Quotes Thread For The Blog

[mali]

Pandora hardcase pic
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52085-pandora-carry-case-photos-request/page__view__findpost__p__816044

Pandora and GP32 size comparison
http://www.icontrolpad.com/gp32-pandora/

 

[Consequence_9]

I just realized that the pandora is smaller than the gp32 in all aspects

 

[Mithrildor]

The most challenging thing in Amiga emulation will probably be the touchscreen.

The Amiga is hardcoded to use a mouse. A mouse can't jump immediately from one spot to another like a touchscreen can.
It can only move with a given speed in a given direction.

Therefore, you can move the mouse around with the touchscreen, but as soon as you release it and put it on a different spot, the mouse doesn't jump to that spot. Moving the touchscreen still moves the mouse though.

I can think of three ways to fix this:

1. Create a custom kickstart image which includes a virtual touchscreen driver that talks to X somehow. Wouldn't work for games that don't use the touchscreen routines though.

2. Simulate mouse movement. i.e. if the last area the touchscreen was touching was X and the next one is Y, calculate a quick movement for the Amiga mouse and move it there with maximum speed. Should work with everything.

3. I don't know if the Amiga stores the position of the mousepointer in a certain spot in the RAM. If it does and it always is the same, the emulator could change that position according to the touchscreen.

Not an easy task to do.
Easiest thing is use the analog nub for mouse movement for the start. That will work fine without jumping around

 

[Mithrildor]

No charges here to photograph. I just use a PSP one.

I did do these photos for someone on twitter though:

http://www.icontrolpad.com/gp32-pandora/

 

[gruso]

well an update on uae4all, controls are fixed, scaling is added, and I found it just happens the nub can move the cursor (since uae4all opens 2 joysticks if possible)

 

[Mithrildor]

Can PND files be set to automatically mount? For example if they don't contain an application: man files, the missing help files, a collection of command line utilities. It makes more sense to merge this sort of thing into the NAND file system right? I remember reading here (somewhere) that you could do this within special folders on the SD card... but not heard anything else about it.

Not yet. We've often discussed it,, for lib packs and mini updates or common files, but we'll aim for v1.5 or somethng for that

for now, common needs will probably get ipkg'd or we'll update libpnd asap if needed

jeffPhone

The quote wasnt in the original post, but I added it, because the post was meaningless without it.

 

[mali]

I've had numerous random ideas.. Such as mount a pnd to be /usr/local/pndname, or arbitrary aufs unions but not sure where the sweet spot is between needs and ease. Real power users will probably just do it in /etc/init.d and not need it in pnd. Still, for stuff like a postgres install an automount could be... But also requiring user to be disciplined enough not to yank out sd while on/suspended... Hence we do it post-release after we all have more pnd usage experience

Yoyo - a union over to sd is fine since 1) that's how pnd works, more or less, so we know it works, 2) how we'll likely do system updates with low risk, and 3) means you canrevert all mods by booting wihout the sd but likewise putting whole distro on sd is easy too.. Leave NAND virgin and just boot sd with all your packages installed if you need to. 16gb sshd is not that pricey anymore

But let's see how good we can make the pnd system before you all go rolling your own firmwares

Currently pnd does not support auto-exec scripts, specifically due to all the screaming and gnashing over security we got already Easily put in (trivial in fact), but.. we'll see how it goes at first.

Right now a pnd can request auto-creation of directories (so /id can be created by quake.pnd on insertion, say), and we're adding in so a pnd can request varios directories gto be mounted into the pnd CWD (ie: so /id can show up as ./id, to make porting easy), and all sorts of co9ol stuff.. but we're dodging doing auto-exec and a lot of magic.. keeping things to surrond the app for now, before we get pnds into the system. One step at a time

Yeah, but we don't really want to re-implement sudo

Also don't want it to ask on boot "do you wish to allow these pnd files ot run that request it".

But we coudl add a conf entry tat says 'SecurityOutTheWindow,AllowRunOnBoot' where you ptu in 'yes', and then /pandora/automount would work, and /pandora/autoexec/ would work, say. *Shrug*

(note: talks about malware)
More practicfal would be an automount program that crashes, eats up all the CPU, overlays libc with libpng or somethign and kills your boot Not a big deal if you didn't bugger up your NAND and can just pop out the SD and reboot, but still.

Theres also the question of.. if you flag a pnd as automount.. does it moutn when the SD inserts, or only when you boot fresh? And any rules ofr how to un-mount the automounts? ie: normal pnd mounts and unmounts around the invocation, but if you want a shared-libn pack of DB or somethign, you want it to persist across other applications, but you may want a way to stop it without sending a SIGKILL..

I shoudl probably write up my thoughts and approach so people could debate it a bit, but I rather figured to do that after 1.0 ships; I mean, we're busy enough right now

If you set problems like this loose on the community now, some clever programmer might grab the libPND git and hack up a solution for you.[...]

Mindlord .. THe problem is in defining specs, which first need nailing down as you can see, it'll take some doing (but as in all things opensource, some coder (prolly me will just code it up to kick things off .. Anyway, all of libpnd has been open source since day one so it's not like we're not opening things up.. Have at! As I've always said.. We built stuff in free time and while things were moving targets, so we built stuff to work well.. And to be fixed up or replaced as time goes on as in any healthy project

Yeah, 'terps and libpacks are one of my worries. Ie: we got python in there but not every lib under the sun. Wegot SDL but no lib sdl sound since that's one of 800 non core sdl extensions. We don't have ruby and perl and scheme in there (or emacs .. So system extensions are hmm

strikes me we should treat it like USB .. Allow automount or manual mount, and a dialog to safely unmount .. But hard to detect dependancies maybe.. Or laid may do it...

