Author: chuma

I’m no expert, but on the surface, the Pepper Pad seems like a great machine for reading e-books. It’s got a nice 8.4″ 800×600 screen with easily adjustable brightness. It’s got a large built-in scroll wheel, as well as an arrow pad. It’s ruggedized too, with rubber edges and a rubber screen frame.

However, right now the Pepper has a few shortcomings as a book reader:

• lack of support for PDF and other e-book formats (but PDF is coming soon)
• short battery life.

Right now the only thing you’ll be reading on the Pepper is HTML and plain text files. Also, there’s no way to adjust the font size of a page on the fly, so you better make sure your files look decent before saving them. The one place where Pepper works well is in the “Keep” functionality – if you can view it, you can save it on your Pepper for offline viewing anytime. In my testing this has worked darn well for slurping and saving books from Project Gutenberg, for example.

The Pepper makes every attempt to conserve power (ie. the external video is off unless plugged in, the speakers are powered off unless in use, etc) but the three biggest power draws are the screen, CPU, and WiFi, in that order. You can disable the WiFi manually to save power, and MontaVista Linux is supposed to support Intel’s SpeedStep technology on the XScale CPU, effectively lowering the clock speed and therefore saving power when the CPU isn’t busy. It’s hard to tell if it is though. I haven’t tested this at all, but personally I don’t think you can get more than four hours of uptime out of the Pepper’s battery, and that is with everything unnecessary powered off and with the screen at the lowest brightness.

Pepper has said that support for formats like PDF and MS Word are coming in the “near future” – I really hope it’s sooner rather than later!

Turns out you don’t even have to wait for new apps to be written for Pepper in order to enjoy new functionality: there are a lot of free browser-based apps out there that work great with Pepper’s browser (thanks to its Mozilla roots). Here are some that I’ve started using:

• eMessenger light: a web-based MSN Messenger client. I tried all of them and this one sems to work the best with the fewest ads too.
• Meebo: another awesome-looking web-based IM client. Seems to support AIM/ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to login on my Pepper, but it works great in FireFox.
• Blox0r: awesome web/XUL based RSS feed reader.

There are zip and unzip tools already installed on the pad, however they are called:

minizip

and

miniunzip

respectively.

I just had an enjoyable time setting up my living room devices in Pepper’s Remote Control app. Unfortunately, the documentation in that app is very sparse… so I’m here to help you download remote codes. Personally, I hate teaching a “learning” remote — tediousness defined.

1. Find the remote you need codes for, and note the make and model. Not the device model, but the model number on the remote itself.
2. Open Remote Control on your Pepper, open the Web tab, and go to the list of remote codes at the Linux Infrared Remote Code site
3. Browse to your manufacturer, and look for the model number of your remote. There may be more than one file for it, if so use the larger file (it probably has more buttons defined). Tapping on any file will download and install it into the Devices tab. You’ll also see a download confirmation message in the status bar.
4. Switch over to the devices tab. You’ll see a new device under the manufacturer’s name that has no device type. Open it and assign it the correct device type, and some buttons should appear. Try them out!
5. You can add new or change the assigned codes for the buttons by following the documentation.

Sean who runs the nice looking but content-deprived Pepper Hacks website, offered up this tip:

You can enable and disable services by using the

initdconfig

command. It behaves the same as the ‘chkconfig’ command for RedHat / Fedora Linux. Thanks Sean! So to enable the SSH server you just have to do:

initdconfig ssh on

at the root XTerm.

Since I pre-ordered my Pepper, I’ve been casually browsing around looking for some kind of small, wireless, full-size-ish keyboard to use with it. Don’t get me wrong, even though my thumbs are huge, I am getting used to and quickly learning the layout of the thumb-pads, but for more serious text input I knew that something larger would be needed.

Since the Pepper has built-in Bluetooth I’ve been looking at those, but the only ones that seem to exist are either the Apple Wireless Bluetooth keyboards, which are more or less full-size, or foldable types for use with PDAs. I wouldn’t buy either without trying them out first, as I can be quite picky when it comes to keyboards — my favourite of all time is the IBM Model M. But in the meantime there’s a really quick, easy, and cheap way to hook up an external keyboard or mouse to your Pad: a USB to PS/2 keyboard/mouse adapter! These can be had in many places for around $10 to $15. They’re powered off of the USB bus, and converts any old PS/2 keyboard or mouse into a USB HID device. Sweet! I’ve got one plugged in right now with an IBM Extended Access II keyboard, works like a charm!

Unfortunately, right off the get-go I was having problems getting my music and video onto the pad (which is still without a name, and no, I’m not calling it Sgt. Pepper). I had initially planned on using my USB->CF card reader to put files onto it. Unfortunately, the Linux 2.4 kernel doesn’t get along with my card reader. Not Linux or Pepper’s fault – apparently my card reader just happens to be “quirky”. Considering it cost me net $0 I’m not too pissed.

There’s also of course the Pepper Desktop software, which is supposed to let you sync the Pad’s contents with your desktop. But still no joy – I added files into the Music Library on the Desktop and followed all the instructions to start a sync, but it died at Step 4. Looking into the log files, there’s something rotten going on on the Desktop’s side I think. I sure as hell hope it isn’t Norton AntiVirus doing something bad, but I suspect something’s just broken. No joy!

Next, I thought “I know! I have this external USB hard drive with backups of all my music and video on it – I’ll just plug it into the USB port and awaaay we go!” Which should have worked. But didn’t, even after I converted the drive to FAT32. The reason? Pepper assumes that any USB device will have only one partition, sda1. Well… in order to have a 186GB FAT32 partition, it has to be within an extended partition – meaning it showed up on sda5. But even trying to mount it manually failed, which was strange to me – something just doesn’t want to read an extended partition table or something?

Finally I hacked me a solution. Samba (the Windows File Sharing client for UNIXes) is installed and works just fine on the Pepper. I suspect it will be integrated into the software soon, but all I needed to do was mount my SMB share into /media/usbhd (where Pepper expects a USB disk to be mounted) and Eureka! It worked.

I’m really hoping to solve this sync problem soon, because it’s by far the most elegant way to be doing things.

Photos of the inside of Pepper, so I don’t have to take mine apart!

Images in PDF file

My Pepper Pad was shipped from Canada (where it is assembled), to the USA, and back to Canada.

Canada Customs is making lots of money off of this transaction.