misha: hmm. perhaps they were referring to angstrom. they're not on the forum, but they occcasionally pop into #anki on freenode

cangy Wrote:zaurus phones? oh, you mean qtopia phones, not zaurus

Apologies for the confusion. I was under the incorrect understanding that some of the Zaurus models are also mobile phones. After having another look around, I see that this is not so.

Good luck putting a debian on your Zaurus. If you manage it, I'd be interested in hearing about it more, in particular, how much effort is needed to get QT4 and Anki on it.

I'll try and do the same within the next couple of weeks.

resolve Wrote:misha: hmm. perhaps they were referring to angstrom. they're not on the forum, but they occcasionally pop into #anki on freenode

Alright. I'll keep that in mind when I have time to approach this more directly. Thanks.

misha, many thanks for the kangaroo link in the Essential Resources thread. I just installed it and it's working brilliantly with my touch screen umpc! Zaurus owners should definitely check it out.

While not specifically tailored to Japanese like anki is, I use fullrecall for all of my flashcards because it has a pocketpc version that is syncable with the pc.

Well, I tried putting Angstrom on my Zaurus CL-3200 on Saturday, with the hopes of eventually getting Anki on it.

Angstrom install went pretty smoothly. This being my first time changing distros on the Zaurus, I was careful enough to make a full backup of everything I had on it before doing anything.

I couldn't help but notice that Angstrom runs visibly slower than the stock Sharp ROM. I spent a full day playing around with it. My goals were, initially:

- Dictionary software (Kangoroo)
- Japanese touch-screen input
- Python and PyQt
- Anki

I wasn't able to achieve them, and not long before midnight decided to put the Sharp ROM back on. I use my Z pretty extensively during the week, so I needed it in working condition. I might spend a bit more time looking around and preparing before I try installing Angstrom, or another distribution.

Misha, I read from the Kangoroo site that the dictionary files have been streamlined for the zaurus, less entries/nfo. Have you found it lacking at all? Should I look into re-integrating the full edict and kanjidic files since I don't have a zaurus?

Aikiboy Wrote:Misha, I read from the Kangoroo site that the dictionary files have been streamlined for the zaurus, less entries/nfo. Have you found it lacking at all? Should I look into re-integrating the full edict and kanjidic files since I don't have a zaurus?

The only thing I found lacking with Kangoroo's dictionary is that it doesn't provide any sample sentences. I've been thinking about ways to get around this limitation -- I may eventually modify Kangoroo to handle sample sentences in a similar way to WWWDIC.

Other than that, the dictionary is quite complete, in my view. I'm an intermediate learner though, so the provided dictionary may not be sufficient for higher levels.

Let me know if you ever do go about re-integrating the full EDICT and KANJIDICT into kangoroo, though. With a 6 gig microdrive there's no real need to be stingy on dictionary files.

Will do misha, although I was re-reading the info and it may be that only the kanjidic identifiers are scaled back, presenting only heisig/L. And possibly all entries are included in the dictionary with only the most popular definitions. I'm not quite sure, but for the time being it's pretty cool jumping from kanji part to part. So far, so good!

misha Wrote:Good luck putting a debian on your Zaurus. If you manage it, I'd be interested in hearing about it more, in particular, how much effort is needed to get QT4 and Anki on it.

just installed debian using this method: http://www.oesf.org/index.php?title=Q15:...tarball%3F

surprisingly pain-free given the lack of docs, but haven't got X sorted properly yet

installing anki and deps is the same as any debian

initial anki issues are speed and fitting things in 640x480, as you'd expect... with the sample heisig deck, show answer takes 6 seconds, answering takes 14s, the main window doesn't resize to fit the screen (fits ok when forced to resize, but resizes itself off the screen again if the side bar is used. deck editor sizes itself properly), deck editor single letter search takes 19s, saving takes 21s.

so, almost usable now, with any luck it should be fine with a few tweaks and the new back end!

cangy Wrote:just installed debian using this method:

...

so, almost usable now, with any luck it should be fine with a few tweaks and the new back end!

Hi cangy,

I've gone down a different path. After I gave up on Angstrom, I decided to see if the Zaurus was capable of the underlying Anki library (libanki) without any changes. It turns out that it actually can. You have to do a small witch dance to get Python and other dependencies to work with the Sharp ROM, but it's quite easy.

