Okay, my initial experience with the Pandora has been... well, something of a disaster, so pardon me if I vent a little. I'll gloss over the bit about WiFi not working on the installed OS, the fact that there's no quickstart guide installed, the 'please enter your name' dialogue not having default focus and various niggles like that which would confuse or completely floor a newbie.
I've reflashed it with 1.5 Beta 4, and Wifi now actually does things, which is good. There's no web browser so the online quickstart guide about installing the codec pack is useless, which is not so good.
So, installing applications, see if I can make it do something because out-of-the box it's basically a calculator, presumably because of the NAND limits. I've read a little bit about the PND system over the last few years while waiting for the system to arrive, but using it has been... interesting. I knew about that NAND limitations so the first task is to set the machine up to use an SD card for the installed applications.
This being a pretty important step, and the Pandora nominally being targeted at people without linux experience, you'd expect a some handy utility to reformat the card into whatever filesystem the Pandora likes best and prepare the directory structure, right? If there is, it's very, very well hidden.
I found a little tutorial which involved manually creating the directory structure on the disk, which I did. 'Course, it didn't bother to state which filesystem it should be, so I created an ext3fs partition and took it from there - I might add that tune2fs isn't there and can't be installed, so you can't change the maximal mount count and other such things.
Anyway, I set the 'pandora' directory to have 777 permissions, and created the rest as the logged-in user rather than root.
Once this was done, I used the PND Store to attempt to install a couple of applications - which I notice are almost - but not quite - sorted alphabetically. If there's a rhyme or reason to the sort order it's lost on me. Either way it makes it hard to locate applications, which is IMHO the whole idea.
Okay, so I install Firefox in the hopes of being able to follow the Quickstart guide later on. I install what I hope is DOSbox, but am not quite sure because there are two entries and the PND store does not tell you what the program actually is or does, unlike, say, Synaptic or even the horrific dselect. I also install what is probably a ZX Spectrum emulator.
At this point things have been okay-ish, if rather rough and unpolished. Now it goes bad, because it does absolutely nothing. I spend 15 minutes trying to figure out how the hell you're supposed to run a PND application once it's been installed and eventually find a forum post implying that the applications appear on the desktop, which of course they haven't.
What appears to have happened is that it's dumped the application onto the SD card, but not written anything to the 'menu' subdirectory for whatever reason.
Eventually I figure that maybe I screwed up somehow by using an ext3fs partition on the SD card, maybe some weird permissions problem? So I have the mac reformat it as a stock FAT32 partition. Then things really go bad because the PND store is convinced the applications are still installed, which they aren't because the card has been reformatted. It won't re-install them, it won't upgrade them and it goes into an infinite loop if you try to remove them.
I suppose in the worst case I could reflash the OS, but there must surely be a less destructive way.
Oh, and I get an error 13 (permission error) if I try to install a PND to the NAND (e.g. the PND manager)
Any suggestions for fixing this? Because after a five-year wait, I can't help but feel a little let down.
I've reflashed it with 1.5 Beta 4, and Wifi now actually does things, which is good. There's no web browser so the online quickstart guide about installing the codec pack is useless, which is not so good.
So, installing applications, see if I can make it do something because out-of-the box it's basically a calculator, presumably because of the NAND limits. I've read a little bit about the PND system over the last few years while waiting for the system to arrive, but using it has been... interesting. I knew about that NAND limitations so the first task is to set the machine up to use an SD card for the installed applications.
This being a pretty important step, and the Pandora nominally being targeted at people without linux experience, you'd expect a some handy utility to reformat the card into whatever filesystem the Pandora likes best and prepare the directory structure, right? If there is, it's very, very well hidden.
I found a little tutorial which involved manually creating the directory structure on the disk, which I did. 'Course, it didn't bother to state which filesystem it should be, so I created an ext3fs partition and took it from there - I might add that tune2fs isn't there and can't be installed, so you can't change the maximal mount count and other such things.
Anyway, I set the 'pandora' directory to have 777 permissions, and created the rest as the logged-in user rather than root.
Once this was done, I used the PND Store to attempt to install a couple of applications - which I notice are almost - but not quite - sorted alphabetically. If there's a rhyme or reason to the sort order it's lost on me. Either way it makes it hard to locate applications, which is IMHO the whole idea.
Okay, so I install Firefox in the hopes of being able to follow the Quickstart guide later on. I install what I hope is DOSbox, but am not quite sure because there are two entries and the PND store does not tell you what the program actually is or does, unlike, say, Synaptic or even the horrific dselect. I also install what is probably a ZX Spectrum emulator.
At this point things have been okay-ish, if rather rough and unpolished. Now it goes bad, because it does absolutely nothing. I spend 15 minutes trying to figure out how the hell you're supposed to run a PND application once it's been installed and eventually find a forum post implying that the applications appear on the desktop, which of course they haven't.
What appears to have happened is that it's dumped the application onto the SD card, but not written anything to the 'menu' subdirectory for whatever reason.
Eventually I figure that maybe I screwed up somehow by using an ext3fs partition on the SD card, maybe some weird permissions problem? So I have the mac reformat it as a stock FAT32 partition. Then things really go bad because the PND store is convinced the applications are still installed, which they aren't because the card has been reformatted. It won't re-install them, it won't upgrade them and it goes into an infinite loop if you try to remove them.
I suppose in the worst case I could reflash the OS, but there must surely be a less destructive way.
Oh, and I get an error 13 (permission error) if I try to install a PND to the NAND (e.g. the PND manager)
Any suggestions for fixing this? Because after a five-year wait, I can't help but feel a little let down.
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