Announcing Droidora - - - HELP WANTED


WizardStan said:
Craigix said:
That is what I was referring to, 20 odd pages of rage.
Click to expand...
Certainly nothing to get political over. If I like cake and you like pie, that's not politics, that's just two people who want different things.
Click to expand...

"Let them eat cake" http://www.jamieoliv...-spaghetti-cake .........."or Pie" http://noblepig.com/...ts-the-sky.aspx


Similar ingredients, different tastes, all catered for on the same menu . If this Android antipasto develops further for Pandora, it becomes another choice, if its polished off, perhaps a good pasta offering but that can of spaghetti, has yet to be opened fully and let fly from the nest miraculously "Pestobuh"


@Prometheus....Sorry to resurrect the Flying Spaghetti Monster but its been just over 3 days and its kind of traditional for all deities to do their "Hullo I'm back again!" thing, after such an obvious period
rolleyes.gif


gibberish said:
let's be honest, the official OS is hardly optimised for the pandora form factor either. nubs as a mouse is terrible. touchscreen as a mouse is also terrible in the clam shell form factor. windows don't scale properly so they hang off the screen, making the thing crash is as easy as clicking too fast, the browsers are mostly awful (slow, bad rendering etc), there are so many quirks and bugs that it makes it an absolute chore to use for anything more than firing up another piece of software (an emulator, a game, etc). a grid system like android would suit the device way better, i have absolutely no doubt about that. and yes, i know about minimenu or whatever it's called. but it's unattractive and is almost as unreliable as the full blown desktop.


a full desktop environment, as amazing and flexible as it sounds like it could be, is simply not suited to a device this size and shape. enraging linux nerds who demand that the horse be flogged forever more is a small price to pay for an OS that is fluid, bright and finger friendly, easy to navigate, familiar to newcomers and has a huge library of well polished software all ready to go.


Cyberworm, i wish you the very best of luck with your project!
Click to expand...

I see your support for Android but thats a tad harsh on the current OS. The nubs work fine for mouse here, you can tweak the shoulders as buttons if you cant get on with it , the touchscreen works fine and I don't find the system crash happy, or a chore to deal with at all. The flexible input options should suit most people. The full desktop is perhaps there, for when TV out enables using the thing as a full blown laptop/desktop replacement, that you can walk away with, after undocking/unplugging and is another welcomed feature of choice for me, whilst the browsers are plentiful and functional. Only full flash or java support is lacking, due to limited userbase and official licensing cost practicalities in a largely proof of concept, 'niche device', against the corporate grain. Prometheus reveals that Android browsers on the Asus Transformer are more buggy for example, than Pandora's.


More friendly UI's are also planned , along with this Droidora concept, Panorama (looking for suggestions), Xbmc, and other software launchers only, like Effigy and Wahcade if demand ever pushes their supply. Perhaps an iOS clone port could be made aswell? The possibilities are at least all outthere for now, as is the truth, which is Pasta based and I cross my noodles we see the Pandora fly aswell as the FSM if not alot further (as afterall he is just a self full filling bowl of imaginary meatballs and that stuff from Italian trees
wink.gif
(according to the BBC)) as it deserves to prosper and make many sequels.
 
gibberish said:
let's be honest, the official OS is hardly optimised for the pandora form factor either. nubs as a mouse is terrible. touchscreen as a mouse is also terrible in the clam shell form factor. windows don't scale properly so they hang off the screen, making the thing crash is as easy as clicking too fast, the browsers are mostly awful (slow, bad rendering etc), there are so many quirks and bugs that it makes it an absolute chore to use for anything more than firing up another piece of software (an emulator, a game, etc). a grid system like android would suit the device way better, i have absolutely no doubt about that. and yes, i know about minimenu or whatever it's called. but it's unattractive and is almost as unreliable as the full blown desktop.


a full desktop environment, as amazing and flexible as it sounds like it could be, is simply not suited to a device this size and shape. enraging linux nerds who demand that the horse be flogged forever more is a small price to pay for an OS that is fluid, bright and finger friendly, easy to navigate, familiar to newcomers and has a huge library of well polished software all ready to go.


Cyberworm, i wish you the very best of luck with your project!
Click to expand...

My experience of the Pandora Desktop OS is somewhat different to yours. Nubs and touchscreen work great as a mouse here. Crashes are few and far between. Browsing is excellent IMHO. Midori is great for most stuff and when it's lacking Firefox 5 is still quite fast.


I OC my Pandora to 720 MHz all the time (hardly a big OC) and that little extra MHz seems to make all the difference.


That said I'd like to have Android as an option but I'll be tapping the screen with my stylus, not my fingers, as IMHO there's nothing more annoying than a grubby, finger print covered screen :)


Oh and BTW I'm a Linux Noob not a Linux Nerd ;)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
ok just so you know as pointed out in IRC but they are too lazy to post it...


There is a android project already in existence for pandoras SOC


rowboat maybe you could use this as a base, then any hardware that the Pandora has that rowboat doesn't support can be picked up at this end.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
meandu229 said:
Incase anyone is interested


http://blog.linuxconsulting.ro/2010/04/porting-wifi-drivers-to-android.html#c9131956034525972550


that looks like a quite good guide to porting a wifi driver and our wifi drivers are here


http://git.openpandora.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=pandora-wifi.git;a=summary


(even an old old android one)


I havent got time to look much more into it than this,for a while


Or is the one packaged already the right driver just needs something else doing?
Click to expand...

I followed this guide to try to get wifi working. I had to modify some parts to get it to the state it currently is, as the guide did not 100% work for me. I took everything from the Pandora's .37 kernel and included it into the Android kernel. So yes, the wifi drivers are already in there but it still doesn't work. Maybe it's just wrong configuration but my knowledge in that case is basically non-existent.

milkshake said:
ok just so you know as pointed out in IRC but they are too lazy to post it...


