Out Of The Box


Fzero

Advanced Member
Joined
Mar 9, 2010
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When I open pandoras box, I'm obviously going to be checking EDs downloads page to get me some emulators, asuming that soon after release those pages will start being populated with download files. Is there anywhere else that has other [non emu] original games that would work on the linux version pandora uses?
Linux gaming is new to me really, so wouldn't know which type of game is compatible, I'd pretty much rely on EDs d/l site and pandora wiki site and any links here - if I searched for Linux games is there any type/version I should look for?

Also, what's latest with Skeezix mmenu?
I'm guessing out the box it has the menu ED shows on his vids with the theme changer options, I like the look of that and looking forward to checking all the menus out, see what's available.
But I really the idea of the mmenu and I like the way it looks is skeezix video, will that be available soon after launch?
-sorry if there is a post all about this is the developers news forum, only just occured to me I couldve looked there, and I will, but I've typed it now..;)
 
ED's downloads?

We're going to have a *dedicated site for working games for Pandora.

The AppStore. (similar in fashion to iPhone/iPod appstore - find and download)

It will have all games, utilities, emulator and programs listed - all you do is download and it will save (if you choose right location) to correct location: It will pop up on Desktop (or start menu - Save location dependent). Click icon and play.

It's going to be as simple as any other big company console.

No installing, none of the Linux fiddly stuff (which I hate!). Just download and play.

Edit: Mmenu is going to be great. At launch we are going to have a full GUI (XFCE) as you know, plus we are going to have P-Menu (which is similar to mmenu) and Ubuntu netbook launcher. 2 minimalistic launchers by default.

Be happy! :pandora2ut4:
 
Yeah and there's even the little twitter update that lets you know when new apps are uploaded.

The Pandorappstore or what ever it ends up being called with be the best easiest and safest place to get stuff from outside of maybe the sites of the people who code the games. Partially because the linux games will all mostly have to be recompiled for the Pandora before they'll work anyway so it makes sense that it has it's own store house.

With the mention of minimenu, it occurs to me; How do we choose which environment we'll get on start up? is it like we hold a button as we start it to choose or will we have to set a start up option and it'll always use that unless we change it? I'd like the option to be able to just hold like the "1" button as I start it for minimenu or "2" for Pmenu or full X, etc.
 
^ It asks on first boot which one should be default iirc and you can switch it via menu afterwards as shown in one of ED's vids.
 
I wonder if they will and/or can implement something into the kernal to have 3 boot options which depend if you were holding a button:

Like turn on and press nothing: XFCE
Turn on and hold 'X' and get Pmenu
Turn on and hold 'A' and get Ubuntu Launcher


Something like that - Seems like another good Pandora idea!
 
Holy ish!!!!

an AppStore eh, i didnt know, this is GREAT news to my ears!!! :p

KingOddBall, when i mentioned EDs download site, I meant this site:
http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi
...I thought that was one of EDs sites?
...Either way, that looks a nice place for people [those clever dev types] to dump their works, so its all central.

But an appstore, that sounds super sweet!

I had seen a youtube vid with ED showing how he booted into minimenu, but i wasnt sure if that was some hack he had on his prototype to just show us how the menu looked.
I see now that we can all boot up the alternative menu from doing the 'hold select' button [or something similar - again, this is great news to me]

cheers guys!
 
We've discussed having a 'hold FOO while booting to bring up boot selector'; it wouldn't be hard to build in, but its not likely to be there launch firmware, but someone could add it later pretty easily using the stuff already built in. (ie: theres a script which pops up the GUI picker and sets which one to run, so just call that after detcing a key-down.)

By default, the first boot wizard asks you which environment to use; each of those environments offers some way to 1) switch to another environment, and 2) select another environment long term. (In mmenu's case, I currently let it run xfce from within mmenu (in case you want to just ge tot the desktop without changing mm from your default menu), and let you switch to xfce as a permanent menu, or run pmenu instead of mmenu just this one.

mmenu is going through a lot of hacking .. it didn't exist, what, two weeks ago? Craig wanted me to make it, so I hauled ass and got it working pretty well in a week, and now I've been pouring in some refinements, mostrly stuff thaty you can't take pictures of :) It has a sensible default configuration, but massive numbes of conf items you can fiddle with .. currently: http://git.openpando...abf69b23b0dc3e1

Minimal doesn't mean unconfigurable, just means those conf options let you craft the very specific minimal setup :)

by default (currently) it loads icons up front during app-scan (so takes a second or two to start up), but you can conf it to pull up icons 'later' in a background thread (so they pop up as it loads them); this slows down navigation a little (background loading and all), but makes startup near-instant, so you can change the conf if you want. Likewise, it defers preview loads now. You can have it load previews during swtart up (very slow!), or do it later when the selediton pauases and make you wait, or make it load them in a bg thread (which really chugs things up though, since thats a heavy operation.) Currently, a mount/unmount of a pnd to pull out a preview pic is slow since it has a lot to do (in case 5 apps are simultaneously mounting the samd pnd, for instance).. but we will be adding a 'fast mount' option to do read only qiuck operations for, which will speed up preview pic inhaling. Due to preview pics taking a couple seconds each to suck out (icons are instantaneous mind you), pmenu and mmenu do caching of previews to SD. mmenu has conf item to let you tell it where to cache to, or to search through multiuple locations (even USB devices attached) to find one with enough free space, so it will newver fill up your SD with caches :)

Theres tonnes of stuf flike that oging into mmenu, but you can't take pics of stuff like that, and DaveC is working on a skin for it, but its not ready yet (I've not seen it myself.)

