Kobo Start Menu

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Cyphox

edit: of course i tried (you're talking about starting cr reader from start menu after a forced reset, dont you? if you're talking about testing my "preconfigured" cr, i've only done that twice), still a non-functional cr,

So you tried starting cr reader from start menu after forced reset. From what you said afterwards, I take that it did not work. As for your "preconfigured" cr, what exactly is preconfigured. I guess you are using cr3.ini and cr3hist.bmk that you have saved some time ago. Anything else?

Originally Posted by Cyphox

and i tried another thing:

i restored my backup, started cr via vlasoftlauncher (the way it works just fine normally) and did a hard reset = damaged config

so the corrupted cfg-file is because of the resets/forced powerdowns i had to do.

Did you look at the configuration file (cr3.ini). What did happen? Was it empty? Was the content incomplete? In which way was it corrupted?

Originally Posted by Cyphox

but i cant say for sure if cr freezes or if its just the touchscreen/powerswitch that doesnt work after launching cr for the second time directly from start menu.

Strange that it works once, but not twice.

Originally Posted by Cyphox

maybe im talking nonsense now, but perhaps cr doesnt like the touchpad-driver/plugin that startmenu provides in some way. correct me if im wrong, but when you launch vlasoftlauncher, it doesnt use the driver provided by startmenu but it loads the driver again by itself, doesnt it?!

You are right, it does use the drivers/libraries provided by vlasovsoft. In the first update that I uploaded, this was different, since the start menu and vlasovsoft used the same drivers/libraries for some time. But the last version of vlasovsoft uses different drivers/libraries. Therefore I uploaded finally, a new version of the update.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by chandravadans

The fix works, thanks!

But I'm a little concerned about the (bad) effect on the display. I'd read somewhere that e-ink displays aren't that great at refreshing constantly, and can get worn out. I'll dig deeper and let you know if that's actually true.

The clock was never meant to be used continuously. I provided this option only at a certain point, since I thought it could help us tracking down why some devices did not respond to touch after a certain FW update.

Originally Posted by chandravadans

Was curious, does the device have to stay busy displaying something on the screen? Or does having a script running in the background also do the trick? That should definitely take some pressure off the display.

Again,

--EDITED--

Turns out, it does work. Invoke a script that runs in an infinite loop in the background when startmenu starts, and kill it when startmenu ends. It doesn't necessarily have to print anything on the display, thereby (potentially) saving it. Tried the same for koreader, and it worked.

That was actually the next step I was thinking of. Did you do some experiments how intensively the device has to be kept busy?
I am glad it works for you. However, it would be nice to know why this problem occurs on your and some other devices, and doesn't on others . Or why the problem disappeared for WS64 after replacing the internal sd.
If we don't find a better solution than to keep the device busy, we should think of a way to keep it busy doing something meaningful. But right now I don't have a good idea.

[chandravadans]

Originally Posted by tshering

That was actually the next step I was thinking of. Did you do some experiments how intensively the device has to be kept busy?
I am glad it works for you.

Yes, it actually doesn't matter how intensely busy the device is kept busy. I was just making it sleep for 1s every time the infinite loop was executed.

Originally Posted by tshering

However, it would be nice to know why this problem occurs on your and some other devices, and doesn't on others . Or why the problem disappeared for WS64 after replacing the internal sd.

Yes! As a matter of fact, even I tried replacing the internal SD card, and sadly the problem persisted. It would actually be quite interesting to know the root cause of the problem. I'm guessing that this problem occurs on all devices (Kobo Glo's atleast), but simply went unnoticed so far because nobody tried to keep it idle for that long.

[Cyphox]

interesting:

i have four touch-areas in cr, next+previous page, menu and close.

menu and close are working just fine, i can close and open the reader a thousand times if i want to. but as soon as i want to do a page turn (swipe or tap doensnt matter) the device freezes and have to do a reset.

just checked the two files you've mentioned, they are both empty (this time, as i mentioned earlier sometimes just one of the files (settings or recent books) is damaged) after a hard reset

[tshering]

Originally Posted by chandravadans

Yes, it actually doesn't matter how intensely busy the device is kept busy. I was just making it sleep for 1s every time the infinite loop was executed.