All that remains now is to write a decent GUI that will work with the Sharp ROM. Anki uses QT4, which is way ahead of what's part of Qtopia on the Zaurus (seems to be QT/Embedded 2), so the GUI needs to be pretty much rewritten.

The good news is that it really isn't that hard to write a simple GUI with basic features to cover a substantial amount of Anki functionality. I've spent a bit of time this weekend on this, and so far I have a GUI that allows you to load a deck, review cards, and save your progress. I've run into the same speed issues that you mentioned, but was able to work around some of them in my code. Most importantly, fetching a new card and reviewing takes less than a second. This makes it borderline usable as a stand-alone review tool. Saving a deck takes a couple of seconds though, as you've mentioned.

I started to play with syncing but haven't been able to get it to work completely. The Zaurus has very limited memory resources and that's preventing syncing from working fully.

It sounds like resolve has planned to address the speed and memory issues in a future release of Anki.

If anyone would like to play around with the Anki port to QT/Embedded or Qtopia, then please drop me a line. It's an alpha at the moment but extra testing is always good

Cheers,
Misha

misha Wrote:All that remains now is to write a decent GUI that will work with the Sharp ROM. Anki uses QT4, which is way ahead of what's part of Qtopia on the Zaurus (seems to be QT/Embedded 2), so the GUI needs to be pretty much rewritten.

nice work misha! it'd be sweet having a lightweight gui optimised for the z! (my production z is an sl-c860/sharprom, the 3200 is just for trying out debian at the moment...) did you consider doing it as cgi or with an embedded web server? then there'd be no gui dependencies at all, and the media rendering stuff would be taken care of by the browser...

Saving and time between answer and next question shown should be reduced considerably in the next version. Show answer should be pretty fast even on the old Anki though - is your device swapping & out of memory?

cangy Wrote:did you consider doing it as cgi or with an embedded web server? then there'd be no gui dependencies at all, and the media rendering stuff would be taken care of by the browser...

I thought about it, but after trying out both Opera 7.55 and NetFront 3.1 I wasn't too impressed with the amount of usability I got from them. Neither was able to render the Javascript Anki pages correctly, and the simple interface was a bit too simple for me.

The deciding factor was the fact that it's Python -- I'm currently brushing up on the language, so the timing couldn't have been better.

You can check out the details of the port (and grab the source for the alpha, if you're feeling adventurous) here.

I'd love to see some screenshots!

resolve Wrote:I'd love to see some screenshots!

They're pretty cringe-worthy at the moment.

http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/AnkiQPE?actio...G_0500.JPG
http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/AnkiQPE?actio...G_0505.JPG

Apologies for the greasy finger marks.

Misha's port also runs on the stock EEEPC OS.

The stock OS supports qt/embedded?

resolve Wrote:The stock OS supports qt/embedded?

QT/X11 and QT/Embedded are interface-compatible, more or less.

resolve Wrote:The stock OS supports qt/embedded?

The stock OS supports Python 2.4 and PyQt3.

I figured the stock OS ships with qt3. qt4 broke a lot of qt3 code, but I guess the same doesn't apply from the move from qt2 to qt3.

resolve Wrote:Show answer should be pretty fast even on the old Anki though - is your device swapping & out of memory?

no, no paging at all, nor any other disk i/o

misha Wrote:Apologies for the greasy finger marks.

shift-copy takes a screenshot

Can anyone help me figure a couple things out that are making me want to bang my head on my desk lately?

First, I just recently installed Anki, and every time I open it, it asks if I want to download the update despite the fact that I've said YES like 6 times already. Why does it keep asking me over and over?

That's just a little annoying, but what's really driving me nuts is that I can't get my Anki to let me input Japanese which is really crazy to me, considering it's a Japanese study program. It lets me *copy and past* Japanese in (and even automatically translates the pasted text into kana in the reading section), but it always overrides my OS's Japanese IME and just types English when I try to manually input no matter what I do.

Anyone else have this problem, or am I just really clueless? Please help! I want to start entering cards, but would really don't want to have to cut and paste everything I want to put in my card decks.

Thanks in advance!

If you're asked to upgrade again, the upgrade didn't work. Install manually.