Jeff

The devfund is already being used to get Pandoras to developers, and once more are out there will be used as an incentive for people to fix issues or reward people for work done. It's not a 'cure all ills' solution, but every little helps.

 

[mali]

Chinese mould factory are back at work

Well they will just be getting back on with the job, I hope we will have an update on what is shipping from them at the end of this coming week.

Nun, sie haben bereits angefangen, die Arbeit aufzunehmen, sie haben mit Fatih Kontakt aufgenommen.
Wie schnell das jetzt alles gehen wird, weiß niemand, aber zumindest haben sie sich zurückgemeldet, was schonmal sehr positiv ist (kam bisher selten vor, dass sie sich von alleine bei uns melden )
They already resumed work and contacted Fatih. We don't know how fast it will go now, but they contacted us at least and that's a good thing, cause they usually don't get in touch spontaneously

Also, ich wage zu bezweifeln, dass die [*I AM STUPID SPAMMER*] mit der Massenproduktion loslegen.
Es sind noch nicht alle Mitarbeiter da und die Maschinen müssen ja erstmal eingerichtet werden.
I doubt they will start MP immediately. Not all workers are back yet and the machines have to be calibrated first.

Ist ja nicht so, dass man da einfach nur auf das Knöpfchen drückt und 1000 Gehäuse kommen raus.
It's not like they just push a button and 1000 cases are spat out.

Die Maschinen müssen hochgefahren werden, die Gußform eingepasst und optimiert werden.
The machines have to be heated up and the moulds have to be adjusted.

Ein paar Tage würde ich denen auf jeden Fall geben, um den Produktionsprozess wieder anzuleiern.
Sie hatten uns ja auch vor dem Neujahresfest gesagt, dass die Produktion im Werk ab dem 22. Februar wieder losgeht, also gehe ich von aus, dass sie jetzt erstmal alles warten, einrichten, in Betrieb nehmen, etc.
We should give them a few days to resume production. They told us before CNY that production continues on the 22nd and I think they will have to do some maintenance and preparations first.

edit:
"s.o.f.o.r.t" is a spamword? WTF?

I can assure you they are back because they sent us quite a long email about something they want to do to make the lower part of the case stronger as some of the cases they did before the CNY have flow issues in that area.

Well they are saying this area of the case turned out thinner than the surrounding area in the units they have currently made, but we don't think it's an issue as it's the area above the battery, and that section is pretty solid anyway and not an area you can see in every day use.

So you're not going to change it?

I'm going to speak to Michael/Dave about it but I don't think we will change it.

We most probably will not change it. They want to change it as this would remove the last issue with shrinking - but that shrinking would be in the battery area below the sticker...
You'd need to remove the sticker to even find it. Doesn't make sense

I just checked, after figuring some driver issue out .. Dosbox (entirely pickles work, not mine!) ..

Civ 1 - runs great! touchscreen play, with audio etc!
Wizardry 7 -- runs flawless with audio (Adlib ftw
Dune 2 -- runs great! Played through first level with audio. (A little clunky as right-click is not mapped yet, but its a quick port I think still; pickle will add right-click to touchscreen easy enough, like in f200 version.)

Cranked up the CPU to 900 for fun, and then tried..
DM2: Skullkeep -- damn, bad opcode in the emulation in dosbox
MAster of Magic -- actually playable, and I thought this would be a dog (1994)

Eye of the Beholder 1 -- I showed a video of this a year ago, but runs great on touchscreen!

Warcraft 2 -- seems good! Pickle worries it might load down on later levels wit a lot going on, but firsgt level is playable actually.

I'm working right now, but just through those onto my SD and fiddled, while DB is chugging and busy

So there you go, looking good!

jeff

 

[mali]

Does the battery heat up significantly during charging? Would that exacerbate a weak spot?

Nope. It's just a small dull under the sticker in the battery compartment.
If the battery would heat up enough to melt the plastic, I wouldn't want to touch the unit

i fear the chinese company has other orders from bigger companies they want to produce first. so by saying they found another little thing they need to fix, they're just play for time before they put us on production line.

No, they talked about this already when they shipped the Rev3 samples.

(soldering the nubs)

They are done by hand.

Adventus sent me a really nice review of his Pandora. I hope he can get set up for development on it today.

Adding pnd support to other distro is -easy- - just build libpnd and poach pndnotifyd.

sdl has sound . Lib sdl sound is not part of sdl, it is someones random extension with mp3/etc decoding. It was an example of... We have tonnes of common libs in panda distro, but no distro has all possible libs.

Jeffphone

(FBReader)

Angstrom repo stuff very often works.. Unoptimized but works. Didn't try it though but surely it'll get a proper port. As to dependancies with ipkg'd, just get the deps too

jeff

Overclocking is in the default menu right now (works I think) and it pops up a warning when trying to set it high. Hopefullythat is sufficient

Not that I speak for anyone of value.

Undervolt shoudl never be a problem.
OC should never be a problem, not really, in an ARM chip with adequate venting/etc.
OVervolting is asking for trouble. I'm not sure what warranties are like for other companies, but overvolting seems often not covered, and is actively prevented in many cpus

Pandora has pretty easy overclocking, but as we all know its relatively harmless -- and if your battery gets hot, freaking turn it off or clock-down. Duh.

