Hacker compatible? (Hacking in the constructive sense)

[RandomM00]

I'm wondering about buying a 1GHz Pandora, despite the price.

I want it mostly for programming, playing open source games and for playing music. Not to mention supporting a great idea!

 

I'm concerned about a few things:

Can I install bizarre stuff easily? I use many odd programs: dwb (Webkit browser), cmus (Mplayer frontend), go (compiler written by Google), avra (assembler)

Am I stuck with a desktop environment chewing up compute power? I really hate things like that, Gnome 3 and Unity in particular!

Is the hardware durable? I've heard about wireless issues and fragile cases, I don't want either of those problems

Does the GPU work well? I have a few demmanding things I like: 480p video, teeworlds

Why do people keep saying the DAC is good? How good is good?

What are my chances of getting hardware/software problems fixed? I don't have enough experience to debug drivers! I certainly don't have the equipment to resolder chips...

 

Thanks for your help!

 

[TrashyMG]

- while I can't say everything will be easy, but a bit of the things you are mentioning could be compiled for the pandora if they haven't already been.. the default OS image on the NAND(512MBs) doesn't have the compiling utilities to save space, but we have a PND package with all the compilers and such that can be ran from a SD card... Also there are a few members that have shared there cross-compiler environments if you want to compile on your desktop.

- XFCE4 is what it's normally running.. it's lightweight.

- The first generation had these black cases that tended to crack, I have yet to see this issue on the current cases.. the Wifi has been a problem for some.. although for me I have 3 Pandora(s) and I haven't had an issue with it. A recent software update made it a tad more stable too..

- 480p video depending on codec should work, we have a port of teeworlds already.

- MWeston is an Audiophile, he put extra effort to put in some quality audio components when designing the electronics.

- I've never had issues with the hardware personally as for drivers we have a good amount of brilliant people on this forum and our IRC channel that can help out.

Also to note, we have a great build of slackware that runs off a SD card.. it's got full repository support and such.

 

[Binky]

If you want to install bizarre stuff you can either work out how to make up a PND from it (there are instructions), ask someone else to do it (this forum is full of highly competent people) or install a normal distro on an SD card (Slackware, probably).

Everything thing will have to be compiled for ARM, but that should be a problem on the condition that it is [open-source, does not rely on obscure bits of OGL, is not heavily hardware-optimised (x86 assembly) and, of course, has a Linux port]

If you're worried about a dektop/WM eating CPU time and RAM, we have a very nice openbox port with tint2 and warlock bar

As to audio, read this:

http://www.head-fi.org/products/open-pandora

 

[ekianjo]

- 480p video depending on codec should work, we have a port of teeworlds already.

- MWeston is an Audiophile, he put extra effort to put in some quality audio components when designing the electronics.

\

480 works fine on 1Ghz, whatever you throw at it. higher resolutions could work but it will depend on the codec and the compression. 

Mweston did not just use quality audio components, he separated the power supply for the amplifier part from the rest of the Pandora power supply to render the sound as clear as possible (if not you can noise/interferences) and that is also why the sound output is so good. 

 

[ekianjo]

Can I install bizarre stuff easily? I use many odd programs: dwb (Webkit browser), cmus (Mplayer frontend), go (compiler written by Google), avra (assembler)

Compilation of new programs is relatively easy on the Pandora itself. I do compilations of new stuff I find almost every week, while it;;s not always straightforward (depending on the complexity of the original program). 

Once you know how to compile it, packaging it is easy. There are tutorials on Pandoralive.info explaining the whole process.

Currently there is no "go" compiler for the Pandora. But that can be done. Someone needs to try it

 

[rohezal]

i installed just pandebian, which is chrooted debian (full repos). there is a nice mene where you can launch the debian applications. installing stuff is using synaptic or classic apt-get.

 

[dreamer]

Mweston did not just use quality audio components, he separated the power supply for the amplifier part from the rest of the Pandora power supply to render the sound as clear as possible (if not you can noise/interferences) and that is also why the sound output is so good.

I did find that the audio input on the ext connector gave quite some disturbance, but that could just be RF-interference on my crappy prototype wiring

 

[TrashyMG]

Mweston did not just use quality audio components, he separated the power supply for the amplifier part from the rest of the Pandora power supply to render the sound as clear as possible (if not you can noise/interferences) and that is also why the sound output is so good.

I did find that the audio input on the ext connector gave quite some disturbance, but that could just be RF-interference on my crappy prototype wiring

I was having the same issue on the input.. but I'd say my attempt at an EXT cable was pretty poor too.


Audio out is awesome though..

 

[RandomM00]

Wow, quick response. Thanks!

 

Some other things I've thought about:

Can anyone explain how the Pandora boots, in particular how other distributions can start?

Do SD cards perform well as storage media for system data?

