Following on from the SD label post of oh, a day or so ago, Dragoon has uploaded a collection of download-and-print stickers for your card pampering pleasure. The link was added to the original blog entry, but we figured the pretty pictures made it worth a new tweet. There is also a thread on the gp32x boards where you can throw down your requests, and throw up your contributions. Get amongst it.
We heard you liked blogs, so we’re microblogging the blog. On the suggestion of Benjymous, the blog has been piped into Twitterfeed so you don’t miss a thing while er, rock climbing and that sort of thing. Follow us here: http://twitter.com/pandorablog
A new post from EvilDragon on the official blog…
Hi,
I told you, cpasjuste is currently working on a simple and clear launcher, using skeezix libpnd to work with PXML.
cpasjuste just posted a small sneak preview of the menu, you can see how PXML works (showing icons in categories, preview pictures, etc.).
skeezix libpnd is already pretty advanced. Together with vimacs, he made it possible for EVERY dev to easily use PXML and therefore, automatically add games and programs into the right categories as soon as you put an SD card into the slot!
We will show a video with that feature included into the matchbox UI as well soon!
Now onto some news on the case: The company is working on it already, however, a few files got errors while exporting them. We are working together to fix them, should only take a couple of days.
Just to clarify, the video you’re about to see is not the shiny Angstrom GUI we’ve already seen, but a stripped back launcher alternative for the minimalist crowd. Think of it as the new Gmenu2x. 
Yes, yes, the dreaded D word. It does sound like it’s only a little blip on the radar, though. And here in the Pandora community, we know blips.
Anyway, the moulding company found an error on one of the parts and need to tweak it, so it’s going to take a little longer
-craigix
It probably won’t be much of a delay (it’s just a missing join on one part), I do wish we had done an SLA* at the same time though, but never mind. -craigix
Just another day at the office by the sounds of it. There are still plenty of other things going full steam behind the scenes (software development, keypad layout) so it’s not like the pause button has been pressed. We’re really looking forward to crossing that first item off the To Do list though…
* SLA (Stereolithography) is another prototyping method.
We’re filing this one under Why Didn’t We Think Of It. Lover of fine details Dragoon from the gp2x.de forums has created this snappy set of SD card labels, replacing the boring onslaught of GB ratings and speed classes with something far more edible. N64 might be a little optimistic, but what can we say, he knows how to market these things.
Source, via pandora-blog.de
Update: Dragoon has kindly uploaded some tasty label designs for all to use. Grab them now from the Pandora File Archive. (Oh, and if you hadn’t heard of the archive before this, best you bookmark it now.)
If EvilDragon’s latest Angstrom video didn’t float your boat, perhaps it’s worth checking that you’re actually in the water. Or, maybe you’re just holding out for some Gentoo news. And Gentoo news we have, courtesy of Viridior and his merry band of distro devs.
Hey, we did a lot of good work to get Gentoo ported to the armv7-a platform. Looks like we will have something to install the day you get your Pandora. No worries, this is the ‘dev’ image, finalized user images are the next goal and can be produced much quicker.
Gentoo-pandora-dev-0.0.2 is released. (And it works great on the BeagleBoard)
You can see the full software inventory here.
Highlights…
[software]
bash
vim
nano
screen[compiling]
armv7a-softfloat-linux-gnueabi toolchain
gcc-4.3.2
python-2.5
perl-5.8
distcc[networking] (usb works) (eth not tested but should work)
ssh
nfs
ntp
autofs
rsync
wireless-toolsInstallation instructions here
You can find us in our normal stomping grounds in FreeNode#gentoo-pandora
Did someone say commercial game? Back in January we reported that a Pandora port of Caster was being considered. This time around, there’s no need for careful wording or a rumour tag. GP32x member Svartalf has informed us that all the lower case j’s have been dotted, and Caster is heading for both x86 Linux and Pandora. More from the man himself:
It still lacks a few things before it can go into beta on the X86 Linux side of things, so it’s going to be a short bit before that is ready- from there, we only lack a few tweaks inside the game and SDL 1.3 to make it play nice with ES implementations other than the iPhone one. Pricing for the Linux and Pandora versions will be the same as the Windows and MacOS versions and will be obtainable from Elecorn’s sales site.
Craigix has posted an interesting question in the forums. He’s asked what commerical games we would be interested in seeing on the Pandora and why.
After reading thought the Gizmondo liquidation details I was surprised to see just how cheap they obtained some of their game ports for the console. Of course having those games didn”t save the system in any way but…
If we could throw some money at having a commercial game or two ported over which ones would they be and why?
Which do you think would get the Pandora the most attention or the most sales?
Or is the money better spent elsewhere?
Could we see some commercial games coming out on the Pandora? Or is it generally a bad idea taking ideas from the failed Gizmondo?
New blog post from ED, with video:
Hi,
still waiting for the case, however, I got some news: According to the factory, it should be finished by next week, so there was a one week delay because of the chinese new year here. Could be better, but it could also be worse!So, in the meantime, I injected MDaves theme into my Angström image of my Pandora devboard and can show you a nice video (HD
).
It shows, how easy it is to change the icon size to suit the menu to your needs.
As a little bonus I also ran some first version of ScummVM. Some seconds are missing though, as the video footage was broken for some reason.
Enjoy
Skeezix says:
We’re building a system to make app installation stupidly easy.
We’re still banging it out, but assuming it all comes together and works (and it should, we’re nearly there) .. you’ll download special apps in a bundle, a .pnd file. Inside that will be a directory structure and so on for the app to live, but users won’t care (unless they unpack it into a directory.)
So an entire app (all its data etc) can be downloaded as one file, dropped onto an SD card. Stick the card into Pandora, and te launcher shows the app in its category. Tap to run and it just works. No unzip, no set up.. just download and run. Piece of cake. (You are of course able to unpack it, futz with it, put it in anywhere you want on sD or in NAND, etc.)
We also intend to build the OS in such a way that you can just use Angstron packages if you want to, but thats suboptimal. (I can explain why if you want.)
Anyway, its going to be easier than on the gp2x, which was not really rocket science either
We or I will start writing up some docs on the wiki soon, so folks can get an idea how it wll/does work.
(For devs.. it is pretty easy to pack up the files into a .pnd; trivial on linux, a little work on Windows.)
jeff
Source
Thanks to virtuosos Prometheus and DasFool tuning us in.
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