dynamic somewhat, but it's still true of devices like the Archos that are really engineered solely by the manufacturer.
History is laden with exceptions to this- the Nokia Nseries had several major revisions for it's OS pushed out over its lifetime, but that may have been because of Nokia's embarrassingly slow hardware cycle- one of the reasons that project got killed in this brave new world of HTC and Samsung living largely off of the hardware and software efforts of others. So if they push out Gingerbread next week, it'll be great, but everyone here needs to be ready for the very real possibility that these devices will live on Froyo for the rest of their lives. It's not a problem- as long as you look at it the right way. If not, perhaps Archos won't make you happy. I would put forward that few others are going to make you happy either, though.
the only thing that we are missing without 2.3+ Android is some apps that require 2.3+ like new Skype with video calls.
I'm missing only Skype video calls, what's use of front facing camera if there's no video calling?
Bdw, pm me if someone knows some app that works on A70 that can make video calls to some windows client.
Did anyone with SDE installed tried this?
Bdw, it could be that Archos finally got selected group of few to test their firmwares before mass beta testing
One more thing, since we have "only" 256MB RAM, and than we got swap enabled, would CLASS10 SD be any better for larger swaps? Can swap be mounted from SD? Do we have any tests of RAM performance on G8 devices?