There is a android project already in existence for pandoras SOC


rowboat maybe you could use this as a base, then any hardware that the Pandora has that rowboat doesn't support can be picked up at this end.
Click to expand...

Oh I did use that project in some way (board configuration mostly and SGX drivers). I tried using their project with my kernel but I get a halfed screen with very weird colors. So I got back to my way. Sadly, just because it's the same SoC it doesn't mean it will just work like that :-/.
 
Had a hell of a time getting this to run again last night.


To use the SD Installer you need to have a folder in the rootFS named boot with the uimage inside it, after altering the rootfs to include this the sd installer did install it and I then switched out the autoboot.txt for the android one and it booted the kernel but couldnt find the rootfs for some reason,
 
Cheers for the pointer re SD installer. I had figured a few days ago the uImage was probably the missing file and had tried to untar, include it and re-tar, to up a ready copy for others but all my attempts to make a new tar.bz2 failed, as I couldn't get the right command, or with windows tools couldn't seem to find a program that would make a bz2, even if I set it for such. I just got zipx or bz instead. I gave up
dry.gif
. What's the proper command to make a tar.bz2 from the Pandora terminal? (feel very dumb
laugh.gif
)
 
MarioPandio said:
Cheers for the pointer re SD installer. I had figured a few days ago the uImage was probably the missing file and had tried to untar, include it and re-tar, to up a ready copy for others but all my attempts to make a new tar.bz2 failed, as I couldn't get the right command, or with windows tools couldn't seem to find a program that would make a bz2, even if I set it for such. I just got zipx or bz instead. I gave up
dry.gif
. What's the proper command to make a tar.bz2 from the Pandora terminal? (feel very dumb
laugh.gif
)
Click to expand...
Yeh I had to go through the sd install source to find where it was dumping out.


I did it on windows using 7-zip , quite easy, unzip it to the tar file add the folder to the tar file then add it to a bz2 with 7zip.


Also SDinstaller makes its autoboot.txt from a a string in the source so we can just replace a file we could request sd installer author give an option to add your own autoboot.txt or make our own version or just carry on swapping it out.


Hope this gives you more luck than me,
 
MarioPandio said:
What's the proper command to make a tar.bz2 from the Pandora terminal?
Click to expand...


Code: 
tar cjf /path/to/new/archive/archivename.tar.bz2 /dir/or/file/you/want/to/pack --options



If you plan to pack one directory, then I would "cd" to the directory-tree-branch above it, in order to get the stored directory structure right.

Example: I want to backup a pnd-development-folder "/media/trans8/mountmenu":





Code: 
cd /media/trans8

tar cjf /mnt/backups/mountmenu.tar.bz2 mountmenu

This will store all files in the archive beginning with "./mountmenu/...." and not with "media/trans8/mountmenu"....", which wouldn't be what i want.


("tar -cjf" works too)


see "tar --help" or http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?tar


"tar tjf archivename.tar.bz2" to test and view the internal path-structure of the archive.


"tar xjf archivename.tar.bz2 ." to unpack it to the current directory.


Sometime while backuping whole systems options like "--one-file-system" are necessary or when restoring to a different system "--numeric-owners" are needed. But you don't need them always. See the man-page for details on these or other options
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It's gotten really quiet in here. Are there any suggestions as how to proceed further? I'm still busy handling LaTeX, so it will take a while until I can do something with the project again.
 
Wifi is something I really want to get to work. I just don't know what's wrong with the configuration I have...
 
I cant contribute with development at all sorry but I was going to add to the wiki a few days ago with links, keymap hints for Pandora and perhaps some video but I don't have time at present.


I tried numerous android apps as apk files (all of which don't currently run (as was expected at this stage), though they do show up), yet the android interface already shows what could be done with this, if PND support could oneday be possible aswell. Another very nice option for Pandora. I hope you can get farther with this project but if not, that your university project related to this Droidora project is successful regardless :)
 
Good news everyone!


Wifi is finally working. Thanks to aTc and notaz :D .


So what was the problem?


1. I didn't know that you need two kernel modules: wl1251.ko AND wl1251_sdio.ko. I didn't use the SDIO one


2. The driver needs a firmware you can get from the Pandora repository


So after these two steps I finally got wpa_supplicant to work properly. But I still didn't have a connection to my Router.


3. You need the right configuration in wpa_supplicant.conf


Sadly there isn't a universal configuration, it all depends on how your wires lan is configured. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but acitvating wifi via the Android GUI still doesn't work. Sadly activating it via the terminal emulator also doesn't work. Here's how you get it to work:


1. Make sure your wpa_configuration.conf has the right configuration


2. Try to activate wifi via GUI. That will try to enable wifi after booting.


3. Reboot


Now you should be connected to your router (if the configuration is right) and you should have internet access. The colors on the browser are a little off (the pandora page is brownish), but that's not that important right now.


I'll upload everything to the repository later (including a new pre-build image).


Thanks again aTc and notaz :) .
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Cyberworm
Droidora - Android auf der Pandora --- Hilfe gesucht
2 3
Replies
44
Views
8K
Cyberworm
Cyberworm
SNESFAN
android on pandora
5 6 7
Replies
121
Views
24K
Eridger
E
Linux-SWAT
[Rebirth Competition] Slackware for Pandora 13.37 release thread.
10 11 12
Replies
237
Views
36K
moxie
moxie
paulscode
App Development Training Course Project
Replies
5
Views
3K
EssoAir
EssoAir
ivanovic
GP2X Wip & Help Wanted: Porting Battle For Wesnoth
Replies
18
Views
6K
DieMumiee
D
Back
Top