The Open Pandora thread
 

Home since friday 1-21 :D

Re: My Pandora is almost here...
 

Is this from the first batch? I'm stunned at the delay, but glad you've (nearly! ;) ) got one finally.

Re: My Pandora is almost here...
 

Yes, first batch. Two years later. Not that techs are so much further in the field of umpc, as far as I know.

Re: My Pandora is almost here...
 

It's home.
And, err.... it's not your ordinary, mainstream device!

First impression: it's bulkier than expected from photos. XFCE that's onboard is quick enough. Both midori and arora crash in the first few minutes of use on quite simple sites.
Can't see how to press left and right mouse buttons - resorting to screen tapping.
No tv cable in the box. And that's all for now.

Re: My Pandora is almost here...
 

wow the n900 looks tiny next to it haha. So how is it? planning on doing a lilttle review? btw, can maemo be installed on it?

Re: My Pandora is almost here...
 

The N900 IS tiny (esp. the screen).

How much did the Pandora cost you?

Re: My Pandora is almost here...
 

If you don't know how to right-click or where you TV out cable is you should probably go have a look at the official forums @ boards.openpandora.org.

Chromium and Firefox seem to be recognised as the best browsers despite neither being pre-installed. Flash even works in Firefox with a little help from Nokia.

Re: My Pandora is almost here...
 

Good to see you got it.
I had mine on pre-order for well over a year and canceled it December last year. Bought myself a new trail bike helmet and some weights! Big heavy plates! A much better deal I thought! N900 is far superior!

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

In terms of usability and completeness, and in comparison to the N900, it's a toy.
But if you forget your experience with the N900, you see that the Pandora is quite a complete and very portable UMPC and has enormous potential, due to the openness of the software & hardware, and the good performances.
Plus, on the forums there's the same relaxed and constructive mood that once one coud get here.
I am not the one who can install maemo on it, I lack the know-how, but since they are similar, hardware-wise, it's very likely it would be easy for one of the fine coders here. Maybe throwing in on a sdcard is enough?

1 Pandora + 1 spare 4000 mAh battery + 1 TV cable + shipping was 239 GBP.

Thanks, now I got updated info. Presently running Firefox 3.6.12 from pnd. Got Flash working with a little help of ajack ;)

I've flashed the latest beta firmware, and I'm bootingfrom an SD card (experience on N900 convinced me to never boot from SoC NAND ;) ).
Everything works beautifully.

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

It will take you 2 months(TM) to get bored of that device ;)

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

More than the time it took to get me bored of Android! :)

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

I am looking forward to playing soon.....

------------------------------------------------

date Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 11:34 AM

Hello,
...
This is to confirm your Pandora has been shipped.

If you are in the UK you can look forward to receiving your order in the next 24 hours (weekends not always included), if you chose UPS shipping you should receive your order in the next 48 hours (weekends not included). Airmail will take 2-12 days.

We want to thank you for sticking with the Pandora project for all this time. We hope you will enjoy the final product. You can head over to gp32x.com to talk on the forums and soon enjoy your Pandora.

Thanks so much,

Craig and the Pandora team.

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

Pandora was nice gadget about 2 years ago, at that time it was a good community driven project but it has been constantly tainted because of bashing they have been doing to gamepark holdings.

The fundings have been very obscure, shady bussiness practices and now pandora express, you get your pandora in a short time when there are other people on the queue who bought it more than a year ago.

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

I bought my pandora in october of 2008 not sure what you're talking about?

I will make my own projects, I just need some hardware, and I can't wait until it gets here.

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

It's not bad to play with, it's like a tiny workhorse, and receiving it now after 2 years is like a late Xmas present. PB, I'm glad you're in... Let me know of your hacks - you're going to turn it as a glove, aren't you ;) Also beware the ac adapter is junk - mine is already dead, and another fellow's one seems to explode: charge the Pandora through usb or take a good quality psp charger, 5V 2A.

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

Well I am excited, I have not really followed the project at all. It just made me mad. Now that its coming, I am like a kid, I cant wait for it to arrive. I am very much looking forward to playing with the pandora.

People said the same thing about the n800/n810 running QT and KDE, its not really usable, it just a toy. To those who ran it full time, and used a bt mouse, and usb joysticks and Koffice, and cups printing, and cd/DVD burning it was better than the original interface. While this may not what everyone wants, its exactly what I am looking for. :D:D:D

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

It is already easily overclockable (there's a xfce menu voice for that). Mine goes happily up to 1 GHz (crashes at 1.1 GHz). Flash 10.1 from ti works better than on the n900. The pnd package system is a good thing: embeds the application package in a single file which stays on the sd card and gets attached and detached from the root filesystem at your will.
So long for now... Waiting for your P to get home!

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

You're very lucky indeed! I'm waiting for mine.

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

What kind of battery life are you getting at 1ghz?

Is it auto switching up to 1Ghz, or only selectable?

