LineageOS, Current status : 16.0 Test Builds

[EskeRahn 5,471]

Suggestion: Remap Keyboard close/open to something different than current F5/F6 - My least bad suggestion would be Media_close and Media_eject.

[Craig 1,435]

They're putting that back to the normal android event, I think its like SW_LID or something, not using a keycode.

[Craig 1,435]

53 minutes ago, tdm said:

The right-slant-arrows (fn-keys) are (dead) modifiers that allow generating the yellow symbols.

So basically, duplicating the shift key?  Seems silly to me.  But if you have a reason for it, great, but please make sure they're separate keycodes so user can remap them individually.    In stock currently if you change behavior of one, it affects both.    If you're not going to make them meta left & meta right, then fx key should be meta.

[tdm 2,322]

3 minutes ago, Craig said:

So basically, duplicating the shift key?  Seems silly to me.  But if you have a reason for it, great, but please make sure they're separate keycodes so user can remap them individually.    In stock currently if you change behavior of one, it affects both.    If you're not going to make them meta left & meta right, then fx key should be meta.

Sure, it seems silly to me also.  But that's the way the keyboard is printed.  I would map the fn keys to something else but they are required to generate '/' and '?'.

 

But the beauty of the new keyboard driver is that you can remap all the keys.  The gpio keys aren't remappable yet but I'd like to make them remappable before I finish.

 

 

[Craig 1,435]

1 hour ago, tdm said:

Sure, it seems silly to me also.  But that's the way the keyboard is printed.  I would map the fn keys to something else but they are required to generate '/' and '?'.

 

But the beauty of the new keyboard driver is that you can remap all the keys.  The gpio keys aren't remappable yet but I'd like to make them remappable before I finish.

 

 

Until yesterday when someone pointed it out, I'd never thought the keyboard was printed that way.  I thought they used yellow for contrast and cuz its an fxtec color.  People aren't idiots, they've used keyboards before, they know what shift key is for already.  I don't see why lineage should so something weird like that. 

The disadvantage of using Fxtec key for meta, as opposed to the slant arrows, is that there's only one of them - and the global android shortcuts DONT work with sticky they have to be held together.  Because we have slant arrow on both sides, and there are already keycodes for meta left and meta right, it makes the most sense (to me) to use those keys as meta keys.  It also allows you to keep Fxtec key as 'Android home' that some people consider a feature (b separatut not important to me, meta+h works fine). 

It seems you're also trying to put a solution for slash/question mark into the driver/kernel, instead of leaving it to the layout, which is causing you further limitations.   I plan to make my right slant arrow slash, one of the reasons it's important to make sure the right and left slant arrows have differnt keycodes.    If you do that in the kernel, that'd solve that!  Of course, the reason I dont' expect that to be default is cuz then the functionality doesn't match the print.    I'm still really annoyed they didnt include slash key by default.

 

 

Edited February 12, 2020 by Craig

[Craig 1,435]

Just thinking further out of the box... if you really want slant arrows to be shift, make them right and left shift.  Then make the shift keys into right control or something.  More functional, but definitely not as intuitive.    

 

Or - if you want slant arrow  + PL to be quesiton mark slash, you could make the keys meta, but also include programs that just send question mark and just send slash - and makes those the keyboard shortcuts for Meta+p and meta+l

Edited February 12, 2020 by Craig

[EskeRahn 5,471]

11 minutes ago, Craig said:

I'm still really annoyed they didnt include slash key by default.

I think the FinQwerty solution for this is quite good, You only move the slanted apostrophe, and that frees the key for / and ?,  So almost everything is left unchanged. That is what I would suggest as a default for the Qwerty in Lineage, really close to the print, and yet useful:

[Craig 1,435]

2 hours ago, EskeRahn said:

I think the FinQwerty solution for this is quite good, You only move the slanted apostrophe, and that frees the key for / and ?, 

Glad you like it, my guess is that's cuz you gave him lot of early feedback when he was developing it so he often did it the way you suggested.  I try to use apostrophes when I remember, so wouldn't want that key changed anyway.  But that's the kcm layout file, not the driver.  It seems tdm wants to put some of that functionality into the driver itself. With kcm you can put it anywhere you want, and I do hope Lineage includes some useful layouts so ppl don't need to use finqwerty, but I'm fairly confident they will.  But I'll wait to discuss layouts further until the keyboard driver is finalized, cuz the layouts depend on what the modifier keys are mapped to.    I've heard some finqwerty layouts currently ALT+keys, which isn't something I'd like, I've also heard he duplicated some shift functions with slant arrow, etc, and uses lots of three-key-chords instead of just picking one key as the 3rd level modifer (and 4th level is that same key with shift) like standard us intl.    But I'll keep recommending people use finqwerty layouts until we have better solution, and keep recommending ppl feed back to Finqwerty guy directly on changes/suggestions.  I did make some comments on his git regarding dead keys and layout names, etc, early on.

