Hello! My name is TTK Ciar and I've been the proud owner of an OpenPandora box for three weeks.
I've been a n810 user, and was looking forward to upgrading to the N9, but then Nokia dropped Meego and the N9 was no longer a viable upgrade option for me. I really like having Linux under my pda's hood -- I'm a software engineer, and if an app doesn't exist, I can generally hack something up that works, and developing for a linux platform is very much preferable to the alternatives. After much research, I decided OpenPandora would make the most sense for me.
So for the last three weeks I've been installing packages, compiling/installing what opkg doesn't provide (like jove, my preferred text editor), and rearranging things to suit myself. I have a 32GB SDHC in the first slot, and moved much of the system there (except for what the OS needs to boot and mount the card), which gives me a lot more room to expand. 400MB was pretty cramped.
My goal is to get everything working on OPD that I normally used my n810 for, and it's just about there (listening to music on it right now). A couple of things stand in the way, though.
For watching movies, I'd like to use mplayer. I've seen posts on this forum where people refer to using mplayer successfully on the OPD, but I think I'm missing some important parameters to make it work on mine. When I invoke mplayer, it shows me a blank window, while spewing complaints to stderr ("Too many buffered pts", and a rather humorous "Your system is too SLOW to play this!" followed by some helpful suggestions which I tried to follow but failed).
If you use mplayer on OPD, what options do you pass it to make it work?
For managing network connections, Network Manager is horrible. It is slow, unreliable, difficult to interact with, and doesn't give much in the ways of debugging information. I tried using the same process as I have scripted up on my laptop, but it doesn't seem to work:
iwconfig wlan0 channel 1
iwconfig wlan0 rate auto
iwconfig wlan0 key REDACTED
iwconfig wlan0 essid 2WIRE360
.. and then either "dhclient wlan0" or "dhcpcd -d -t 40 wlan0" (I compiled dhcpcd on my OPD) to get a DHCP lease.
All of the iwconfig commands work (run as root), but dhclient and dhcpcd fail without explanations. I peered at the Network Manager source code, and it appears to use dhclient internally. Not much is logged by default (understandably; small flash filesystems are nonconducive to massive logfiles), and I haven't gotten around to reconfiguring syslogd yet.
If I can get something to work typing the commands in by hand, I can write a perl script which replaces network manager. I'm going to get more verbose logging working and see what that tells me, but if anyone has suggestions in the meantime, I'd appreciate them.
For reading pdf documents, evince works okay, but it's terribly slow. One of the things I use my n810 for is reading professional journals and pdf ebooks while out and about. I'm going to try building xpdf for a snappier experience, but it's low priority. I've compiled lynx, which works well as a lightweight html reader.
For listening to music, I usually use xine, but it doesn't seem to work on OPD. I'd been wanting to write my own music player app for years, but xine was always "good enough" to make me not bother. I've got a simple one working now (it's a perl script which wraps /usr/bin/lame and /usr/bin/aplay) and when I've added a couple more features and some documentation I'll put it on my website for download, in case anyone else is interested.
One thing that surprised me was that the OPD doesn't come with any games by default, not even cheesy little ones like othello or tic-tac-toe. For a platform that is marketed as a gaming app, you'd expect something
No biggie, I installed xmame and will poke around for ROMs, and maybe GNUChess. My wife likes to borrow my n810 sometimes while we're out to play Mahjongg. Does anyone have a Mahjongg app they'd like to recommend for the ODP?
To my surprise and delight, Octave was in opkg's package list, and it installed and worked right off the bat. My n810 can't run Octave, but I've often wished for it.
I ended up compiling and installing perl instead of using opkg, because the opkg perl package lacks a file (which I failed to write down, and can't remember) which prevented the CPAN shell from working. With the CPAN shell, I can install any CPAN perl module, not just the modules in the opkg packages list. I develop a lot in perl, so building perl from scratch was worthwhile.
I'm loving this thing! Thanks OPD team for making it happen Any help with the issues I've mentioned would be appreciated, and hopefully someday I'll be able to offer help to others.