Yes! As a matter of fact, even I tried replacing the internal SD card, and sadly the problem persisted. It would actually be quite interesting to know the root cause of the problem. I'm guessing that this problem occurs on all devices (Kobo Glo's atleast), but simply went unnoticed so far because nobody tried to keep it idle for that long.

You might be right that all devices are prone to that problem in some way, and not everybody is perceiving it because depending on certain conditions some devices can cope with more idleness than others.

I think with the next version I will introduce the option to run a sleep loop script from .kobo/kbmenu/onstart/ksmhome.sh.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Cyphox

interesting:

i have four touch-areas in cr, next+previous page, menu and close.

menu and close are working just fine, i can close and open the reader a thousand times if i want to. but as soon as i want to do a page turn (swipe or tap doensnt matter) the device freezes and have to do a reset.

just checked the two files you've mentioned, they are both empty (this time, as i mentioned earlier sometimes just one of the files (settings or recent books) is damaged) after a hard reset

I know this will not help you, but I set my settings so that I have the same touch-areas now as you and everything goes smoothly.

Did you try with another version of coolreader? (For testing you can just rename the vlasovsoft folder to vlasovsoft_39 or something, and have the other version installed in vlasovsoft, as usually.)

[tshering]

There are reports that some devices (for reasons unknown to me) become unresponsive if left idle for some time. The package uploaded here tries to prevent this.

This package needs KBStartMenu_04_update01a.zip to be already installed on your device.

Install:

• extract KoboRoot.tgz from the archive
• copy KoboRoot.tgz to .kobo of your device
• safely eject the device
• select "handle update" > "install update"

Attention: This will overwrite your user settings.

Alternative way to install:

• extract the content of KoboRoot.tgz
• edit usersettings.txt according to your wishes
• merge the kbmenu folder with the kbmenu folder of your device

[Cyphox]

hooray!!

i figured it out, kind of, the problem has something to do with page refresh!

my reader has almost no ghosting, so i usually set it to 0.

IF i set it to anything DIFFERENT than 1, i get those freezes i mentioned.

at first i thougt, yeah, no big deal, just set it to 100, but damn, same problem.

and even if i set it to 1, the problem still returns when entering the frontlight-settings (it freezes prior to the automatic page refresh)

there is no god, i guess. or he doesnt want me to use cr without vlavsoftlauncher.

tested with .37, too -> same

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Cyphox

hooray!!

i figured it out, kind of, the problem has something to do with page refresh!

my reader has almost no ghosting, so i usually set it to 0.

IF i set it to anything DIFFERENT than 1, i get those freezes i mentioned.

Just tried it and set update interval to 4. After restarting cr, it become unresponsive after I tried to turn the page.

[Cyphox]

Originally Posted by tshering

Just tried it and set update interval to 4. After restarting cr, it become unresponsive after I tried to turn the page.

so im not crazy, what a relief.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Cyphox

so im not crazy, what a relief.

I can also confirm that trying to call the front light menu in cr freezes the device, if cr is not called by kobolauncher.

This and the other point you discovered, namely setting the page update interval to a value other than 1, will make the "coolreader" menu rather useless for many users. Therefore, I will disable it by default in the next version.

Edit: Just in case you are planing to make some further experiments. Do you use telnet? It is so much more convenient to write "killall cr3" in order to defreeze the device than to force a power down and restart it.

[Cyphox]

glad i could help. thanks for your patience and im looking forward to the next version of ksm.

edit: kind of. i know what it is, but havent used it that much in the past. i guess i can use it by activating this usbnet-thingy

rebooting the device is not a big deal anyway, i always have a paperclip in range when fiddling around with my kobo ;-)

[tshering]

Can anybody please confirm whether this approach to prevent the device from freezing works? I have some doubts, but I cannot test it myself because my device is not freezing anyway.

[Cyphox]

Originally Posted by tshering

Can anybody please confirm whether this approach to prevent the device from freezing works? I have some doubts, but I cannot test it myself because my device is not freezing anyway.

works for me. my kobo idled for some minutes, no freeze so far.

going to test it further, but i think you just elimated this bug.

thanks!

edit: yepp, guess you did, still no freeze.

thanks to chandravadans and to you of course!

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Cyphox

works for me. my kobo idled for some minutes, no freeze so far.

going to test it further, but i think you just elimated this bug.

thanks!

edit: yepp, guess you did, still no freeze.

thanks to chandravadans and to you of course!

Thank you for testing!