Regardless, it doesn't change the fact we don't have a dedicated key printed as slash, or that there is a question mark and a slash printed on the P & L keys.    As I said, I already have my own targeted solution, which is to use the right slant-arrow key as slash, and as soon as keyboard driver for android does seperates the keycodes from the two slant arrows, I'm installing LOS.  But I don't expect slash on right slant arrow to be LOS default, since Fxtec printed that funky slant arrow on that key instead of a slash.  With stock android i used keymapper to make the sym key into slash while waiting for keyboard driver to be fixed, but taking forever.   And currently I'm running sailfish, and it's easier to figure out solution there cuz they don't have to consider default aosp stuff (cuz they dont even have such features to consider!).  I use a us-intl layout there that works great, they already changed slant arrow to right-alt, so that's used as the third level for us-intl layouts.  And because its a simple file to edit and don't have any restrictions, easy to change the file yourself...

Edited February 12, 2020 by Craig

[Hook 3,043]

2 hours ago, Craig said:

Glad you like it, my guess is that's cuz you gave him lot of early feedback when he was developing it so he often did it the way you suggested.

Don't know if Eske gave him the idea, But Anssi asked me what I thought of the idea back in December and I told him I thought it was a good solution (which I continue to think) so you might have to blame me too.  😄

[Craig 1,435]

No worries, I'm not too concerned about that, I'll edit my own kcm if I don't like what LOS includes.

I'm more concerned with the driver/kernel stuff.  Dont really wanna try to build LOS myself on my dated PC if I can't do what I want with default LOS.

Edited February 12, 2020 by Craig

[Craig 1,435]

I thought it all thru again, after learning even more.  Updated the long post before, so I think its now ideal; I'd love to hear from those who think its not ideal.  And I'd love if tdm read it again now that i've updated it based on even better understanding.

https://community.fxtec.com/topic/2509-lineageos-160-test-builds/?do=findComment&comment=44147

 

[tdm 2,322]

23 minutes ago, Craig said:

I thought it all thru again, after learning even more.  Updated the long post before, so I think its now ideal; I'd love to hear from those who think its not ideal.  And I'd love if tdm read it again now that i've updated it based on even better understanding.

https://community.fxtec.com/topic/2509-lineageos-160-test-builds/?do=findComment&comment=44147

 

I read over your revised text and it's making more sense. I am open to the FxTec key being used as the dead modifier and using the slant arrows as other modifiers. But that still wouldn't get F# because FxTec+# would need to generate the yellow symbols (for consistency). I'm sure there's another way to generate them though.

 

One thing I'm not clear on is, what do you mean by "'alpha' keyboard definition"?

[Craig 1,435]

13 hours ago, tdm said:

I read over your revised text and it's making more sense. I am open to the FxTec key being used as the dead modifier and using the slant arrows as other modifiers. But that still wouldn't get F# because FxTec+# would need to generate the yellow symbols (for consistency). I'm sure there's another way to generate them though.

 

One thing I'm not clear on is, what do you mean by "'alpha' keyboard definition"?

This is where we disagree.  I see no reason for Fxtec+# to do yellow symbols on number row, that is for shift, those are always for shift on every keyboard in the entire world I've ever seen, why should this one be different?!?!@?  

 

As to alpha, that's one of the most important things.  I'll find the real aosp text stuff and edit this, but in short, it makes modifiers like shift and alt sticky, so to get capitol L you can press shift then l in succession (or together, if you ignore sticky it still functions normally).   It also will allow us to get suggestions from gboard.  It will also make it when you longpress a letter, you get a popup with all the accented versions of that letter.  This is all standard aosp stuff, works on all other android keyboard phones ever.

update: here's the info from google itself.  we are thumb typers, supposed to be alpha.    And it gives us an option for auto-capitilization, forgot about that cuz I disable that, but some people like it.