I don't think we currently have kernel support for volt-ing, but maybe there is. I've not looked at the chip specs in ages to know if it supports sw-volting, but my memory suggests it does? Either way, if we dont' expose that to the user, peopel are more or less covered. (Alternate kernel builds or firmware, makes it interesting however!)

IMHO, overclocking should not be a warranty-voiding thing, but volting should be

For videos and such, generally the pandora is not clocked -- in my videos I try and be clear in the desc to note the environmental conditions -- clocked or not, code optimied or not, X11 up or not, and so on. But generally I never overclock .. the Pandora is a pretty beastly performer, but OCing is a handy tool when you need it. (Heck, you want performance, just go to a greatly reduced environment like pmenu/etc, and you've gotten rid of anythign in the way.. clocking isn't usually needed!) But if you want to be really pushign your dosbox emulation or Amiga on unoptimized UAE, then OCing is a tool.

The current UI warns when setting clock outside the recommended spec.

jeff

edit: IF we do have a kernel interface to the volt, maybe we should suppress it; then real men can build their own kernel and know what they're getting into. (Course, peopel will just download and use that kernel anyway, but they also will know what they're getting into, and in that case they can get into lots of other trouble anyway

 

[mali]

[Quote limit reached, had to make a new post]

The OS allows you to both adjust the speed of the processor, and adjust the voltage of the processor.

Just to be clear, current kernel doesn't allow to change OPP (or voltage) by hand, so at least the default OS won't allow you to overvoltage.

You could mount a pnd from within a pnd .. Just use pnd_run.sh

but yeah, more to do as we go

jeff

This should be a non-issue since soft-overclocking shouldn't be detrimental enough to the pandora to cause it to die before the warranty is up anyway. If it does there was probably something wrong with it anyway.

I would have agreed with you on this until this thread. But now we are going to have to get all serious and make a statement.

I've never known an ARM chip fail after overclocking, but maybe times are changing.

1) Mali was not a customer.

2) We won't be blackmailed by Vimacs.

3) We will release a statement on overclocking. (we need to look in to this possibility you really can fry an ARM chip before it crashes).

I'm sorry if I offended any of you, it's an occupational hazard.

Now I'm going back to work. There is a lot to get ready for these cases.

Removing from pnd is bad.. So far all changes go to appdata folder via the aufs union we do.. Rebuilding a on on the fly just means you've now go broken pnds if anyone else copies them

on one hand we're talking 8gb sdhc cards so why worry over a little duplication? It's the big grtuitous dupes to avoid, but let's def avoid giant dep chains

but I could see one giant mono pnd they several pnds depending on.. Just 1 pnd dep. The problem is versioning, and people needing additional mono libs .. A mesh dependancy ... Must be careful

but I can't say much.. Surrounded by screaming kids at indoor playground right now

jeffphone

 

[mali]

Holy moley, what's happening here?

I followed all these posts to find out there are several things I really need to point out...

First off, it is NOT easily possible to OVERVOLT the unit!
This has been removed from the kernel. You can only OVERCLOCK, which shouldn't do any harm (except for freezing the unit).
So I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Second, some comments to what started everything here:

@mali:
Yes, you could overvolt without telling anyone. However, please keep in mind that this is no big company here.
If a lot of people did this and we get back hundreds of Pandoras which died from overvolting and everyone said "Hey, I didn't do anything, it's covered within the warranty!", it could destroy the whole project.
As said, I'm talking about overVOLTING, not overCLOCKING, as that will definately hurt the Pandora (overclocking most probably won't).

This lead to a currently fully stressed craig to overreact. Yes, he shouldn't post when in that mood, but it CAN happen. I tend to NOT post when I'm in that state (and believe me, a project as this really really stress you A LOT).

@craigix:
Try to NOT overreact like this. You can TELL guys the reason why this isn't nice, but please don't insult them.
If you are very stressed, it's better to not post anything (or tell me I should handle this, as insulting will lead to threads like this one).

Now, the thread continued... vimacs (probably also having a bad day) was pissed off by this and threatened craig that he will put his scripts under a more restrictive license, therefore PNDs won't work.
Of course, this lead craigix to think about dropping PND support, as this could've lead to serious problems delivering the Pandoras out.

Craig AND vimacs seemed to have calmed down a bit later on, as vimacs didn't close his scripts but gave the rights to skeezix and craig told us it wasn't his intention to insult vimacs in any way.

Well, congratulations, you just saw what stress can do to people working together on one major project.

My advise is for all to calm down.
This project can REALLY be stressful, you can believe me (I experienced the same). Having to deal with chinese business partners while having 4000 guys sitting behind your backs asking impatiently what's the current status now (every five minutes ) can really stress you. Of course, a lot of money is involved, too.

Therefore, things can happen that shouldn't. I hope craig does learn from this and will try to calm down before posting, as it will hurt the project instead of helping it.

vimacs, please don't leave us. You've really been a great help so far and I personally wouldn't want to miss you.
We all had our bad days, but in the end, all we want is this little thing going out there and bringing joy to everyone!

Yes, working on the OS or other stuff while not having much time can really be annoying and stressful... but that's just the last steps we have here.
Once it's out, there are tons of devs who will help us tweaking it for sure.