-- TTK
I've been a n810 user, and was looking forward to upgrading to the N9, but then Nokia dropped Meego and the N9 was no longer a viable upgrade option for me. I really like having Linux under my pda's hood -- I'm a software engineer, and if an app doesn't exist, I can generally hack something up that works, and developing for a linux platform is very much preferable to the alternatives. After much research, I decided OpenPandora would make the most sense for me.
So for the last three weeks I've been installing packages, compiling/installing what opkg doesn't provide (like jove, my preferred text editor), and rearranging things to suit myself. I have a 32GB SDHC in the first slot, and moved much of the system there (except for what the OS needs to boot and mount the card), which gives me a lot more room to expand. 400MB was pretty cramped.
My goal is to get everything working on OPD that I normally used my n810 for, and it's just about there (listening to music on it right now). A couple of things stand in the way, though.
For watching movies, I'd like to use mplayer. I've seen posts on this forum where people refer to using mplayer successfully on the OPD, but I think I'm missing some important parameters to make it work on mine. When I invoke mplayer, it shows me a blank window, while spewing complaints to stderr ("Too many buffered pts", and a rather humorous "Your system is too SLOW to play this!" followed by some helpful suggestions which I tried to follow but failed).
If you use mplayer on OPD, what options do you pass it to make it work?
For managing network connections, Network Manager is horrible. It is slow, unreliable, difficult to interact with, and doesn't give much in the ways of debugging information. I tried using the same process as I have scripted up on my laptop, but it doesn't seem to work:
iwconfig wlan0 channel 1
iwconfig wlan0 rate auto
iwconfig wlan0 key REDACTED
iwconfig wlan0 essid 2WIRE360
.. and then either "dhclient wlan0" or "dhcpcd -d -t 40 wlan0" (I compiled dhcpcd on my OPD) to get a DHCP lease.
All of the iwconfig commands work (run as root), but dhclient and dhcpcd fail without explanations. I peered at the Network Manager source code, and it appears to use dhclient internally. Not much is logged by default (understandably; small flash filesystems are nonconducive to massive logfiles), and I haven't gotten around to reconfiguring syslogd yet.
If I can get something to work typing the commands in by hand, I can write a perl script which replaces network manager. I'm going to get more verbose logging working and see what that tells me, but if anyone has suggestions in the meantime, I'd appreciate them.
For reading pdf documents, evince works okay, but it's terribly slow. One of the things I use my n810 for is reading professional journals and pdf ebooks while out and about. I'm going to try building xpdf for a snappier experience, but it's low priority. I've compiled lynx, which works well as a lightweight html reader.
For listening to music, I usually use xine, but it doesn't seem to work on OPD. I'd been wanting to write my own music player app for years, but xine was always "good enough" to make me not bother. I've got a simple one working now (it's a perl script which wraps /usr/bin/lame and /usr/bin/aplay) and when I've added a couple more features and some documentation I'll put it on my website for download, in case anyone else is interested.
One thing that surprised me was that the OPD doesn't come with any games by default, not even cheesy little ones like othello or tic-tac-toe. For a platform that is marketed as a gaming app, you'd expect something
No biggie, I installed xmame and will poke around for ROMs, and maybe GNUChess. My wife likes to borrow my n810 sometimes while we're out to play Mahjongg. Does anyone have a Mahjongg app they'd like to recommend for the ODP?To my surprise and delight, Octave was in opkg's package list, and it installed and worked right off the bat. My n810 can't run Octave, but I've often wished for it.
I ended up compiling and installing perl instead of using opkg, because the opkg perl package lacks a file (which I failed to write down, and can't remember) which prevented the CPAN shell from working. With the CPAN shell, I can install any CPAN perl module, not just the modules in the opkg packages list. I develop a lot in perl, so building perl from scratch was worthwhile.
I'm loving this thing! Thanks OPD team for making it happen
Any help with the issues I've mentioned would be appreciated, and hopefully someday I'll be able to offer help to others.-- TTK