 

(I also heard the lights hal was coming from Photon Q, if i recall correctly that means the capslock led lights up when you press shift, then goes off when you press the next letter).

 

https://source.android.com/devices/input/key-character-map-files

• ALPHA: A keyboard with all the letters, and maybe some numbers.

  An alphabetic keyboard supports text entry directly but may have a condensed layout with a small form factor. In contrast to a FULL keyboard, some symbols may only be accessible using special on-screen character pickers. In addition, to improve typing speed and accuracy, the framework provides special affordances for alphabetic keyboards such as auto-capitalization and toggled / locked SHIFT and ALT keys.

  This type of keyboard is generally designed for thumb typing.

• FULL: A full PC-style keyboard.

  A full keyboard behaves like a PC keyboard. All symbols are accessed directly by pressing keys on the keyboard without on-screen support or affordances such as auto-capitalization.

  This type of keyboard is generally designed for full two hand typing.

Edited February 12, 2020 by Craig

[EskeRahn 5,471]

5 hours ago, Craig said:

Glad you like it, my guess is that's cuz you gave him lot of early feedback when he was developing it so he often did it the way you suggested.  I try to use apostrophes when I remember, so wouldn't want that key changed anyway.  But that's the kcm layout file, not the driver.  It seems tdm wants to put some of that functionality into the driver itself. With kcm you can put it anywhere you want, and I do hope Lineage includes some useful layouts so ppl don't need to use finqwerty, but I'm fairly confident they will.  But I'll wait to discuss layouts further until the keyboard driver is finalized, cuz the layouts depend on what the modifier keys are mapped to.    I've heard some finqwerty layouts currently ALT+keys, which isn't something I'd like, I've also heard he duplicated some shift functions with slant arrow, etc, and uses lots of three-key-chords instead of just picking one key as the 3rd level modifer (and 4th level is that same key with shift) like standard us intl.    But I'll keep recommending people use finqwerty layouts until we have better solution, and keep recommending ppl feed back to Finqwerty guy directly on changes/suggestions.  I did make some comments on his git regarding dead keys and layout names, etc, early on.

Please note that this is NOT the straight apostrophe, it is the backwards slanted one (apostrophe not accent!), printed left of Q, My English isn't good enough to even know where I  could (or should?) use a slanted apostrophe over a straight one. Please tell me where it is used. (see also this)

And the Alt functions are Stock Android afaik...

[Craig 1,435]

Thanks for pointing it out, I hadn't taken the time to look close enough to understand.  I agree slash and question mark are far more useful than tilde and backtick.  Very good solution, I'd agree too.

No idea when that back tick is used for English, if at all.  I feel like I've used tilde for something in my life tho, but certainly not as often as question mark.  Now I know what Hook meant by 'on the wrong side'.

Edited February 12, 2020 by Craig

[netman 1,424]

10 hours ago, tdm said:

Also as long as I'm here, I want to let everyone know that I've fixed a couple issues in the new keyboard driver.  The test driver in the boot image I posted had so-called "ghost key" issues where eg. pressing D and then G (on qwerty) would not register the G.  It also failed to recognize the first column of keys (H, B, 7, ...) at boot.  And the FxTec key didn't do anything.  All of these are fixed now

Is the github up to date with this? My version of the driver does anti ghosting properly (hence the extra loop, scanning twice, different re-init sequence and polling), and I've tested this extensively. The issues on boot are due to P1 being initialized incorrectly.

Edited February 12, 2020 by netman
i had phrased it totally incomprehensibly xD

[_DW_ 628]

Don't worry about back ticks they mean the same as single quote it's just a character set /typography thing 😄

 

[EskeRahn 5,471]

36 minutes ago, Craig said:

I feel like I've used tilde for something

(The Tilde is NOT affected by the FinQwerty solution)

[EskeRahn 5,471]

23 minutes ago, _DW_ said:

Don't worry about back ticks they mean the same as single quote it's just a character set /typography thing 😄

According to this it is "space w. acute accent" that in some older fonts are used for one of the curly quotes (that are generally available in unicode)

[_DW_ 628]

19 minutes ago, EskeRahn said:

According to this it is "space w. acute accent" that in some older fonts are used for one of the curly quotes (that are generally available in unicode)

Yes pure presentation thing has no meaning in language.