Shipping will bring a lot of relief. Then things will become a LOT smoother.


Okay, now finally, my thoughts about overclocking / overvolting:

I don't think overclocking should void your warranty, as I don't think it will kill any CPU.
When it comes to OVERVOLTING, things are different. It can SURELY kill your CPU and it will be disabled in the kernel we provide.
It's basically like trying to use 12V instead of 5V in AC in. It will fry things and therefore, this should void warranty.

We need to investigate more about it, but that's my opinion.

Now, everyone, thanks for reading.
Let's all grab some nice warm cup of coffee, calm down a bit, and continue to work TOGETHER on our small little handheld instead of throwing insults around us, okay?

Thanks.

I said it before, and will say it again most likely, to one major painpoint of this project is decent communication.
Please have a decent chat behind the scene on how to tackle thing like this in the future as this thread shows it is quite a disaster area.

Well, why I have to agree here, there are also some problems:

1. I get about three hours of sleep each day and don't even manage to finish all that I wanted on that day. There's so much work to do at the moment (eMails, OS bughunting, manual, etc.), I just don't have time to do a regular chat with the other ones. I guess it's the same for the rest: Michael has a lot of work to do to prepare the mass assembly, etc. We're all in different timezones, so that adds up to that. I do concentrate on working with the devs on the OS and let the others take care about the cases right now. Sadly, there just isn't time for meeting and chatting. Sometimes I even don't manage to check my eMails...

2. Even if we would talk about things regularly: Most of the time people demand very quick responses here, usually within hours (otherwise this thread will escalate). So we would have to meet up and chat about things every few hours to prevent threads like this escalate. If some people didn't demand immediate respondes from craig, we could've talked about this via mail and give a response one or two days later... which would be WAY too late for most people here.

For the last couple of days I've been trying to upload a video of me playing LoZ Ocarina of Time / Sin and Punishment but my internet fails me. I was going to post some thoughts in that thread. I should be able to upload it tonight (I'm going to my brothers where they have much faster internets).

Man, I take a couple days to be on babysitting duty with my daughter, a 3 day vacation from things, and look what happens!
Oh the drama! (*theory* -- this is all just done to work everyone up, to make Pandora - The Musical, sell better.)

libpnd and the PND-file system are open source, and I hope they will some day be of sufficient quality and value to be adopted by other Linux distributions. It is a possibly awesome thing with the potentially to be 100% ignored by everyone, or could someday be cool. A lot of libpnd is Pandora-specific, though perhaps I should more clearly delimit the pnd-file stuff and the Pandora-stuff, as already a couple other distributions (non-Pandora related) are looking at pnd-files. A lot of it was built while the sand shifted beneath our feet, and some of it was done quick.. but it is Good Stuff. It works, it works well, and once released, and we see usage patterns in the users, talented people all over will rework and rework it to be something wicked I am sure. We should count our community lucky to have people like dflemstr in it.. and Vimacs, notaz, djwillis, etc And nice chaps like ED who can't andle such explosions as this without blushing (And yes, I know, all of libpnd could be written as a 10 line sh-script, a 1 line perl script, a 17 line python job, or a 1 character APL job, but I wanted it easily bindable, so its a big monolithic set of apps, deal with it!)

(Why does this sound like something you say at a funeral?)

For my part, theres far too much invested to let the project fail now; this puppy is going to damned well ship, and have a pretty decent OS in it Craig etc have a lot of financial investment, and blood and sweat; we devs don't have the financial burden and stress that way, but we have the blood and sweat part, thats for sure (looks at Djwillis and notaz). So fear not people, this is all going on, don't worry. We're a responsible lot

But here we have vimacs, who is beyond skilled and a valued team member, and a friend; a lot of the OS has been hacked out in IRC as we sit about discussing things, etc; I have logged it all (haha, take that!), plus I keep the wiki; I've got the history here people Craig keeps his nose out of the channel, lets us do our magic there; hes got the store to run, etc. He keeps out of our way. Maybe Craig knows the value Vimacs brings, or maybe Vimacs is just a name he knows is helping out but not to what extent. Or maybe craig lost track of things. I'm not here to apologize for anyone, or to speak for anyone. What I'm saying is.. Vimacs is too good to let go, but he makes his own decisions. (When you think about it, the OS was built by djwillis, notaz, myself, vimacs, ED, cpasjuste, and others. But Mike alone built the hardware? Damn!)

1) libpnd and PND-files are going on, in Pandora and outside of Pandora. They're not vanishing, people. My email inbox has damned exploded!
2) Vimacs is valued; he is also a friend. Hopefully this shit sorts out. (Don't ban me for that word, for if ever an appropriate term that is it!)
3) DAmnit, if he cancelled, I will fly to .de and get him one myself. He goddamned deserves it, whethor he wants it or not, and whether anyone else wants him to or not. Seriously, I will save my pennies and get him one and shove it down his throat!

I'm in a tough spot; I ship things. I'm a pro, its what I do; I've also been building gadgets, software and the Internet for too many years, and know all about Teh Flamewars. And I'm a decent guy, I keep someones back, and Vimacs is a good man. But we ship, I have spoken.

