Fastest Browser for Pandora is...

[ekianjo]

Just wanted to share something I found last night, since it may be useful for some here... I have always found the browsers available in the Repo to be a little sluggish (except maybe jumanji), and yesterday out of curiosity I tried to install the package chromium-browser from PanDebian.


you can do it with a command such as :


apt-get install chromium-browser


and it will figure out the dependencies.


This was clearly a good idea. This chromium browser in PanDebian is the real thing, not like the ports we have in the repo. It is very, very, very fast, more so than the chromium versions in the repo. Even at 600 Mhz it's very impressive.


On a side note, i also tried Midori in PanDebian, and while it was not as responsive as Chromium, it was very decent and definitely better than the Midori PND as well.


Overall I think many people may be missing an opportunity to get the most out of the machine with PanDebian, and while it takes a long time to install, once it's done the reward makes up for it. I'd recommend PanDebian at least for such applications like browsers, and office programs (like libreOffice). For games, the PND format is more convenient, but having both is really an advantage.

 

[ghostpatch]

interesting.... thanks!


could it be that the additional gain comes from the NAND and its connection/latency?


I'm very impressed of the pnd system so far.

 

[ekianjo]

interesting.... thanks!


could it be that the additional gain comes from the NAND and its connection/latency?


I'm very impressed of the pnd system so far.

PanDebian does not use the NAND - it's all stored on external storage.


I am not sure why PanDebian would be faster than PNDs, but that could have something to do with the package itself.

 

[EvilDragon]

Oh. there's a more recent chromium version in Debian ARM now? I should be able to use that one to package a new PND

 

[ekianjo]

Oh. there's a more recent chromium version in Debian ARM now? I should be able to use that one to package a new PND

I am not sure if it is a more recent one (I assume it should be, since it is the main repo), but it certainly feel much faster than the latest PND of Chromium I used If you can make it into a PND, that would be great for everyone else!


And this is not a Chromium/Chromium OS package, it's pure Chromium.

 

[_wb_]

Startup time of PNDs will always be slightly slower than that of direct installs in the filesystem, since the mounting of the squashfs takes some time. After startup, there is no more difference. Maybe we need an automated system to create PNDs from Angstrom or Debian packages, at least for such commonly used and frequently updated applications like web browsers. Even better would be to have custom builds that are tweaked for the Pandora, if anyone has time to do that.

 

[ekianjo]

Startup time of PNDs will always be slightly slower than that of direct installs in the filesystem, since the mounting of the squashfs takes some time. After startup, there is no more difference. Maybe we need an automated system to create PNDs from Angstrom or Debian packages, at least for such commonly used and frequently updated applications like web browsers. Even better would be to have custom builds that are tweaked for the Pandora, if anyone has time to do that.

I think there was a discussion regarding automating the PND creation a few days ago, but that would be very difficult to handle because of the dependencies hell... At least that is what I recall.


So far I am quite satisfied with having PanDebian on one side and PNDs on the others. One can use PanDebian for frequently updated applications such as web browsers as you mention. PNDs can do just fine with less active applications.

 

[_wb_]

Well yes, the dependency stuff is what makes it non-trivial to automate. Essentially you need to recursively add all dependencies to the PND, leaving out any dependency that is already in Super Zaxxon. So you need a list of all Angstrom / Debian packages (or equivalents) that are in SZ (should be easy for Angstrom because SZ mostly uses Angstrom packages; for Debian some kind of mapping between dpkg packages and opkg packages would be needed, maybe just by looking at the files inside). Somebody clever could probably write a Perl script or something that does something like this.

 

[ekianjo]

Somebody clever could probably write a Perl script or something that does something like this.

Why don't you give it a try ?

 

[milkshake]

@EvilDragon if you could package the PANDebian version that would be super freaky awesome.

 

[Stainy]

BabyPanda browser is fine for me.. nice and light

 

[EvilDragon]

@EvilDragon if you could package the PANDebian version that would be super freaky awesome.

I'll try.


Seems to be a pretty recent version. Last time I checked Debian, there was no ARM version of chromium available, but that was half a year ago.


Nice to see they included it now

 

[fusion_power]

Well, I don't use PanDebian, so a decent pandora version of this Chromium version would be indeed very nice.


I use Firefox on the Pandora and while it is very stable and flawless, "clean" browsing possible, Firefox is indeed not the fastest browser for Pandora. I also have Midori, but tends to crash and does weird things wirth the forums posting options (messing up quotes, puts pasted text always on the first line instead of under quotes and much more crazy stuff).

 

[sebt3]

chromium cannot be built correctly for our current OS. Once .next is out of the door I'll reboot my porting of that

 

[slaeshjag]

When .next is out, Midori will hopefully take care of itself.

 

[CapcomSuicide]

I don't really know how to install software in linux, so the PND concept is very useful. Fingers crossed it would be possible to get this fast "Chromium" into a PND.

 

[Null]

I don't really know how to install software in linux

It's generally no different than using something like PND Store.

 

[fusion_power]

chromium cannot be built correctly for our current OS. Once .next is out of the door I'll reboot my porting of that

Uh, why not?


I thought our firmware is up to date now? ^^"

 

[slaeshjag]

It isn't. It's the same old stuff that shipped in 2010, just with a newer kernel. .next will be the first real system upgrade.

 

[fusion_power]

Oh, I thought, along with the kernel, there also were some Updates for Angström. At least there are some improvements compared to older Versions on the Pandora (Desktop and MiniMenu)