Best Image for Amiko Alien2+

There were some changes recently to the drivers for the front panel. I am not sure if they are incorporated into Hyperion 4.5. They have made some changes in the HDMU image, but I am not sure if it is working 100% yet. (I am taking about the front panel icons, the image is quite stable...)

I am also deciding on enigma2 to run on my Alien2 as an alternative to Spark but I find all enigmas have one huge issue, at least for me - they are too slow to respond to switching channel, showing info panel, hiding info panel (1 to 2 seconds if not longer), in short, too slow for just about everything. Spark, in contrast to various Enigmas2, doesn't even seem to have a cursor, spinning wheel or anything to indicate that something is about to happen, simply because in Spark you don't wait for anything, that is you don't wait long enough for any operation to warrant showing that the box is waiting for something to show up... perhaps Spark also has some spinning wheel or 'progress dots' but it is so fast you never get to see it.

It is hard for me to understand how people can put up with this slowness in enigma (I tried openATV5.1, Hyperion3&4&4.5, Neutrino3, HDMU CaptainBlastXD backup image...)

I still have to try out this 'Graterlia' project, hope it won't be too geeky for my limited linux know-how. That one might be, hopefully, lean and mean enigma but that remains to be seen.

if they are slow its a number of things

first is the tuners and how they are set, if you have one feed but both tuners switched on the it grinds to a halt,very slow as the box is trying to find a feed,
the other is the hard drive and epg data, if on flash not much of a problem but the epg.dat file gets bigger and bigger to a point where i have to delete it
i do that once a month, no biggy but the i have virmin and sat and as such the amount of epg data makes the epg guide on cooltv a tad slow, but onother menus it isnt a problem and very fast on HDMU

trust me iv tried them all and find the HDMU to be the best of the bunch

going back to spark, yes its lean and fast but look at what you have, a epg that is well sorry crap, a channel list that is a pain to sort out even oscam and cross can be a pain as well on spark, but it has some good features and if they fixed the guide id be back yesterday but i always say give the remote to the kids and missus and ask them to find a channel,record and play back, they always pick e2,well they do in my house anyway

I am currently testing the latest Spark (1.2.80) and I do not find it any faster at changing channels or displaying info bar than my HDMU or OpenSPA images I usually use. I do not have a lot of plugins installed though, so maybe that is the difference??? Have you tried installing the latest HDMU image directly from HDMU ( not a backup image )? As a start, you can try telneting to the box and running "top" to see if anything is using a lot of cpu. I occasionally see a spinner, but never when changing channels (unless the motor needs to move...)

I have had a Amiko Alien 1 ,and it was very stable and fast with the ffteam neutrino image.I did try also some e2images , but none of them was stable:32_002:

thanks joeuser on the telnet top command, never used that before

just did it on mine and 2 came up top (lol)

one was usr/local/bin/enigma2 with about 1% ish and less but the biggest was one called button/0 with 6%

Quote from pauldb

thanks joeuser on the telnet top command, never used that before

just did it on mine and 2 came up top (lol)

one was usr/local/bin/enigma2 with about 1% ish and less but the biggest was one called button/0 with 6%

Unfortunately most plugins just show up as enigma2, so hard to debug plugin problems...

BTW - if you press "H" it will also show all threads.

Also, haven't gotten around to find out why button always uses so much cpu - but on my list of things to do!

OK thanks all for responses, I came to this thread to retract slowness accusation for the 'CaptainBlastXD backup image' which I gave second look this afternoon, hoping that disabling some features will cure the debilitating spinner showing and those almost two seconds lag on pretty well all operations...

I found how to get this HDMU backup image to full 'sparklike' speed - after trying to disable 'use multiple bouquets' and 'do not show infobar when changing channels' without any speed improvements, I finally drilled it down to the following -> if I go to plugins menu and launch the fist plugin there, the "AutoBouquetsE2-28.2e stream bouquet downloader" and when its panel opens I press OK on remote (which is probably the same as pressing the green button to Start it) I get asked something about 'if I want to scan NIT' (I select NO, don't know what it is anyway) and then it turns my parabola to 28.2e if its not there and scans for few minutes and when its done and I back out of menus I find the enigma works as fast as it should. However if I reboot enigma the slowdown return and I have to launch this plugging and let it do its lookup thing as per above to get enigma back to speed. What gives?

