[HD2 Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting and Genera] curiousGeorge:
Excellent job on Ubuntu 0.2. I'm sure you're already aware of the minor issues concerning video playback (gnome-mplayer in landscape is very slow, normal mplayer in landscape doesn't respect screen orientation), and you've mentioned numerous times there are audio issues (built-in speaker, no audio in call, etc).

Perhaps this has been discussed, but since there is no reference in the readme or front page, I thought I'd ask why the Lucid (now approaching 10.04.1) base wasn't used instead of the slower, less-optimized Karmic. The packages for 10.04 are compiled with ARMv7-exclusive switches (not to mention much higher permeation of NEON optimizations across multimedia apps), and potentially include application-specific fixes in addition to the NEON patches. Lucid was also built around the 2.6.32 kernel (a variant of which you are using). I've heard the Linaro test models (Freescale i.MX 51/53 chips) use this to excellent effect.

I'm also curious as to why the system monitor reports only ~380MB total RAM. I'd expect it to be closer to 500MB -- will editing the simple startup config with a higher memory value be safe to perform?

Incidentally, I hear Flash 10.1 builds for ARM GNU/Linux are reportedly making rounds in developer circles. Although QSD HW acceleration is not yet implemented in the traditional GNU/Linux userspace, would it not be possible to include the full flash player (slow mozilla plugin)?

I am quite pleased with the visual changes and the inclusion of phone features! I believe this is the first time I've ever seen an integrated phone-specific application set in a desktop-centric distro. Bravo! That truly caught me by surprise. The performance and loading times were much diminished even though the filesystem was larger (resolving an issue I reported in the past). Although the filesystem is huge and there is no squashfs support, these two items are debatable and surely low priority.

Overall, the environment is remarkably usable. I ended up shrinking the bar by 5 pixels and moving it to the bottom where I was less likely to accidentally click it instead of the X on maximized windows. I also shrunk the font size on window titles to 12 (or 13) since 14 was a bit large and resolution was limited, though the wide scroll bars are very useful, as is the (somewhat glitchy) Firefox drag plug-in. The on-screen keyboard lags a bit on input, and it's difficult to re-size it (although maximizing its window fairly trivial). I'm curious why you chose this one as the default over the other on-screen keyboard included (in Accessories). Drop-down menus also seem to overlap the keyboard, making typing painful in fields with auto-complete (firefox Awesomebar, gnome input fields...). I love the hold-to-right-click functionality, as well as the hardware "arrow keys," which allowed me to play a game of Tetris. ;) Unfortunately, these arrow keys are not remapped when the screen is switched to portrait, which is somewhat awkward.

It was a good idea to enable single-click navigation in general, but because of the screen sensitivity (which you also mentioned), it is difficult to tap-hold (for right click event) without accidentally launching the files (left click). Either way, it's fine. Things I might like to see in the future (in order of preference, not feasibility):

1. More RAM available to the OS (full 512MB would be great).

2. Sound (+ Sound in calls)

3. Battery meter (charge not a huge priority - can always switch back to WinMo for that)

4. Better on-screen keyboard or input method

5. Less space/loading times (squashfs would solve this if enough RAM and processor is thrown at it -- Lucid may be key to higher performance).

6. Bugfixing (video playback, screen sensitivity, run-on lines in SMS app, etc)

...

9001. Flash 10

Overall, I'm not only amazed at the result -- I'm touched as well. This is truly a marvel of human ingenuity. Bravo, and excellent work! Are there any plans for 0.3? Is there a wiki or tracker for the hd2buntu project?