Gp2x User Guide Announced

[Guyfawkes]

I am about 50% into writing the first draft of a GP2X User Guide which will be available to read online, print or in PDF format. I am also hoping that stores will provide this guide to new customers who buy the GP2X. The guide is currently 15 pages so I expect it to hit around 25-30 by the time its finished and will be packed full of easy to follow guides, photos, screenshots and useful tips.

Here is what will be included:

– Setting up your GP2X
– Using the GP2X for the first time
– Managing files on the GP2X
– Installing and loading software
– Viewing Images
– Playing Music
– Viewing Movies
– Reading E-Books
– Using Explorer
– Using the Settings menu
- Troubleshooting
– Useful information (this is links to websites etc)
- Movie encoding guide (need someone to write this)
- Introduction to development on the GP2X
- some kind of GP2X specs page added somewhere

More subjects will probably be added in the future when needed.

Here is a list of what I need:
- Help or someone to write the movie encoding guide
- Ideas for other subjects to cover
- List of all GP2X related websites.

If you can help out please reply here or PM me with some more info. Thanks!

 

[Mark Watson]

<_< - reading ebooks

Any chance of a preview of this? I'm pondering buying a GP2X as I want something that goes old games/mp3/vids/ but also quite importantly is an ebook reader, and I haven't seen much on the forums or on the websites about ebooks.

 

[Lazrhog]

<_< - reading ebooks

Any chance of a preview of this? I'm pondering buying a GP2X as I want something that goes old games/mp3/vids/ but also quite importantly is an ebook reader, and I haven't seen much on the forums or on the websites about ebooks.

​

I am hoping for the opportunity to view PDF files as e-books. Man that would be sweet. Is the PDF file format open source ? I don't think it is, but that would imply there is no PDF viewer for Linux .... that can't be true. Perhaps there is an open source PDF viewer for Linux we can pilfer...

 

[Guyfawkes]

I am writing the ebook guide at this very moment The viewer is fairly basic and only supports TXT files, it doesnt feature any bookmarking features, different sized fonts etc. It can fit 54 characters per line. Up/Down on the joystick scrolls the page by one line up or down, and the Left and Right shoulder buttons scrolls the page by on page up or down. And thats about it for the ebook viewer.

I should have the ebook guide written in a while, so after I can upload a sample of what the ebook part of the guide will look like.

 

[Sonic-NKT]

isnt there a update allready available which provide bookmarking for ebooks? and there is also a pdf reader in the works

 

[Thunderchild]

This will be sweet, I'm a noob to this sceen so this will help me loads, unfortunatly I can't help you tho!!!

I am hoping for the PDF viewer as well!

 

[Guyfawkes]

I installed the patch which updated the music player and the ebook viewer but i cant see any bookmarking support on the viewer. I know the patch installed as the music player now has 10 volume levels instead of 5 in the old version. I will double check in a minute to be sure.

update - cant see any bookmark support, tried pressing all the buttons but nothing seems to happen. can any confirm this is supported or not?

 

[Mark Watson]

-
The viewer is fairly basic and only supports TXT files, it doesnt feature any bookmarking features, different sized fonts etc. It can fit 54 characters per line. Up/Down on the joystick scrolls the page by one line up or down, and the Left and Right shoulder buttons scrolls the page by on page up or down. And thats about it for the ebook viewer.
-


Hmm, bit of a shame, as for my money that doesn't really count as an ebook reader, just a text viewer. I was hoping that there might be a way of reading .lit or mobipocket or any of the other range of formats which you can buy 'proper' ebooks form.

 

[Guyfawkes]

i havent fully checked if it does support other formats, i will check .lit now. i was only going by what icons are in the menus and for the viewer there is only a txt icon.

update- yeah looks like only txt is officially supported. i renamed a txt file to .lit and it didnt show in the file lister. depending on how the .lit files are formatted it may still work if you rename it to .txt. not that clued up on ebook formats so no idea if this will work or not. ill try and get a real .lit file to check.

 

[Sonic-NKT]

if its not in yet, it will come for sure

 

[Guyfawkes]

I uploaded a quick example of what the E-Book part of the guide will look like. The E-Book guide is probably the most boring and shortest part of the guide so its a bad example to see how the full guide will look

You can view the example here, sorry the file is over 300K for two pages with a couple of images, no idea why its doing that. the full guide is currently only 660K and has many images!

The final layout for the guide isnt done yet as I will work this out when its all finished and know where everything goes, also I will make some graphics to show an image of the buttons instead of just the text 'B button' etc.

 

[garengarch]

praise the lord - and guyfawkes

 

[oneandoneis2]

If it's still needed, Guy, I've been planning a guide to ripping movies from DVD to a GP2X-friendly format.

Trouble is, I was planning a web page aimed at Linux users, not a PDF guide aimed at the general public. . .

 

[Prothall]

Drawing from information in other threads, I'd be willing to write something on movies for the GP2X, though I've no experience ripping DVDs.

Also, on the PDF viewer, theoddbot has a functional PDF library running, though I don't think it's yet been made into a proper "viewer" piece of software for the end-user as such.

 

[chris_r]

I installed the patch which updated the music player and the ebook viewer but i cant see any bookmarking support on the viewer. I know the patch installed as the music player now has 10 volume levels instead of 5 in the old version. I will double check in a minute to be sure.

update - cant see any bookmark support, tried pressing all the buttons but nothing seems to happen. can any confirm this is supported or not?

​

If you exit the text reader it will sive where you exited so that when you reopen the text file it will start from the line it left off at

 

[Guyfawkes]

thanks for letting me know, just tried it and it works. i will add this to the guide.

 

[no_skill]

would you mind if we put this on the wiki so users can edit the guide?

 

[codeninja]

I installed the patch which updated the music player and the ebook viewer but i cant see any bookmarking support on the viewer. I know the patch installed as the music player now has 10 volume levels instead of 5 in the old version. I will double check in a minute to be sure.

update - cant see any bookmark support, tried pressing all the buttons but nothing seems to happen. can any confirm this is supported or not?

​

No bookmarks, but it remembers where you were in the txt file if you quit out of the eBook reader.

 

[Guyfawkes]

no_skill - i will make the PDF available for downloading and a web version (html) on my site. i dont plan or really want to put it elsewhere as it means more work having to update with any changes if working with multiple sources. a forum post will be created on my forums for people to suggest/add their own content, make changes etc.

for those interested theres a wip version of the guide at http://www.emuholic.com/GP2XUserGuide.pdf Its updated every so often when I do some work on it. Ignore any missing text, errors (I havent checked anything), formatting, crap images etc. as its not finished Please dont post about this guide yet either as its not yet officially released.

 

[no_skill]

ok. but especially for starter guides a wiki is an awesome thing. everyone can add things and correct mistakes. it's so much less maintance work - it's incredible.