I don't view channels form this sat 28.2e to begin with, I suppose the EPG setting is somehow waiting for this plugin to work in the background and it doesn't work as it should and that is causing the slowdown? I did have enigma running for like half hour at least, I suppose when started there may be some minutes before epg and such like actualize but that doesn't seem to the case here.

I am thinking to uninstall this plugin (didn't delete it as yet because now it enables me to get the enigma up to speed, what if I delete it and enigma will be slow again and I won't have this plugin to run LOL and it won't show up in downloadable plugins to install again...) and or deleting or pruning the whole channel setting - not sure if this latter can be done from within enigma or I need to export setting out to some program like DCC or what people use nowadays, it has been some time since I did that. This enigma from CaptainBlastXD backup image seems to be configured for UK region (Ireland specifically perhaps?) and I am in central EU. BTW speaking about location, I set the time region but the time is two hours off, like when it is 18.00, the enigma shows 16.00, two hours less. It can't be summer time shift since that would be just one hour. Should I simply choose time region couple hours shifted East, like someplace in Russia or what, that couple hours time offset is confusing as hell in infobar/egp

As for Spark, I have this box perhaps four years and I tried enigma here and there but never was able to use it for any length of time in practice, always just testing for an afternoon maximum and then it was back to spark. If it wasn't unacceptable slowness, then it was difficulties connecting USB HDD, that is another bummer with all enigmas. BTW can HDMU image connect FAT32 or do I have to use that linuxEXT3/4 format? I'd rather not to and if yes, then is it a rocket science to mount it.

- - - Updated - - -

Quote from joeuser

you can try telneting to the box and running "top" to see if anything is using a lot of cpu.

Well, that is sort of useless, the values jump crazy and after rebooting enigma and it slowed down again, I telneted in and noticed jffs something at some 17% CPU used, I think that is some partition thing. But because its so quickly changing what I managed to copy out is different, plus not formated as it is in notepad. Could the slowdown culprit be my USB HD which has Fat32 format? I left it connected as I was using it in Spark...

Quote

Mem: 93760K used, 23436K free, 548K shrd, 0K buff, 39024K cached
CPU: 1.1% usr 19.0% sys 0.0% nic 79.8% idle 0.0% io 0.0% irq 0.0% sirq
Load average: 15.32 14.94 14.78 2/72 6331
PID PPID USER STAT VSZ %VSZ CPU %CPU COMMAND
6252 2 root SW 0 0.0 0 9.2 [Player_Aud_Mixe]
6153 2 root RW 0 0.0 0 6.3 [button/0]
6141 424 root D 81216 69.1 0 1.9 /usr/local/bin/enigma2
6319 6310 root R 2604 2.2 0 0.4 top
1080 2 root RW< 0 0.0 0 0.4 [pti_task]
6261 2 root DW 0 0.0 0 0.2 [Interocitor_0]
6265 2 root SW 0 0.0 0 0.2 [HostRec40800013]
6256 2 root DW 0 0.0 0 0.2 [Player_Aud_3]
1194 424 root S 9892 8.4 0 0.0 /bin/evremote2 useLircdName 100 50
2083 1 root S 2880 2.4 0 0.0 aotomtd 60
6309 1199 root S 2608 2.2 0 0.0 telnetd -i
6310 6309 root S 2604 2.2 0 0.0 -sh
1199 1 root S 2600 2.2 0 0.0 /usr/sbin/inetd
424 423 root S 2168 1.8 0 0.0 {rcS} /bin/sh /etc/init.d/rcS
1684 424 root S 2168 1.8 0 0.0 {hdd_level.sh} /bin/sh /usr/bin/hd
1923 1 root S 2168 1.8 0 0.0 udhcpc -R -n -p /var/run/udhcpc.et
6085 1684 root S

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