Can't read documentation

[Blue Protoman]

So when you go to the Documentation tab and open a readme, an Arora window comes up. Problem is, Arora is so broken, it can't open a simple .txt file. So instead, I have to keep the window open, and go to mnt/utmp/whatever to find what I'm looking for. Is there a way to set Firefox as the default reader or something?

 

[Granitehead]

Look at

update-alternatives

 

[Blue Protoman]

What do I do with that? (The terminal is alien to me.)

 

[Granitehead]

If you've got a shell command you don't know always type "man <the unknown command>" (without the ><).


I think "man update-alternatives" will give you all information you need.

 

[gruso]

I'm all for teaching a man to fish, but some more clues might be needed. I have a similar complaint and want to set Mousepad to open my documentation.


The man page for update-alternatives is a hell of a read. I just read it on my desktop of course, because there is no man on Pandora. Which means anyone running Windows or OSX on their desktop is going to be pretty stuck right now.

 

[Granitehead]

I haven't got my Pandora yet, so I didn't know there is no man on the Pandora.


Why is there no man on Pandora? Not enough space on the NAND?


But even Windows and OSX have a webbrowser, haven't they?


Then some quick search would result in http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/ or some other website where you can read manpages online.

There are several packages which provide a text editor compatible with vi, for example nvi and vim. Which one is used is controlled by the link group vi, which includes links for the program itself and the associated manpage.

To display the available packages which provide vi and the current setting for it, use the --display action:


update-alternatives --display vi


To choose a particular vi implementation, use this command as root and then select a number from the list:


update-alternatives --config vi


To go back to having the vi implementation chosen automatically, do this as root:


update-alternatives --auto vi

You can use the above example from update-alternatives manpage for everything else. To change the standard editor just exchange "vi" with "editor", for the webbrowser "x-www-browser" and so on.


In Ubuntu you can look at /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives to find out what the generic name ("x-www-browser", "editor", and so on) for something is. In Angstrom it's probably somewhere else, but as I haven't got my Pandora yet I don't know where.

 

[Aethix]

Arora works fine for me for opening text files. It just takes a while to load.

 

[kwh2010]

Arora works fine for me for opening text files. It just takes a while to load.

Yes, I think Arora is fine for viewing readme files.


Looks like the viewer launcher and the viewer arguments are set by this configuration file under the [info] section


/etc/pandora/conf/desktop

[info]

emit_info       1

dotdesktoppath  /usr/share/applications

viewer          ../../../usr/bin/arora

viewer_args

category        Documentation

I think arora was chosen because it can handle lots of text file formats.

 

[gruso]

I haven't got my Pandora yet

Ah, I thought you did and you might have some specific help up your sleeve. NVM. As you can see from the post above, it's a Pandora OS specific fix.

@kilowatt thanks for the tip. You're right, Arora was chosen to give devs a variety of options for presenting readmes/manuals including HTML. But never have I seen a dev produce more than a .txt readme with their release, if they even do that. Arora has failed to open a significant number of files for me too.

 

[SirDregan]

@BlueProtoman: I've had the same problem. Either I had to wait or it crashed. Also I hated putting in my SD card, reading on the pandora which files I'd need for running a game and then switching back to my PC.


But we're working on a windows client for browsing (and later creating) PNDs today. I think the first version should be ready by the end of the week