Pandora’s box has been opened!

On September 30th 2008, I pre-ordered my Pandora

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from gp2xmobile
Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 4:47 PM
subject Your order from GP32 Distribution Ltd has been processed successfully

Order total: 208.88 GBP
Card used: Unknown, United States – MasterCard – XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX – Attempt:1
You bought: 1 x TV Cable & 1 x Pandora (Air)

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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 recieving your order in the next 24 hours (weekends not always included), if you chose UPS shipping you should recieve 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.
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Friday, Feb 11, 2011 1 PM
My Pandora was delivered!!!!

first impressions

When I opened the box I was surprised to see the lack of polish in my package. One very small but useful pamphlet. My battery was already installed in the unit, and a blank in the box, which very much surprised me. The box it shipped in looked like it traveled around the planet a few times. The TV out cable did not ship with my unit.

Holding the pandora it feels very solid, but at the same time creeks quite a bit with normal usage.

Booting the pandora console the first time was very exciting to see (jn person, on my own pandora

You get asked a few questions on boot, like location, date, time, which GUI interface you want. Choice between XFCE and MiniMenu. XFCE is a full linux desktop and MiniMenu is a fullscreen menu based application launcher. I have only had experience with XFCE, so I cannot comment on the menuing system.

The system booted nicely felt very peppy. First thing I did was connect to the internet via wifi which was easy and painless. However this excitement was short lived. While it connected quickly and easily it would stop working after shorter and shorter intervals. I adjusted my access point DTIM from 1 to 255 which seems like it made the wifi connection more stable and it seemed to last longer before becoming NON-functional. Eventually I found RC1 Firmware which solved most of the problems, but it still seems to become dead after extended periods of time. I did put the AP back to original settings.

NOTE: all experiences from here on out were on RC1 firmware

Once I had a fairly stable internet connection I installed Firefox 4.01 beta and a bunch of emulators and began to play. I am extremely happy with the firefox and with the emulators, mame, snes, n64, sega all running great.

My next challenge was getting online via bluetooth from my phone and T-mobile. I tried installing all kinds of different software from the repo and other places, re-flashed several times after forcing the overwrite of some libraries

One thing I thought was awesome through all of this was the way pnd packages are handled, I reflashed several times but always had my bookmarks and history and passwords. Cool stuff!!

After great amount of playing I found this post on the openpandora boards
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/1495-3g-over-usb/

Using the scripts outlined there I was able to plug in my phone (Nokia 5230) via USB and use it as a modem. My Nokia 5230 was plugged in via USB host port on the pandora and found the modem without issue.

USB CONNECTION HOWTO

1) Create the following files

File: /etc/ppp/usb-chat
TIMEOUT 120
ABORT ‘BUSY’
ABORT ‘ERROR’
ABORT ‘NO CARRIER’
” ‘ATE1′
# Change according to your carrier
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”internet2.voicestream.com”
OK ATD*99***1#
# or OK ATD*99#
CONNECT \d\c

File: /etc/ppp/peers/usb
noauth
connect “/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/usb-chat”
defaultroute
/dev/ttyACM0
115200
persist
debug
passive
noipdefault
usepeerdns
# Varies between carriers, some don’t even need these.
user “o2″
password “o2″

2) Then as root run
pon usb

to turn it off

poff usb

Thats it, you are connected!!!!!!

Woo Hoo, cool stuff, however, not quite what I was going for, I wanted bluetooth connection dial up networking, so cables are not needed!!!

BLUETOOTH CONNECTION HOWTO

No worries, this works great on the pandora too. I just needed to do a little more playing.

First of all:

1) Turn on bluetooth from the system menu

2) Use the bluetooth icon to pair your phone with it

3) Create the ppp files

File: /etc/ppp/peers/bt
noauth
connect “/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/bt-chat”
defaultroute
/dev/rfcomm0
115200
persist
debug
passive
noipdefault
usepeerdns
# Varies between carriers, some don’t even need these.
user “o2″
password “o2″

File: /etc/ppp/bt-chat
TIMEOUT 120
ABORT ‘BUSY’
ABORT ‘ERROR’
ABORT ‘NO CARRIER’
” ‘ATE1′
# Change according to your carrier
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”internet2.voicestream.com”
OK ATD*99***1#
# or OK ATD*99#
CONNECT \d\c

Now we need to connect to the proper phone and port

4) open a terminal and become root, then run the following command

sdptool search DUN inquiring

With output similar to this:
sdptool search DUN inquiring
Inquiring …
Searching for DUN on D8:75:33:48:B1:19 …
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0×10017
Service Class ID List:
“Dialup Networking” (0×1103)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0×0100)
“RFCOMM” (0×0003)
Channel: 22
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0x454e
encoding: 0x6a
base_offset: 0×100
Profile Descriptor List:
“Dialup Networking” (0×1103)
Version: 0×0100

Notice two things about this output, the phone bluettoth address and the channel used for modem.

5) Run the following command

rfcomm bind 0 D8:75:33:48:B1:19 22

Notice the Address and Channel in the command.

6) Run the following command
mknod /dev/ppp c 108 0 2> /dev/null

7) Run the following command to connect to the internet via bluetooth
pon bt

or to disconnect

poff bt

create a script to connect to the internet without having to type a crapload

I created the following file to connect to the internet via my bluetooth phone:

File: /usr/bin/bt
mknod /dev/ppp c 108 0 2> /dev/null
killall pppd 2> /dev/null
rfcomm release 0 2> /dev/null
rfcomm bind 0 D8:75:33:48:B1:19 22 2> /dev/null
pon bt 2> /dev/null

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First few days playing, hope this info is helpful to someone.

I am very happy with my product!!!!!!!!!!

penguinbait~~~~~~~~~~

more to follow~~