4) In the end, Vimacs has assigned responsibility for his code to me (damn you Vimacs, you can fix your own bugs you bastard!); as my code will be LGPL (like it or not, we want people to be able to make commercial apps for PAndora, and thus they need libpnd to be available to them in that capacity; so here I sweat for countless hours so someone can sell _my work_. Thats what giving to the community means people!), his code will be LGPL as well.
5) I hope Craig, and Vimacs, and all that mess will cool over; I don't think Vimacs is angry per se, just disappointed; if he is really angry, I hope he forgives me .. but his code has to be LGPL. I'm glad I don't have to replace it .. I would have felt like a turd, a scalper, to do it, and wouldn't have done half the job

Craig can be a nutter, and he knows it. He fosters it, thats why he wears that hat to amuse and scare children But you all knew it going in, its not like he wasn't always Craig.

jeff, fence-walker.

I do love the new meme .. "whats your order number?" ..

I'm not telling anyone. I want my production Pandora, my wife is already stealing my dev one!

I'm a long tme bswd guy (half my machines are still FreeBSD even , so I have considered it. Still, as Pandora is Linux and most Linux is flag waving for GPL, I figured LGPL was a pretty good match for everything. I'd liek to trot out "we're busy enough, do I really weant to spend 10 daysmulling over licenses", but its not like you can change liceses easily later. So currently going LGPL route, but hell, I should just dual-license it

*grumble* I hate license-wars, its like rule-warring with Magiv the Gathering players

jeff

You're worrying about the license? Look at the code. The license is the least of your worries.
Once again: I like the idea, not the implementation.

ouch!

Any particular problems?

ie: There are a number of hacky bits in there (what the heck, its free time and not much of it, and under a shifting OS and moving target , but the APIs and goals are good; I never said any particular bit is perfect

The multilanguage handling will get improved post-release; the PXML.xml spec will get altered post-release (to be multi app aware and a long list of improvements), the whole emitter and app-exec mechanism will get merged and improved. The whole monolithic desing of pndnotifyd etc will probably stay, due to my trying to keep it all really obvious and simple, though big parts will get redone (move to dsbus, even though dbus is a big bloated thing, its hella lot more reliable than inotify for a lot of things). Really, the whole thing shoudl be a few lisp-like pything scripts, but that woudlnt' be bindable to anyones code, so its all straight boring C, very little C++, and all written to be obvious to anyone, so not fancy. The whole PXML parser needs a redo, too, while we're at it

But if theres any big bugs, please let me know; for design thoughts, please let me know so can mull things over for the future.

Course that said, you're welcome to fork and rewrite ... please do I've always said that day one, once we've shipped, peopel are welcome to replace every last bit of it, as long as the idea still works

(I do get a reasonable amount of criticism over it, but as is typical .. no one sends patches, cept dflemstr Its easy to pick apart things, but patch away! It builds and runs on pretty much any modern linux, you can use pnd files on a normal linux box for testing

jeff

(I know, we've been here before, but I forget; been awhile, and been through too many long work weeks IF it was just over the format (iso+footer), then that is of course a triviality, and we actually support already cramfs and other filesystem types in there.)

And pnd is not an executable format, it is more a packaging system with a lot of conveniences tossed in, derived from a crackpot idea ED had about 2 years ago

Esentially, in concept, its like a .zip file you can run; we just ditched the need to install and uninstall, and made auto-discovery so things magicly appear. Theres a lot of bits to it, but thats the concept

jeff

Wooot, fullspeed movieplaying (not yet hardware accelerated) with the current image for DVD Quality movies. Okay, 720p x264 doesn't work

 

[mali]

Adventus has included such details of the clock speed and optimisations on his previous videos on YouTube. That is if his account is called JudasAdventus. Can't wait to see this video.

Yep. I always try to include the clockspeed, frameskip and rendering resolution in my videos. This one is at 800mhz, No frameskip or sound, 640x480. It irritates me when people omit these details from daedalus PSP videos.

Hey Adventus: What speed were you running your Pandora at when playing N64? (was it Full Speed?!?!)

Zelda is fullspeed in some places, its about 85-100% in the 1st dungeon but the town is slower, maybe 60-85%. Sin and Punishment is not fullspeed in general, it jumps between 60 - 100% depending on how many enemies are onscreen. Both games are fun, though sin and punishment is alot easier than i remember .

@DaveC: If you want I can send you the newest binaries, I think the one Pickle supplied has old graphics plugin (i dont use a .vsh file anymore).

I don't want to run it at 800 Mhz and risk damage before I know if it is safe or not, and no sound is no fun to me

I hope its safe too, I've been overclocking the devboard to 850-900 Mhz for awhile now . I haven't noticed it getting hot or even warm. I'm pretty sure these chips can withstand a fair bit of heat anyway, I work on an iPhone at work and it gets pretty hot to hold (probably uses the case as a giant heatsink) but it doesn't crash or anything.

Do you think the hardware will eventually be able to run N64 well at say 600 MHz WITH sound? Or is that just beyond the current tech?

It is very difficult to say, the dynarec by Ari64 is very good and i haven't been able to squeeze much more out of the graphics plugin recently. But I think there is significant gains possible in using the VFP/Neon for FPU emulation. At the very least we could statically alloc FP registers so there would be less pressure on the ARM regs (so it would speed up non-fp operations aswell).

I think the vast majority of games will require an overclock to be what i regard as playable. This application is pushing the limits.

Adventus' Pandora first impressions + Mupen64Plus
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52175-prototype-impressions-mupen64plus-with-loz-ocarina-of-time/

One of the things I've not been able to work out from the discussions and videos surrounding TV output is how the difference in resolution is handled.

