Pandora + Debian = Happy Penguins :p

Well its been a while since my last post, I had to RMA my pandora, it took a couple weeks, It had one faulty SD slot, but this is all another story. I have had it back for a few weeks and I have been a busy penguin, I have setup a cross compile environment and have installed compile tools on pandora. compiled a few things, started down the KDE 3.5 path, building qt, and arts, and ran into several problems. I really miss my scratchbox maemo environment which I hated, however its probably cause I am following 5 sets of instructions that all assume I know more than I do. Anyway this was all going pretty slow, so I started looking around and I ran into this http://pandorawiki.org/Debian_On_SD (Thanks Stuckie)

On that Debian on SD page you can download a bootable Debian image. I promptly did this and installed KDE4 against some warnings. It actually ran great, but the akonadi server which is required for KDEPIM and other fun things just hits mysql (disk) constantly and it kills performance and I ran into many other issues that I was able to overcome, but I really wanted to see how KDE 3.5 would run.

I then went back to the page and followed the build from scratch instructions building from lenny instead of squeeze. I ran into some issues not addressed in the wiki, but it was what got me threw it all, thanks again Stuckie!!
http://pandorawiki.org/Debian_On_SD

Anyway, So Here is what I ended up with: KDE 3.5.10

Open up a terminal (ALT -k) opens konsole

ICEWEASLE!! Iceweasle is a mozilla based browser, I installed the grabanddrag extension. gnash is in the repo, but it just pegged the cpu when I tried to watch video, so I uninstalled it.

Full suite of OO openoffice

Cups and printing from whatever you want :p In my office, I setup the Ricoh printer, it found it without me having to define it. My coworker spent three weeks getting his mac to print, debian 1, osx 0

Installing applications using synaptic

I added some pandora menus so I could add some keyboard shortcuts to make things easier.

Important information:

This is MY setup, I am sharing as I think its pretty cool. So things are setup to my likings, and you can configure most everything. Just note if you add a new user, all the shortcuts and customizations I have done will not be in the new users profile should you choose to create one. Also note this does not use PND files, they are of no use in this system.

CPU is set to 800mhz on boot. If you want to change this back to 600 (the default), go to /etc/pandora/conf and change line default:800 to default:600 and reboot.

If you want to change the machine name from pandorabait, edit the following files and reboot.
/etc/hostname
/etc/hosts

Input issues:

When you first boot up, the mouse button used on the right hand nub seems to take about 4-6 clicks before it starts responding??.

Touchscreen is using evtouch and it is a bit, uh, well not working great. It is not very precise and sometimes you need to click on a different part of the screen and come back to where you want to click. This is usable, but not perfect by any means. I have all the tslib parts included and a extra xorg.conf, but I cannot seem to get it calibrated. Hopefully someone else can get it working and let me know?

If you boot to console or switch to fullscreen console. not all the keys work properly, for example I cannot make a : which means you need to edit files with nano instead of vi.

Shortcuts:

(F11) = Fullscreen
(ALT – L) = Toggle LED’s on/off
(ALT – k) = konsole
(ALT – w) = toggle wifi (enabled by default on KDE login)
(ALT – b) = toggle bluetooth
(ALT – SPACE) = Maximize Window / Unmaximize Window
(CTRL – SPACE) = Move Window
(Pandora Button) = Kmenu
(SHIFT – UP) = Switch Desktop up
(SHIFT – DOWN) = Switch Desktop down
(SHIFT – RIGHT) = Switch Desktop right
(SHIFT – LEFT) = Switch Desktop left

I do not have any auto dimming setup but the brightness up/down keys work in KDE, you can dim until off and also diable LED’s to save power. Just don’t forget its running when you see it all dark :p

Boot Info:

SWAP Swap space will automatically be mounted IF you label the swap partition “SWAP” or if you manually edit /etc/fstab with your layout. (e2label /dev/mmcblk?p? SWAP) I boot from SD slot 1 and mount swap on SD slot 2

You need at least 4GB free to untar the archive , I would recommend as much as you can afford, 5GB MIN partition would give you 1GB free space.
Default Boot is /dev/mmcblk0p1 (mmc 0:1)
Make sure to edit /boot.txt and change device names if you are not booting from /dev/mmcblk0p1

untar the archive in the root of /dev/mmcblk0p1

When booting, hold the right trigger when turning the pandora on, and it will bring up a menu, boot from SD:01 unless you changed the device

Boot time 1.5 minutes (90 seconds)
30 seconds more after login.

This is all about a weeks work in my spare time, so there may be a bunch of things that do not work I have not run across yet, there are a lot of apps.

User = pandora
Password = deb1an

If anyone wants a copy of the image it will be posted soon, I need to put on another server, my cable modem is slow and the image is 1.6GB if you want it sooner, let me know, I’ll send you a link.

Thank you Pandora Team and Debian and Stuckie, I love my little debian box, ~penguinbait

videos and links to follow

Just unzip on SD and boot

http://173.10.44.233/debian-kde3-pb-final3.tar.bz2

change boot.txt if not booting from /dev/mmcblk0p1
setenv bootargs debug root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rw rootdelay=2 console=ttyS0,115200n8 vram=6272K omapfb.vram=0:3000K video=/dev/fb0 splash
ext2load mmc 0:1 0×80300000 /boot/uImage
bootm 0×80300000