[tdm 2,322]

8 hours ago, netman said:

Is the github up to date with this? My version of the driver does anti ghosting properly (hence the extra loop, scanning twice, different re-init sequence and polling), and I've tested this extensively. The issues on boot are due to P1 being initialized incorrectly.

 

I haven't pushed my code up to github yet, I'm testing some changes.  Android seems to be unhappy when you tell it that you can generate all possible keycodes and it rejects the keyboard (amusingly, it says the internal keyboard is not connected while getevent happily reports all the events).  So I'm trying to figure out exactly what it's checking.

 

I fixed ghosting by switching to polling when any key is down and then back to irq when all keys are released.  That's not optimal -- I would like to only mask the interrupt and poll for rows where keys are down (and thus ghosting is possible) but I haven't gotten that logic quite correct yet.  It's not a huge deal, just a nice touch that I would like to get working correctly.

 

Yes, I noticed and added the missing P1 init.

 

[netman 1,424]

1 minute ago, tdm said:

I fixed ghosting by switching to polling when any key is down and then back to irq when all keys are released.  That's not optimal -- I would like to only mask the interrupt and poll for rows where keys are down (and thus ghosting is possible) but I haven't gotten that logic quite correct yet.  It's not a huge deal, just a nice touch that I would like to get working correctly.

That's a nifty idea, it'd certainly help lessen cpu load when keys are held down compared to my relatively naive approach.

[Craig 1,435]

I keep learning stuff.  Three layers of keyboard after hardware.  Driver/kernel stuff.  Then there's a keylayout file.  Then finally kcm.

So if I understand right, the keylayout file could be a way to apply my suggestion to handle the "missing keys" aspect I suggested as Fxtec logo key+whatever, and could be different for qwerty/qwertz if needed, and also more flexible if scandi layout made in future for example as wouldn't require driver/kernel change, just keylayout.  I think.  Maybe.

Quote

<mccreary> enigma9o7, there is another layer of remapping in Android. You can change how Linux keycodes are translated into Android keycodes with a modified keylayout file
<mccreary> In stock that file is used to map the 'half press' on the camera button to 'focus'
<mccreary> But you can use it to remap a modifier keycode to a printing keycode
<mccreary> For an example, see https://github.com/mccreary/android_device_idealte_msm8998-common/commit/c537ccc293c5fbfafcc0932f17c11a3d57c96f98
<mccreary> That maps two arbitrary keycodes to 'FUNCTION', the 'fn' modifier in kcm files

Edited February 12, 2020 by Craig

[Widget 1]

13 hours ago, EskeRahn said:

Please note that this is NOT the straight apostrophe, it is the backwards slanted one (apostrophe not accent!), printed left of Q, My English isn't good enough to even know where I  could (or should?) use a slanted apostrophe over a straight one. Please tell me where it is used. (see also this)

The backtick (grave accent) isn't used in in English at all. Some applications use it as monospace/code formatting, and programs like ssh use it in some keyboard shortcuts. At this point it's only there because it's been there long enough for enough programs to assume it's there.

Some people use it as if it's the apostrophe but they're wrong 😁.

[mechtec 14]

Hello,

So I received my pre-order Pro1 a few weeks ago.  But getting it setup and usable has been slow.   My current Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4g slide is getting a bit old, still running Cyanogen as Lineage does not support it.  As such its starting to have SSL errors everywhere and is quickly getting to the point its unworkable.

My needs are simple, I need a decent input device (keyboard), root access (I really don't understand why anyone would accept a device they don't have control over), permission controls (Privacy guard works for this in Lineage) and all the basic things terminal/web browser/audio/phone calls/etc working.  I think I need Lineage to get proper permission control.  Unless I use XPrivacyLua with the (Ed)Xposed framework, I might be able to make the stock Android work, but I have not attempted this setup.

So I have explored the "LineageOS 16.0 Test Builds" thread quite a bit.  Huge thanks to @tdm for creating, (seemingly single-handed) a mostly working Lineage build.  I went to the download here http://files.nwwn.com/android/pro1/lineage.html and installed linage on my Pro1.  But at 16 pages its nigh on impossible to read them all, and figure out whats current and what's been fixed and what current bugs are expected.  I also have some more general questions.