Is the entire thing scaled down? (Resulting in a squished image at 800x480?)
It is plain cropped (Top left, center, etc)
Is it cropped+scaled (from the center)

Or is it configurable depending on what I need/want to do?

That is configurable from the commandline at the moment, no gui yet.
Not sure if it will be configurable in the tv-out gui when it ships, we will see.

 

[mali]

I'd better set up a twitter account for the file updates. I'll try to make it so you can follow the emus/games/apps updates separately.

http://twitter.com/PandoraApps if you want to watch odd archive testing in progress.

"Quake (ioQuake) updated."
"Hexen 2 - Port of Hexen 2, requires the PC files."
"New: C-Dogs 1.0 - C-Dogs, the sequel to Cyberdogs, is a DOS arcade s.."

(Linux n00b info)

Spoiler

Friends, Romans, Linux Noobs! I see the topic of "terminal fear" popping up about every two weeks. Usually embedded in other topics. Rest assured, if and when an end user is put into the "unholy" position of opening a Linux terminal to do something. You're not going to be out there all alone with no guidance. Odds are if you're popping open a terminal for the first time on the Pandora it's because you're doing some "magic-hackery" or accessing a feature that's not quite ready yet. The most you'll every have to do is open the terminal, type a command exactly as is says on the wiki or what the friendly guru told you here in the forums or on IRC, and press enter. In general you won't be using the terminal to move or copy files, modify text configurations, or anything like that. There are GUI file managers and powerful text editors for those tasks. You CAN do those things in a terminal, but you don't have to.

For some it might help to think of the Terminal like a command console in a game like Quake, TES4:Oblivion, Fallout 3, or whatever. With a little knowledge and guidance you can enter cheat codes (commands) that affect how your Pandora behaves. It really is that simple most of the time.

If you feel inclined to learn what that cryptic command does specifically, that's up to you. As long as you trust the information, and you're ok taking another guys word that the solution to your problem is to type a command like this:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/openGLes.so.4 /usr/lib/openGLes.so.3

You've got nothing to worry about. This type of solution appears in the Ubuntu forums all the time, and Ubuntu is more or less considered the most noob friendly Linux out there. Hell, even in windows stuff like this happens! I work as a phone support tech for an ISP. I can't tell you how many times I've had to get a person running Vista to open up a terminal in Administrator mode to enter the command:

netsh int ip reset reset.log

How is that any less unholy and archaic than what I exampled for Linux?

The Linux terminal is not some Pandora's Box (See what I did there? ) that once opened can't be closed. Linux takes great care to ensure that you don't damage sensitive parts of the operating system when you're running as your normal user account. You can only affect files in your home directory, and you can't accidentally overwrite or delete critical operating system files without consciously giving yourself permission to do so. There is no magic button combination that you can accidentally press that will destroy your Pandora once and for all. That's not to say that once can't give themselves root/superuser/administrator powers and wreak havoc, but as long as you're careful nothing bad is going to happen.

In general, if you're following instructions and a command starts with "sudo" (Super User DO) take a deep breath, type very carefully, and double check your spelling and punctuation. While not every command that needs Super User power is particularly dangerous. Some can be. You should also trust your source, but that goes without saying. Truthfully, this is even less dangerous than the Windows Command Prompt which does nothing to stop a non-administrator user from deleting huge swaths of the file-system if they feel so inclined.

Learning to use the Terminal in Linux is a great benefit to any end user. It grants them to power to fix problems that otherwise couldn't be fixed with strapped in a GUI. A fine example. The GUI is completely locked up. You can move the mouse, but nothing responds. In Windows, what can you do? Reboot? That's about it. In Linux, you can hit Alt-Ctrl-F1 and drop to a terminal at any time. Log in, and issue the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

Hokus-Cadabra! In 5 seconds you've got X running again. Note: this command is for Ubuntu, I do not know if Pandora uses gdm for session management, it might use xdm or something else entirely. This is just one simple scenario where shedding the "Terminal Fear" can save you a whole bunch of time.

There are literally thousands of "cheat codes" to try in Linux. Once you get the hang of "cheat codes" you can easily pick up more advanced commands, and even writing scripts. Before you know it you'll be fearlessly issuing terminal commands in Linux and wondering how you ever got along without them before.

Thanks for listening.

Edit: Spelling and to thank dflemstr for pointing out my gdm restart error.

Spoiler

I'm not trying to be argumentative or anything, but sometimes it does help to know the basics. If you get into a jam, or if X goes down, and you need to fix your machine, knowing some basic commands can really help a lot.

If the X server dies, and you'd like to have it back

startx

Change directories

cd <path to move to>

Change directories to one above current

cd ..

