Customizing A Distro For Pandora

[javaJake]

I'm having a few issues right now:

• Xorg.conf is nearly blank in the official firmware, with a comment that everything is autodetected via HAL. This makes sense, and certainly makes Xorg easy. Except vanilla HAL (at least the one Gentoo comes with) is not prepared to detect the analog nubs as input devices.
• LXDE, or perhaps X itself, understands that blanking the screen saves power. The problem is, they don't know that they really need to talk to /sys/class/backlight/ to power the LCD down, and not just write black pixels.
• They keyboard mappings in the Pandora kernel cover most stuff, but they seem to miss out on a lot. Vitel found a Xmodmap, but I'm wondering if this is the best way.

I'm sure there's a couple other things I'm missing. Has anyone else out there had experience in customizing a distribution to run on the Panodra?

Can a Pandora dev or two speak up with a sort of checklist of things to look at for the complete Pandora experience?

This is definitely a candidate for a wiki page, which is why I ask for so much.

 

[Cloudef]

This is pretty good idea for a wiki page indeed, I hope you get your answer soon.

 

[notaz]

Xorg.conf is nearly blank in the official firmware, with a comment that everything is autodetected via HAL. This makes sense, and certainly makes Xorg easy. Except vanilla HAL (at least the one Gentoo comes with) is not prepared to detect the analog nubs as input devices.

echo mouse > /proc/pandora/nub0/mode
should work with stock X too (assuming it uses xf86-input-evdev which is default on newer Xorg).

LXDE, or perhaps X itself, understands that blanking the screen saves power. The problem is, they don't know that they really need to talk to /sys/class/backlight/ to power the LCD down, and not just write black pixels.

We use a hack in xf86-video-omap for that, I couldn't find standard /sys/class/backlight handling in X.

They keyboard mappings in the Pandora kernel cover most stuff, but they seem to miss out on a lot. Vitel found a Xmodmap, but I'm wondering if this is the best way.[/list]I'm sure there's a couple other things I'm missing. Has anyone else out there had experience in customizing a distribution to run on the Panodra?

Kernel can't export complete map because it's not standard keypad and many keycodes simply do not exist in kernel, so xmodmap/loadkeys is the only way.

Can a Pandora dev or two speak up with a sort of checklist of things to look at for the complete Pandora experience?

For complete experience you need to drag all pandora specific stuff like libpnd, /usr/pandora/*, aufs and so on. It's all in git.openpandora.org

 

[javaJake]

Thanks notaz! Digging through git.openpandora.org has revealed a lot of answers all by itself, as you suggested.

Is there a way I can avoid using the pndevmapperd tool? Something like xbindkeys perhaps?

 

[notaz]

pndevmapperd only does things like handling the lid switch, pandora button and brightness +/-. Everything else should be doable with xmodmap.