Here's a difficult question: what's the worst thing about the Pandora?

 

[WizardStan]

UBoot reads a file called "autoboot.txt" that describes how to mount the filesystem and all the boot features. There's one on the firmware in the /boot directory. If you want to boot off an SD card you simply create a similar file on that SD card. Uboot looks to SD slot 1 first and if it finds an autoboot.txt file it runs it; if no file or no card then it goes to the firmware. In this way it is really simple to have multiple distributions installed across different cards. Instead of an autoboot.txt you can also put a boot.txt on the card: it's the exact same except it doesn't automatically boot, but if you hold the R-trigger then it will give you a menu.

SD cards work very well as a general storage medium. They're a little slower than the NAND so you might notice a difference during boot or when running anything internal, but for the most part they're more than fast enough to handle data access (MP3s, videos, games, etc...), and since most of the applications you'll be using will be run off the SD cards as PNDs anyway you'll not notice.

Worst thing about the Pandora, I would say, is the inconsistency between units. One unit gets great wifi, another disconnects every 30 seconds. One unit has a crystal clear, bright screen, a second one is blanched out under basic lighting. Some units have been dropped and kicked with barely a scratch to show for it and others are cracking at the seams.

Maybe the people with good product are lucky, or the people with bad product are unlucky. As a consolation, any really really broken problem you can send in for RMA and have fixed, like the LCD cables or case cracks if they become problematic.

 

[RandomM00]

Heh. I'm poorer by 500 euros.

Time to extract all of Wikipedia (text only) into HTML files and set up an ARM toolchain on my PC!

I decided to buy an EXT connector to try and build a video/GPIO breakout. Can the EXT connection provide proper monitor resolution? I'm thinking of 1024 * 768, which seems a bit optimistic for an embedded GPU.

I expect to be back in about two weeks...

 

[FelixNemis]

I decided to buy an EXT connector to try and build a video/GPIO breakout. Can the EXT connection provide proper monitor resolution? I'm thinking of 1024 * 768, which seems a bit optimistic for an embedded GPU.

The video out is only composite or S-video so it won't output that high of a resolution

 

[WizardStan]

Time to extract all of Wikipedia (text only) into HTML files and set up an ARM toolchain on my PC!

It's been suggested several times to build an offline wiki reader and load the Wikipedia dumps into it. Not sure if there was any progress on that or what but if you're interested it may be something to look into.

 

[Lafazar]

I have been using Evopedia which uses its own compressed format. I am quite happy with it.

Dev Thread: http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php/topic/5991-evopedia/

 

[RandomM00]

Hello again!

I'm posting this from my Pandora. So far I'm very impressed!

I've found the keyboard surprisingly useable, the touchscreen works well and the battery applet usually estimates around 15 hours runtime with a full battery.

I haven't been able to compile go yet due to something like

exec/fork /mnt/utmp/cdevtools1000/gcc exec format error

Investigation is in progress.

I'm hoping to get some time to play around with some more stuff soon.

 

[comradekingu]

It even says so on the tin. cmus rocks btw

 

[_jr_]

/>


I haven't been able to compile go yet due to something like


exec/fork /mnt/utmp/cdevtools1000/gcc exec format error


Investigation is in progress.

The gcc in the devtools PND is a shell script wrapper invoking the real gcc with an additional option. Some build tools are too stupid to execute it through a shell and want to load it as a binary instead. I had good results with just setting the standard env variables (export them as neccesary)


CC="arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-gcc -specs ../../init/cdevspecsfile"
CXX="arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-g++ -specs ../../init/cdevspecsfile"
The following might be helpful, too.

CPPFLAGS="-I/mnt/utmp/cdevtools1000/usr/include"
LDFLAGS="-L/mnt/utmp/cdevtools1000/usr/lib"

 

[ptitSeb]

/>


I haven't been able to compile go yet due to something like


exec/fork /mnt/utmp/cdevtools1000/gcc exec format error


Investigation is in progress.

The gcc in the devtools PND is a shell script wrapper invoking the real gcc with an additional option. Some build tools are to stupid to execute it through a shell and want to load it as a binary instead. I had good results with just setting the standard env variables (export them as neccesary)


CC="arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-gcc -specs ../../init/cdevspecsfile"
CXX="arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-g++ -specs ../../init/cdevspecsfile"
The following might be helpful, too.

CPPFLAGS="-I/mnt/utmp/cdevtools1000/usr/include"
LDFLAGS="-L/mnt/utmp/cdevtools1000/usr/lib"

The problem is the script is missing this magic line IIRC:

#!/bin/sh

 

[skeezix]

See .. Hacker compatible


Jeff

 

[RandomM00]

I hadn't thought of checking if gcc was a shell script! That was the problem. I can now compile Go programs with C calls in

Thank you!