I need to break the conf file in half, so that the operational-preference stuff is in the main conf, but skin-definition-stuff is in another conf,and then that conf could be duplicated for each skin, thus making skinning much easier .. but as I wrote this is a super quick hack, I still need to do stuff like that.

(All along the way, we devs kept thinking we had only weeks to ship too; I'd have coded a lot of things differently if I knew I had a year to do it... I got my dev mk2 red pcb in Dec, already past the original ship dat,e and thought I only had a couple weeks to cobble together some of the things I did. Likewise with mmenu, writing aq new menu with only weeks before shipping.. *eep* :)

So mmenu is shaping up very nicely and runs fast and well; I'll make pics and a video when I can I suppose.

pmenu is working very nicely.

xfce is fantastic imho, but fo my own usage I've switched to booting into mmenu, and then run xfce from mmenu when I need it :)

jeff

We've got about 30 or 40 apps already (half from pickle and cpasjuste, the other hallf from various people; ED has been bundling them up into pnds and keeping them, so for launch there should be a decent assortment, from Vice to Hatari to UAE to Quake 1/2/3 to Wesnoth, etc. Check my pics of mmenu and look at the icons in the screen :)

Edit: you can tell DaveC is beating me up, as I've added all his customizations he loves from gmenu2x .. so ytou can now create .ovr files (in the same place as their .pnd file) to override the icon name, categories and clockspeed (and eventually more options). ie: /pandora/desktop/foo.pnd, create /pandora/desktop/foo.ovr .. if the name is too wide, or you want to change it, you can just override now. This is at the libpnd level so works for xfce, pmenu, mmenu and anything else automatically. You can also drop a foo.png in the same place to override the icon (helpful for skinners), and I'll be adding it so you can override the preview pics too.

You can do category mappings in mmenu now too .. so if you want to merge Game and Apps into MyGame category you can; you can configure which categories you want to have tabs (and if you want All tab or not), and then map categories to those categories; you can set a default category so you can make your own All-like category catchall, except for a few apps which you shove into your own virtual category buckets. Sort of a big PITA, but Dave insists you all love that stuff, so I built it in. Again, not something you can take pics of, but there you go. Guy cot me a week of life to make options that 1% of people will use, but I hope you dig it ;)
 
Thanks Skeezix!

Your work on this is appreciated, I see in your youtube comment that you done all that in just 4 days, pretty amazing to me, and it sounds like you doing some great stuff with it still, I really look forward to playing around with it, and trying my hand at a little bit of skinning too [so long as it isnt too hard to do of course!]

Think I will also have my menu set as you have, default to mmenu with the option to launch the full xfce menu when i need to.
I like the way mmenu is more graphical, and icons are not so small, and that it can be navigated without the stylus on touchscreen [although i think xfce can also be navigated with the dpad/nubs too]

I saved your vid to my favs, so will check back from time and see what new vids are up

good work Skeezix, thanks!
 
you can use the dpad to move around xfce. Default setup is the dpads to work as cursor keys (and Start and such as control keys for instance) -- so all the keys actually do useful keyboardy things even for non-pandora apps. xfce lets the cursor keys move the selection around, and you can open/close windows and such using keyboard shortcuts. Pretty handy. I really like xfce on the pandora actually, its a very good not too heavy interface.

mmenu is not fancy at all, it just works (when I'm not breaking it :)

jeff
 
kingoddball said:
I wonder if they will and/or can implement something into the kernal to have 3 boot options which depend if you were holding a button:

Like turn on and press nothing: XFCE
Turn on and hold 'X' and get Pmenu
Turn on and hold 'A' and get Ubuntu Launcher

Agreed, that would unbelievably rock! If I had any clue on linux programming I'd give that a shot (I do have lots of C in my back pocket, hurts when I sit down).

I think some of the OS mods and add-ins users are going to be developing will be some of the most exciting parts of the Pandora! That being said, it sounds like there's lots of potential for wanting to re-flash, re-out-of-the-box, or factory reset it, especially considering that the first time boot seems to do a lot right off the bat. Will there be a profile folder, some rc file, something to rip out of the NAND to make it seem like it's a fresh Pandora, and to disable any user-made add-ons that might have borked it?
 
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Its easy to check for a downed key using an ioctl, but libpnd includes some _extremely easy_ to use APIs .. it'd be easy to make an app that starts early, and watches to see if (say) Pandora button is down, and if so, do something. Make the app come up, wait for a sec and monitor the key the whole time, then do its business.

jeff
 
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