Check the current directory

pwd

List files in current directory

ls

List all files in current directory (including hidden)

ls -a

Copy files and directories (copy/paste)

cp -rf <from> <to>

Move files and directories (cut/paste)

mv <from> <to>

Delete files and directories (probably kinda dangerous)

rm -rf <file>

Untar file with .tar.gz

tar -xzvf <file.tar.gz>

Untar file with .tar.bz2

tar -xjvf <file.tar.bz2>

Tar a directory

tar -czvf <file.tar.gz> <Directory>

Run an executable in current directory

./<file>

Run an executable in PATH

<file>

List tasks

ps -ef

Look for specific task

ps -ef | grep <search name>

Kill a task get PID from above command

kill <PID>

If task is still running, and it really needs to be killed (don't do this unless you need to)

kill -9 <PID>

Find a file

find / -name <file>

View a file (not edit) - 'q' to quit, '/<term>' to search, 'n' for next search result

less <file>

View system messages - 'q' to quit, '/<term>' to search 'n' for next search result (as root)

dmesg | less

Reboot the system (as root)

reboot

A few text editors (maybe pick one):
vim
emacs
nano (easiest?)
joe

Well, except for that there's no gdm on the Pandora. Would be way too huge and slow
We're using slim, so the correct command would be:

sudo /etc/init.d/slim-init restart

Look here: http://urjaman.dy.fi/

The URL is temporary for unknown duration. Store the image and .html locally if you want to be sure to get to it again. The server is courtesy of my friend, a PII 350Mhz on an 8/1 ADSL connection, so be respectful, dont F5 it too much

EDIT: As a funny side note: I asked my friend if i can host a page with an image for (possibly) a forum full of people, he replied "it's ok if they can wait" - i lol'd

just in case...

quick mirror: Looki Looki (non-temporary)

I think I'll look into this tomorrow..

Just built battlejewels for pandora, woowoo

jeff

 

[mali]

Just finished keymapping for X11. Now ALL keys do work fine. The buttons are mapped to Pg Up / Pg Dn, Home, End for easy text editing

Oh, and Shift + Upper Firebutton is mapped to Compose key, so people can now also type special characters (tested and working fine)

 

[Qwertyuiop]

Just a quick note: Vimacs stays with us, uncancelled his order and continues to work on the scripts

 

[mali]

^Yay

I found this post by one of the code maintainers for Worms Armageddon.

Porting W:A to SDL/OpenGL is part of our to-do list as part of Linux compatibility. (W:A 4.0 might be exclusively based on SDL.) Once the code is platform-independent, creating a Pandora port should be fairly simple (though there'll probably be some need for adaptation for gamepads etc.)

 

[bzar]

Just a quick note: Vimacs stays with us, uncancelled his order and continues to work on the scripts

Awesome!

 

[mali]

Chinese New Year holidays are over - work has begun at the factory!

We are in daily contact with them, so here is a brief roadmap of what should happen when:

At the moment, the machines are maintained, cleaned and prepared to go into normal production run again. Production will start during the next days, probably on Monday. Then lots of Pandora cases should be spit out each day
While they do this, we try to make them another Silkscreen sample and send us a picture of it (not the whole sample) within this week. If it's fine, we'll use the silkscreen - if not, we'll just go with plain cases, to not waste anymore time.

As for the OS, the devs are really working hard on it right now (despite not having time, as they have so much things to do in real life).
It will surely not be the most polished OS ever released yet, but if you want a polished OS, go get an Apple (and miss all the fun we'll all have by enhancing the Pandora OS together!)

So, what can you expect, what will not work, where are tweaks needed?

What does work:

* The desktop fully works. It's like a normal PC desktop. You have your file manager, your windows, your apps, etc.
* PND system is working. You can simply copy games onto your SD Card, put it into your Pandora - and PLAY!
* Apps: Installed apps do work fine so far. That includes Midori, Abiword, Orage, Pidgin, XChat, etc.
* Audio Playing: XMMS working fine.
* Movie Playing: Working... but has some issues (see below)
* USB Devices: You can connect USB Sticks, harddisks, mice, keyboard, etc. Normal things run out of the box.
* TV Out: The TV Out cable works fine, SVHS only for the moment though (see below)
* Power Saving Mode: Yep, it's included and does work. At the moment, it should last for about 50 hours, not too long, but there might be a lot more components which could be switched off to save more power. Good enough to leave your Pandora lying around for a few hours without having to reboot it.
* LED Warning (Blinking) on low battery with automatic shutdown when the battery status becomes critical.
* Keyboard, us nub as mouse, touchscreen, everything working.

What issues are there?

* The biggest issue: WiFi is still work in progress. The driver works, without using SDIO it was slow (about 1200bps), DJWillis is working on it, but it's time consuming. It MIGHT be ready when the Pandora ships, but it might be WiFi will still take a bit longer. Maybe some devs want to help out here once they get a Pandora in their hands
* There's no software audio mixer yet. This means you can only use the volume wheel. No big deal if you're just listening to music or playing games, but multiple sounds at once will not work yet. Also, the equalizer isn't yet working.
* Some apps have to be optimized for the small screen: Fullscreen apps like Midori, Abiword, etc. do look fine. Some stuff however (XFCE4 Settings, etc.) are using windows bigger than 800x480. They are completely usable, but you have to move the windows around to access all buttons.
* Movieplayer: While basic movie playing works, it does not use any hardware accelerations yet. DVD Quality xvid videos do play fine, but H264 is too much without hardware acceleration. Also, in windowed mode the videos are playing before the menus. Watching movies in fullscreen mode works nicely. Things should be way better when hardware support is included
* There is a lot to tweak and optimize here and there. Bootup speed can be increased, more themes (fingerfriendly ones?) could be created, some minor issues like the normal logout of Ubuntu-Netbook-Launcher doesn't work (you need to use a menu entry), etc. Nothing serious that makes the unit not usable, but there are a lot of things that can be improved within the next months!

So, except for WiFi, all things do work well so far but can be optimized a lot.
Please don't expect to have perfectly working games and emulators on day 1 - adopting to a new system will take some time and except for some core OS developers, nobody has a Pandora yet. Once delivered, games should start to pop up and become optimized pretty fast!