Man I wish it was shipping UPS, it says AIR 2-12 days

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

Battery life has pros and cons. When on and operating, the device has a very low energy consumption. I haven't brought it to charge zero yet in my use pattern (it's only 2 weeks I've been playing with it) but it seems that the 10 hours use promise is true. On the other hand, when it's suspended to ram, it still consumes enough energy (it's clocked to 14 MHz according to its engineers) to suck the 4000 mAh battery in about 24 hours. So use it or turn it off! At least until they find a way to lower current consumed in sleep state. The bootstrap time isn't particularly long, indeed, apart for the first time.
One thing you should do when you get it is update to the latest version of the nand firmware. It's a breeze: you download it as a zip file, expand it to the root of a sd card, place it in the left slot, turn the pandora on with right shoulder button pressed, and when you get a boot menu, you choose to boot from the card - this flashes the firmware to the internal nand.
Then, you can transfer the firmware to the left sd card, if you like. I think it's better, to spare the nand use cycles and to have much more space for it. Instructions are on the wiki - it's easy even if slow, and I had no issues with that. Presently, my firmware is again on the nand, because it's the RC1 of the new version, and I'll move it on the sd card again when it's final.
Concerning clock speed, you have the option of choosing lower and upper limits of clock, upper limit of cpu voltage, and initial clock when booting. If boot crashes, the subsequent one gets reset to 600 MHz. You can also change max clock on the run through a menu command with a slider.

Re: My Open Pandora is here!
 

This is mainly a reminder to self - even if I bet is also interesting to other new Pandora owners.

On-device toolchain

Debian on the Pandora (à la Qole)

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Openoffice.org on the Pandora (Pandebian project):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JqniVzhhso

It's quick! (firmware: hotfix 5 rc1, clocked at 1000 MHz, with 900 MB swap partition)

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

My pandora came today!!!!!!!!!!

Now I just need to get out of work for the rest of today so I can get home to play with it!!!


:D:D:D:D:D:D

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Great! Cheers! Just the *right* day - while Nokia commits suicide, FOSS gets yet another chance!

I am just reinstalling PanDebian (I had a problem with the sd card and it was damaged). Yesterday, A-OK in instaling the software for my usb 3g modem.

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

LibreOffice on the Open Pandora :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWUxmF0Z1lA

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Could someone here look at patching the wifi driver of the Pandora with the wl1251 patches that work with the N900? It would be nice to have packet injection on Pandora.

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Thanks for the video. Beautiful music - is that Bach?

Still waiting for mine ... but soon i hope...

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Vivaldi - Winter (from the Four Seasons).
They are assembling Pandoras like mad now, and their forums keep growing

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

@debernardis

Not sure why this is in Off Topic, but I just wanted to say that was excellent. Thanks.

The Open Pandora community will help keep the n900 alive. And maybe vice versa.

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Some of my experiences and useful scripts :D

Well they were useful to me ;)

http://tablethacker.com/wp/?p=499&lang=en-us

Did I mention I love this thing.

If you want polish, this ain't it.

If you want to do some retro gaming, this thing is awesome, plays perfectly all my snes, sega, mame roms, some n64 games but not all play.

If you want small portable highly functional linux this is pretty cool. This will replace my laptop in many situations especially during travel and camping.

I have only had this thing for a few days, but so far, I think its awesome!! If you have not gotten yours yet, hang in there, and God Speed!!!!!!

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIaXvC-cczc

pretty peppy!!

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

1-0 for the Pandora :)
Did you try with swapon?

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Nope, I ordered a new 32GB kingston class 6 and I am waiting for it to arrive. I have an 8 in there right now and I am full. My 32 should arrive today and I will setup swap and boot from SD.

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

While in the weekend I wish to boot Meego, or at least run Meego in a chroot.
But... is there no Netbook Meego for Arm, possible?

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Well I am booting Debian squeeze from a tarball I found. I just installed lenny from scratch and it booted up wonderfully. ( I choose to go back to lenny to check out KDE 3.5)

KDE4 on squeeze worked beautifully, network manager and all, but akonadi server and mysql were beating up the disk too much. To remove akonadi server, about 1/2 KDE goes with it, and if you disable it, several things do not work properly in KDE. So I am playing with KDE 3.5 on lenny, and will load full gnome on squeeze.

I much prefer Debian to Angstrom

I would skip all that pandebian stuff and boot debian directly, its awesome.

I have boot to squeeze or lenny or pandora-rootfs or gentoo, I was even able to setup and test booting from USB disk.

I have not had this much fun in years :p

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Now this pandora thingy should be somewhat smaller, have a kbd like n900 or n97, rf chip, and you get the debian phone I was dreaming of :)

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

I really like this thing, its nice to not have to compile every app you want to have. Having a full repo of software to choose from.

http://tablethacker.com/wp/?p=545

hit me up if you want to get a copy

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Are we having fun yet? Oh yes, yes we arm :)

Ubuntu on Pandora, yes we arm!!



http://tablethacker.com/images/ubuntu1.png


http://tablethacker.com/images/ubuntu2.png

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

Whats meego?

Re: The Open Pandora thread
 

:) http://www.meego.com/
Where your money is bound to be poured

How did you do the ubuntu?