1.  Is an official Lineage going to come out?  I would feel much better if the rom came from an official site.  Like https://download.lineageos.org/ or even some place on fxtec.com rather then some random place I found on the forum.

2.  Critical issues, the phone usability is really diminished

  A.  Keyboard issues

    A1.  When sliding in/out the keyboard the virtual keyboard won't get turned on/off.  Its either on all the time or not at all.  Depending on if you select the keep virtual keyboard on-screen while physical keyboard is active setting.

https://github.com/tdm/android_device_fxtec_pro1/issues/19

    A2.  When editing text the up/down buttons move left/right instead of the left/right keys.  This did not happen before I selected a layout, but even removing a layout does not make it work correctly now.

https://github.com/tdm/android_device_fxtec_pro1/issues/9

    A3.  No way to auto-rotate to landscape when the keyboard is slide out.

https://github.com/tdm/android_device_fxtec_pro1/issues/5 (kinda its all related as the slide is not enabling/disabling the hardware keyboard)

  B.  Less important then the keyboard issues, but whenever the screen is turned off (by the side button or by the idle timeout) the audio from a call is cut off.  Turning the screen back on brings back the audio within a few secs.  This makes it impossible to use like a traditional phone where you bring it up to your ear, because doing so turns off the screen and hence the audio cuts off.

https://github.com/tdm/android_device_fxtec_pro1/issues/21

3.  Is there any issue tracker for the Lineage rom to know what is being worked on/known about?

https://github.com/tdm/android_device_fxtec_pro1/issues

4.  Is there a git repo or the like for the Lineage rom?  Along the same line, any changelog from version to version, ex its gone from test2 to test3 since I have been working on this phone but no idea what's changed.

The http://files.nwwn.com/android/pro1/lineage.htmllists several repo's.  I think we would need to poke at them all to figure out changes between versions.

5.  What is the recommended way to upgrade from one rom to the next?  I ended up rebooting to recovery and doing a sideload to go from test2 to test3.  However this method resulted in losing all my data as it would not bootup and I had to do a reset to get the phone to boot again.  Is there a better way?

6.  Anyone have a recommendation on backup tools?  I don't have Google apps installed and am hoping to run without them as I don't like Google monitoring my phone.  As such would need something I can do through adb or f-droid.  I do not want any closed source software on my phone beyond the absolutely required bits.

oandbackup is mentioned by @Zamasu  in a later comment along with a closed source one. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dk.jens.backup/

7.  Any way to get the button for apps back?  On my old phone I could press 6 dots and see them all.  This version you have to swipe up from the bottom to see them, would be nicer if I could have a straight button.  (This was VERY hard to figure out when I first got the phone, no manual, no explanation, no indication a swipe up would be an action to see your applications)

5.  Minor issues

  A.  FM radio does not open, it tries and says it keeps stopping.  I saw this was an issue somewhere in the long thread, so its likely a known issue and is unimportant to me in any case.

https://github.com/tdm/android_device_fxtec_pro1/issues/8

  B.  Once in awhile the screen just goes blank.  Holding down the power button for long enough seems to reboot the phone back to a working state.

In-summary, I must say I have complained a lot, but just wanted to detail all my issues.  I like the hardware of this phone and really love the keyboard.  I am often typing off by a key due to the key shift, but expect that to go away once I use it some more.  It feels really nice to type on compared to my prior phones, the size of the screen means the keys are really nice and big.  Audio sounds good, though speakerphone is a bit on the quiet side.  But above all I am very pleased there is finally a phone that's a true upgrade from my prior slide.  I have not been willing to go down the poor input that takes half your screen route that most "modern" phones are taking.  If you made it, thanks for reading and I would appreciate any thoughts you have on any of the matters I brought up.  If you have other issues, I am more then willing to test them and add them above to slowly generate a current issues list with the current LineageOS build (or I could even spin up a real issue tracker, perhaps a gitlab instance or something if people wanted).

 

Edit:  So I forgot to actually read to the bottom of the nwwn.com page it seems.  It listed the git repo and issues tracking https://github.com/tdm/android_device_fxtec_pro1  .  I have updated my issues to include the git issue links for anyone reading this and wanting more info.

Edited February 15, 2020 by mechtec
Include issue links and update with info gathered from responces.