Hi to the forum members

Last week I bought a Viewsonic Viewpad 10s (it's identical with the Advent Vega or the Point of View tablet). So plasma active should work.

As I don't want to skip android (viewcomb) totally, I want to ask if there is any possibility to have some kind of dual boot option for android/plasma active.

I think nobody has tried to dual boot with that tablet. There are other ARM based systems where Plasma Active run on:

http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Installation

The instructions in "1.2 Deploying a Plasma Active (MMC) raw Image to a MultiMediaCard" is for Nokia N900 and installs the PA to a MMC card, not the internal memory (so the Android installation remains intact). Maybe that works for you, but again, nobody has ever tried that with that tablet as far as I know. If you are unsure do *not* try it. Anyway, if it works the system will run very slow because MMC is slower than the internal flash memory.

OK. I tried it. Here are the results (testet on viewsonic viewpad 10s).

1.) Go to http://share.basyskom.com/contour/Deployment/mer_arm_install_archive/point_of_view_nvidia_tegra2/ to get all files you need (kernel image + filesystem for sd)

2.) Download the basyskom-tegra-helper-scripts.tar and extract it.

3.) Copy the kernel image to the helper script folder

4.) Go to the helper script folder an execute ./download_and_prepare.sh . This will download the rest of the files which are needed for flashing.

5.) Extract the filesystem archive and bring it on the micro sd card (howto can be found on here)

6.) Connect your tablet with your PC (USB cable). Backup the old kernel and flash the new kernel image to the tablet according to the readme (you need to get the tablet in to the recovery mode).

7.) Boot with micro sd and enjoy

The android on your tablet won't get touched. Only the kernel images will be replaced. So you can restore it easily. For restoring get the tablet in recovery mode (sometimes a little bit tricky. Try it with power cable plugged in or plugged out. Sometimes it helps to turn the tablet off, unplugged it from power and wait some minutes.). Then execute the ./restore_backup.sh script. After that you get your old android back.

Experiences:
The only filesystem image which worked relative well was the oldest (2011-10-24-19-59-mer-armv7hl-plasma-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2). I didn't get the original (About, Images, Browser) plasma-active apps to start because after starting they crashed. The pim apps worked very well. Also the non active apps. I couldn't use network because the network plasmoid didn't support the meego network manager connman (there seems to be a workaround but I didn' test it).

2011-12-09-18-04-basyskom-plasma-active-testing-mer-armv7hl-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2 freezes on boot.
And 2012-01-18-10-10-basyskom-plasma-active-testing-mer-armv7hl-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2 needs 10 minutes to boot plasma-active. After booting there is a message that qtmultimedia isn't installed and it seems to freeze (nothing could be touched)

Future wishes:
- an easy howto so that other people could try it and report bugs.
- a place for reporting bugs and discussing problems of the community images (at the moment it isn't clear to me where to report bugs and to discuss. Mer, plasma-active, or the basyskom people who hosted the image).

In the end I want to thank all plasma active / mer developers for making a free tablet OS/DE. It looks very promising.

Great to know it (kind of) works. The best place to reach PA developers directly is the #active channel on irc. vgrade is the responsible for Mer and mdfe is the guy at basysKom taking care of building PA images (both Meego and Mer). For sure they can help improving the howto.

The workaround for connmand is already integrated in all those images you tried as far as I know. However, I also know that the connman plasmoid seems not to work on Mer, it does work on Meego. Connman works in despite of the plasmoid, you just need to use a command line dbus client (dbus-send/qdbus) to activate the connection.

Thank you for answering.

From my point of view IRC is a good medium to get in touch with the basic developers but not so good for involving the non regular developers/users. On IRC you can't search if a topic/bug is solved. You always have to ask. At some point it must be be very annoying for the developers to answer always the same questions.
Maybe it's to early at this state but sometime it should be found a better place than IRC to discuss problems of special community images and hence involve a bigger community.

Some questions:
Can you give me some more information how to activate network through command line dbus client? I have a wireless network with WPA/WPA2 and a 73 character long key (is there a possibility to save it )

Do you know if there is a repository with stable packages (plasma-active 2) to get an update through zypper (like I wrote above only the oldest image works for me)?

Plasma Active bugs are tracked in http://bugs.kde.org under product "Active". There are some bugs that are from other KDE software that affects us, if possible you should report bugs using the product of the affected software instead of just "Active" so that the maintainer of that product be notified about the problem.

Some important known bugs are listed in the release notes: http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/ReleaseNotes/2.0

The FAQ also contains usefull answers about configuring Plasma Active: http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Info#FAQ

You can read about past bugs and/or contact PA developers using mailinglist and Active forum: http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Info#Contact

In your particular case you should really contact vgrade and mdfe since they are the ones working on Arm based Plasma Active images. Most of the other developers own i586 devices, so they probably cannot help you much with problems specific to the Arm architecture.

You can use this command line to activate wifi:

/usr/lib/connman/test/connect-service <ssid> <key>

I am not sure if connman will save the key, I think it will. You can also create a shell script, then you will not need to type the key twice.

There is a new image in the link you downloaded the image from that should correctly boot on arm. Maurice (mdfe) uploaded it yesterday. I do not know what is the correct repository for Arm packages, vgrade or mdfe probably knows it.

plasma active in viewpad E72?, is possible?
Thank you.