Maverick status, Launchpad Project

We've created a Launchpad project to contain all the Maverick (and other distributions too) problems pertaining to our platforms. Feel free to submit bugs!

https://launchpad.net/efikamx

Maverick support is progressing. After the release and a solid week of work most of the bugs have been either solved by the Ubuntu developers or fixed where it applies to Genesi code.

Kernel packages for Efika MX Smarttop and Efika MX Smartbook are being tested as we speak (including support in flash-kernel, and a fancy U-Boot update) and a Maverick GNOME desktop build is underway. New systems will ship with these improvements before the end of the month, along with hopefully support for codec acceleration (openmax), 3D acceleration (opengles2), 2D acceleration (xorg-video-imx), and we are working on direct (not XRender) Cairo backends for OpenVG/OpenGLES2 in order to further offload the CPU and updates to several packages to improve performance (xorg-server, pixman, eglibc). Along with the GNOME desktop update (replacing Xfce as the default) we have also completed testing of the OEM configuration scripts which means every system will boot and ask for username, password, machine name, locale and timezone settings and not be fixed to the "oem" account anymore.

We're trying for a PPA but proprietary code in a from-source repository, or putting big binary blobs around, is a little intrusive, so we may simply host our own package repository.

Current issues which are showstopping the release;

• SPI NOR driver locks up terribly meaning updating U-Boot on Efika MX Smarttop boards is needlessly complicated and involves DIP switches and unscrewing the maintenance/debug panel. We hope to solve this with a convenient, tiny SD card image including the update and flashing using MTD, once the bug has been fixed.
  
• Some display bugs have been fixed for most people, but some are still experiencing strange behavior which we would like to fix. There is a point where this will drop to a low priority since we can't hold out forever on the kernel update.
• Standard VESA modes on some panels are hopelessly garbled and show trash data
• Some monitors do not report EDID when they are on another "channel" (for instance VIZIO televisions). In this case the Efika basically does not find an HDMI sink and fails set up a valid mode and instead tries to use the non-existant VGA port. VGA support is going to be taken out to fix this and the mode will default to 720p as normal.
  
• NetworkManager applet disappears in GNOME sometimes making wireless hard to use
• Wireless driver has grown some kind of error, but the kernel backtrace causes a division by zero making debugging difficult and spamming dmesg (this seems to be a race condition somewhere as restoring the debug dmesg spam fixes it, however it does clutter systems and make tty1 annoying to use).

Apart from those niggles which need just a few tweaks to be tested, everything is going smoothly and we hope to ship at least the distribution files and kernel support by the end of the week.

Any suggestions or comments are welcome, please direct them to the PowerDeveloper forums or to the Launchpad Project.