Considering buying: tons of questions!
- Thread starter pachura
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2) nope he meant a swap file, swap doesn't need to be a partition 
I never had to setup a swap on my pandora to run any software, but I mainly use my pandora as a gaming device.
3) the pandora act as a dumb SD card reader when in SD to USB mode, so the SD filesystem must be supported by your OS.
4) I never had any trouble with wifi on my GHz pandora. It's not the fastest wifi device I own, but it's far enough to visit websites and download PND with PNDManager. Seems like people have more or less luck with theirs.
I never had to setup a swap on my pandora to run any software, but I mainly use my pandora as a gaming device.
3) the pandora act as a dumb SD card reader when in SD to USB mode, so the SD filesystem must be supported by your OS.
4) I never had any trouble with wifi on my GHz pandora. It's not the fastest wifi device I own, but it's far enough to visit websites and download PND with PNDManager. Seems like people have more or less luck with theirs.
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Letalis Sonus
Advanced Member
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Overclocking by itself basically only has influence on the stability, it does no harm to the hardware. It's the overvolting that can be harmful, it needs to be done to increase stability on higher clocks. However, we only have a small set of predefined voltages that are guaranteed to be safe - they only have a small influence on the overall lifetime.
BTW: An ARM device has no BIOS or the like (except those Win8 devices, they are required to have an UEFI firmware). The bootloader has to do all the initializations needed to boot the system which has full and unrestricted control over the hardware.
Windows has some (senseless) restrictions on handling removable media, but generally it is being handled like any other storage device. Windows only recognizes the first partition on a SD card, but it will support any type it has drivers available for. Ext2Fsd is probably the best ext driver for Windows (and pretty much the only one already supporting ext4 well enough to be useful). With Ext2Read there's also a driver-less explorer-type program that can be used to read and write ext2/3/4 partitions, however it seems to be rather unstable when handling large files.
atari_afternoon
Very Active Member
IMO, not really. Well, SD cards, of course The carrying case wouldn´t hurt either. I have a replacement battery but the 1st one, after 1 1/2 years, is still doing very well (close to 90%).
I´ve never had problems with the WiFi for browsing, C4A uploading, the PNDManager.
4. Are there any essential accessories I should get?
Well, SD cards, of course The carrying case wouldn´t hurt either. I have a replacement battery but the 1st one, after 1 1/2 years, is still doing very well (close to 90%).I´ve never had problems with the WiFi for browsing, C4A uploading, the PNDManager.
4. Are there any essential accessories I should get?
Hmmm, what's Ångström then?
Or is Ångström the general distribution name (like Ubuntu) and SuperZaxxon is its particular flavor for OpenPandora (like KUbuntu, Edubuntu etc.) ?
In the end, I guess that accessing ext2 on Windows can lead to filesystem corruption, and vice versa - using FAT32 on Linux machines might too.
So it would the best to share data through FTP, web or other protocols. Or have one FAT32-formatted SD card just for transferring data from the computer and not for ongoing operations/permanent storage.
slaeshjag
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It is the distro that SuperZaxxon is based on. Like Mint is based on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is based on Debian.
FAT32 has been stable on linux for years… it's not more risky to use FAT32 on linux than it is on windows.
As said SuperZaxxon is based on Angstrom, but it's heavily modified for pandora.
slaeshjag
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Some PND's won't/might not work right though, as FAT32 doesn't support symlinks.
FAT32 just has less features than ext*: it does not have permissions, symlinks and other special files, files with holes, etc. For data (music, movies, roms etc) it is good enough though. So if you need easy interchange with Windoze, it's a good idea to make one partition FAT32 and one partition ext2/3/4 on your SD card.
Booting from SD has no disadvantages except for the obvious ones: booting will be slightly slower (because SD cards are slower than NAND), and you cannot eject the SD card you're booting from. I boot from SD all the time - I only use the NAND as a kind of emergency backup and to check the PNDs I make work on the default OS. The main advantage of booting from SD is that you have no space limits.
Swap partition: by default, you'll get a zram swap partition (compressed swap in ram), which already helps. In nearly all normal use cases, 512MB RAM is enough. I only really needed a real swap partition once, when I was doing a very big compile job, and gcc for some reason needed a lot of memory at some point. There are also one or two games that need a lot of memory, or so I've heard. In practice it does not hurt to have a swap partition on your SD card - I use a 1GB swap partition. It will not be used if it is not needed. SD card wear is not really something to worry about anymore - even when continuously doing writes, it will take a looooong while before it becomes an issue.