Some of that stuff might be fixed until first release - let's hope for WiFi!

xchat and Pidgin are both included, yes.

Seeing as docs for FBReader are sparse (and the code doesn't log much .. like very first thing, when it can't find its UI plugin, it doesn't tell you it couldn't find it, not where it looked.. silliness!), anyone know how to use it?

I've got it compiled and fixed a few little issues, so it actually _runs_ , I think.

I specify a book name on the command line, and it shows it. With a giant font. It seems to take the full screen, but seems to show no controls beyond a scrollbar. Any quick tips while I'm here looking at it?

Time to install it into my linux desktop and see how it should look

jeff

Ah, it should have a button bar up top, but it does not. *Sigh* I like an easy port, but this is an out of control codebase .. time to dig a little

 

[Mithrildor]

Does that mean that ALSA doesn't support the audio chip yet?

It just means we don't have a software mixer setup yet. Sound output is done through Alsa, so I guess ALSA works

I'm confused about the WiFi

They say 'without using SDIO it was SLOW'

Then they talk about 1200Kbs. Then they seem to imply that wifi may or may not work when system ships. Does that mean they won't be including any driver at all if they can't get a 'fast' driver working? 1200Kbs is plenty fast for my needs!

Sorry, my fault... it should be 1200bps approx
So REALLY slow.

The driver will still be on the system, yes. Maybe it will even be working fully upon release. This is definately one thing we (or better: DJWillis) is hardest working on. But he's got very little time at the moment.

Maybe it was kbps - I haven't measured it out myself... just remembered the value 1200 in the IRC.
I think it MIGHT've been kbps - as with 1200bps, websites wouldn't work, and DJWillis was actually browsing the net.

So, what was the rest of the TV-out status? It says "(see below)" but there isn't really anything about it below. Vimacs hinted at a user configurable resolution (even if only via the cli), do we have any details on that?

Whoops, forgot about that
Via command line, you can set up any res you want. I'd probably make a quick GUI which allows standard PAL / NTSC, Overscan / No Overscan. Maybe even with custom resolutions
However, only SVHS is currently working, as for some unknown reason, the guys who did the driver for it made this setting not dynamically configurable, but fixed in the kernel.
So to switch between SVHS and Composite, you'd need to change the kernel.
We'll probably move that config setting outside of the kernel so this can be switched on-the-fly, but for the moment, it's SVHS

 

[mali]

(Wifi)

The speed is about 50KB/s (400kb/s) which is slow but the real problem is that the driver loses packets constantly which means even loading a simple page like Google can be a chore. I've loaded the GP32X page successfully but then trying to click into a topic would stall forever and I'd just give up.

My understanding is that the kernel needs to move to a newer version where a better SDIO driver exists and access to an IRQ driver so that data won't get lost. DJWillis also tells me he is trying to backpedal that code into the kernel we have now in order to get it working better. He's also the guy building in new GL drivers and bug fixes and PND fixes and all this other stuff so it's a lengthy process.

SDIO doesn't work on latest OMAP kernels too. There are some patches being posted for that but there are reports of basic SD card functionality breaking because of them. It's all still under heavy development..

(Bluetooth)

Just a quick question; How well does the bluetooth work? Has it been benchmarked/tested properly? (I'm asking this because IIRC bluetooth is in the same chip as WiFi and so it should alse be over that SDIO link. Correct?)

Wrong - BT is using one of UARTs. I've only tested basic OBEX transfers and they do work, no benchmarks yet.

The BRF6300 chip allows up to 4Mbps transfers but OMAP3 unfortunately only goes to 3Mbps so that is the rate. There is also a McBSP port connected to the BT chip but Notaz didn't have any luck streaming audio across it. The BlueZ driver has changed a lot since then but no one has gone back to try again as far as I know.

BTW, I tried BT last week on a recent image. My laptop found it and I tried to connect. I got a message on the Pandora LCD that my computer was trying to access it so I chose to allow it. My laptop then asked for a passcode so I typed 0000 which is the only default one I know. Pandora didn't like that code and shut down the link and my laptop told me it was denied. That's as close as I got to testing it but I probably just don't know what I'm doing.

Are there any plans to implement a disable option for WiFI for when I don't want it on?

Sure, it's off by default and you switch it on when you need it.

BTW: MPEG-4 works with 15% CPU usage using hardware DSPs on the beagleboard:

http://felipec.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/new-project-gst-dsp-with-beagleboard-demo-image/

The DSPs use Kernel 2.6.32 for the moment, we're at 2.6.28. And we will NOT switch to a newer kernel before release - such things can be done afterwards

But Please tell me that at some point, there is an understanding that the WIFI will be 100% at some point once its sorted... right?

Yes, it will be
First we were fearing it might be hardware as well, that was when the drivers weren't working. The drivers ARE now working. It's the SDIO bus that's making trouble at the moment, and as notaz pointed out, that's on the other OMAP systems as well, so it's not a driver issue.

For a better understanding:
To achieve WiFi, you need multiple things:
1) A driver that knows how to talk to the WiFi module. That's what did cost DJWillis a lot of his time and he got it to work.
2) Some way that the SoC can communicate to the WiFi module. This can be USB, it can be SDIO. USB is working nice, but SDIO is pretty new and therefore still buggy in the Linux world. We're using SDIO, and that needs to be fixed.