Wifi: works well enough (400-700KB/s) for most people, so no need to get a USB dongle beforehand - it's quite likely that you won't need it.
Booting from SD has no disadvantages except for the obvious ones: booting will be slightly slower (because SD cards are slower than NAND), and you cannot eject the SD card you're booting from. I boot from SD all the time - I only use the NAND as a kind of emergency backup and to check the PNDs I make work on the default OS. The main advantage of booting from SD is that you have no space limits.
Swap partition: by default, you'll get a zram swap partition (compressed swap in ram), which already helps. In nearly all normal use cases, 512MB RAM is enough. I only really needed a real swap partition once, when I was doing a very big compile job, and gcc for some reason needed a lot of memory at some point. There are also one or two games that need a lot of memory, or so I've heard. In practice it does not hurt to have a swap partition on your SD card - I use a 1GB swap partition. It will not be used if it is not needed. SD card wear is not really something to worry about anymore - even when continuously doing writes, it will take a looooong while before it becomes an issue.
Wifi: works well enough (400-700KB/s) for most people, so no need to get a USB dongle beforehand - it's quite likely that you won't need it.
comradekingu
Glowing ember
Pandora as external storage → USB reference / slave on wiki
You can put the whole OS on SD, that is recommended. Try Ångström or any of the other operating systems.
You dont need a swap partition if you dont want one.
You can put the whole OS on SD, that is recommended. Try Ångström or any of the other operating systems.
You dont need a swap partition if you dont want one.
If you are happy using the default OS, there is little reason to install the OS on an SD card. Some people like to because it provides more space in the root partition, but using the OS on the nand works very nicely.
The SD mass storage mode works by presenting the entire SD card to the host device over USB, the host device must then handle mounting and filesystem support for itself.
I've never filled up my 512MB of RAM, but then I don't tend to open hundreds of tabs in FF
The SD mass storage mode works by presenting the entire SD card to the host device over USB, the host device must then handle mounting and filesystem support for itself.
I've never filled up my 512MB of RAM, but then I don't tend to open hundreds of tabs in FF
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Why would anyone need to symlink anything with PND system setup the way it is? The application's appdata folder acts as if it's directly in the same place as the internal PND root folder. Also developers should assume a good portion of people are using Fat32 SD cards.
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Some programs put stuff in your home dir (i.e. in appdata) and assume your home dir is on a normal (i.e. unix-style) file system. E.g. python will temporarily unpack egg packages there, and that does not work on FAT (there are of course workarounds like redefining the egg unpacking directory to /tmp). In sysinfo I used named pipes, which is not supported on FAT (it's not a problem because I can just include the named pipe in the PND itself instead of creating it when it's needed, but you get why such a thing could be a problem).
In general of course PND devs should check that their stuff works on FAT. But in some cases it can be tricky to work around the limitations of FAT, and in some cases devs simply forget to check this because they don't use FAT on their own SD cards. Happened to me a couple of times.
FAT32 works well enough, and nearly everything supports it, even the most retarded software and hardware. But if you're only using the SD card with your Pandora and with non-retarded computers (e.g. running GNU/Linux), it makes more sense to use ext* in my opinion. Symlinks are a very practical thing. Files with gaps can be pretty useful too in some cases. Permissions are probably not terribly useful if you're only using it with a single user, but even then they can help to prevent accidents when well used. And it's also nice not to have weird filename character limitations and file size limitations.
A2000
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Apart from setting up a new sd card with your Windows machine before you actually get your Pandora, I don't see much need to access the sd cards from outside. Really big files can be transfered using a USB stick/hard disk and in almost all other cases you can download the files directly with your Pandora from anywhere (intranet/internet).
BTW if you still want to access the sd card from your Windows machine that will set the requirements for speed. As the right card reader connected to a superspeed port will write files a lot faster then even the speediest sd card can write.
I have a 2GB swap partition on my second sd card but haven't used (=enabled) it for months now. The only practical use was one game in Android but anything else (gaming, browsing, even working with libre office) works fine with the inbuild memory.
BTW if you still want to access the sd card from your Windows machine that will set the requirements for speed. As the right card reader connected to a superspeed port will write files a lot faster then even the speediest sd card can write.
I have a 2GB swap partition on my second sd card but haven't used (=enabled) it for months now. The only practical use was one game in Android but anything else (gaming, browsing, even working with libre office) works fine with the inbuild memory.
