Category: Pepper Pad

  • Pepper Hacking bears some fruit…

    I’ve actually created some things with the Pepper SDK! A calculator and a minesweeper game. I didn’t actually write either of the games, but I packed them up as “native” Pepper Keeper apps with the SDK. Nifty.

  • Real mobile Wikipedia

    I’ve seen lots of talk recently about ‘mobile’ versions of Wikipedia. I’m a big fan of Wikipedia and I use it all the time. I’ve looked at all of the “solutions” for so-called mobile versions of Wikipedia and they all suck. First of all, many of them require full-on ‘net access or a cell phone, or they only let you load a subset of the data with limitations. Pffff. What’s the point then? I want everything, all the time, and I want it to be fast. Never mind that the english Wikipedia is huge – an XML dump of just the page contents is 7GB uncompressed.

    Hrm. I seem to have these two little handheld computers here, and they run Linux and have 20GB hard disks you say? Well geez, what are we waiting for! All we need to run MediaWiki – the free software that powers Wikipedia – is Linux (check), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), and PHP (web scripting language) – often called LAMP for short. Oh, and we need a dump of Wikipedia, of course – those are generated regularly. Off we go:

    B1B

    The Pad 3, with its Fedora Core underpinnings, makes getting LAMP install ridiculously easy. Open an xterm (Ctrl-Shift-1). Issue this command:

    yum install httpd php-mysql mysql-server
    

    Let it resolve all dependencies and install all that stuff. Great.

    B2B

    in contrast to its younger brother, the Pad 2 is based on MontaVista Linux CEE and Professional 3.1. This makes a LAMP stack harder to setup for two reasons:

    • the included apache-dev package is broken six ways from sunday
    • there are no MySQL or PHP packages included.

    I manually patched the busted files from apache-dev: in short, one of the config files in /usr/share/apache-2.0/build/ has to have all of its paths fixed, and the same for the apr-config script. I used the generic MySQL 4.1.21 source RPMs to build some halfway decent RPMs for the Pad 2: you still have to manually setup your my.cf and a startup script though. PHP I compiled and installed from a source tarball. Let it be known that MediaWiki and PHP should also work with thttpd, which is also provided by MontaVista and might not be so broken.

    For MySQL, you will have to set the max_allowed_packet setting to 4M in /etc/my.cnf otherwise your import process could fail.

    B3B

    Follow the MediaWiki setup insructions. In a nutshell: extract the tarball, rename the directory to something useful (like ‘wikipedia’), move the directory to your webroot (/var/www/html), and run the config page to generate LocalSettings.php. You probably want to disable all of the e-mail options, since you won’t be editing this wiki.

    Now, use mysql and delete all the records from the page, revision, and text tables.

    B4B

    Wikipedia provides database dumps as compressed XML files. However we need to import this into the MySQL database. A Java tool called mwdumper is the best way to go about this: it reads the compressed XML and outputs SQL statements, or will even directly connect to a MySQL server and insert them for you. But, this will take FOREVER (at least 24 hours) and if you have to interrupt it, you have to start from scratch. Provided you have another Linux box on which to do some preprocessing though, you can make things easier on yourself. Here’s what to do.

    1. Get a Wikipedia dump file – the one you want is called pages-articles.xml.bz2. Download it to your Linux box. It’ll be big.
    2. Get mwdumper as well.
    3. Get Sun Java 1.4 or 5.0. You can use mwdumper with GNU GCJ, but in my test it’s about 10x slower.
    4. Put both files in a directory and run java -jar mwdumper --format=sql:1.5 pages-articles.bz2 | sed -e 's/^INSERT/INSERT IGNORE/' | split - wikidump- and make sure you have about 7GB of free disk space.
    5. This process will chug along for a while and the result will be a bunch of files called wikidump-aa, wikidump-ab, etc. They contain the SQL statements that inject the data, but we’ve split it up into smaller chunks. That way we can interrupt things in the middle. We changed the INSERT command to INSERT IGNORE so that if we do interrupt things and start importing a file again, MySQL won’t complain about duplicate keys.
    6. Feed the data to the MySQL database on your Pepper: mysql -h pepper -u root -p'password' < wikidump-aa substituting your Pad’s IP, MySQL username and password (the ones you used in the MediaWiki setup, remember?) Or use a shell script to automate this, printing the filename before it starts loading so that you know where you are. We’re talking about 3.8 million wiki pages here. As of this very moment I’m somewhere in file ‘ah’ and I’ve done 784,000 pages.
  • PepperWiki Launch

    I’m launching my Wiki site for the Pepper Pad: PepperWiki!

  • Got a file manager on my Pepper…

    I finally got a decent file manager app running on my Pepper the other day. It’s emelFM, a pretty slick GTK1 file manager. The latest version compiles with the GTK1 RPMs I’ve made, though there are a few bugs in the internationalization files that gettext chokes on that I had to fix. I’ll be working on building source and binary RPMs for the Pepper soon!

  • Pepper Pad beats Nokia 770 in review at Mobile Tech Review

    Mobile Tech Review has posted a very very nice review of the Pepper Pad. They give it 4 stars out of five, while the lackluster Nokia 770 gets 3.5 stars.

  • Software upgrade “shot in the arm” for Pepper coming soon…

    More info about the Pepper’s software update is around, and it’s oh so tasty. It’s also been officially announcedmore coverage on Engadget.

    The applications page on pepper.com has been updated with the three major application enhancemnets coming in Pepper Keeper 2.1:

    • MobiPocket Reader: looks like Pepper hooked up with MobiPocket for an e-book reader. They say you can download content from MobiPocket to your Pepper Pad or Pepper Desktop. Will it work with MobiPocket’s publisher software, so I can convert PDFs for reading on the Pepper? Geez I hope so.
    • Flickr-enabled Photo Library: performance improvements to the already good Photo Library are bundled with Flickr enhancements. You’ll be able to put your Flickr account info on the Pad and publish your photos to Flickr. Did you know that the Photo Library already has lots of easy to use retouching tools – like red-eye reduction, cropping/rotating and more? For me it’s like the best parts of Picasa but portable.
    • TitanTV-enabled Remote Control: I already wrote about setting up the Pad’s excellent Remote Control app, but now it will be integrated with TitanTV’s interactive program guide. You’ll be able to tap on the IPG and the Pepper will automatically take you to the channel, no matter what TV or Satellite/Cable box you have. Sounds frickin’ sweet, except that TitanTV only has US program data – I live in Canada and use StarChoice Satellite TV.

    This is all in addition to the stuff I’ve already talked about: Linux 2.6 kernel, speed improvements, hardware-accelerated video playback, FireFox 1.5 update, and development libraries.

  • How’s the Pepper going? Great, thanks.

    Thought I’d write some more about my Pepper Pad, especially since more and more people are writing about its competition, the Nokia 770.

    I’ve been using the Pad for quite a few months and am enjoying it for the most part. It’s simply great to surf the web on, period. In a few weeks a ton of software updates are scheduled to be released, bringing us a Linux 2.6 kernel, Keeper 2.1 with the latest FireFox 1.5, and finally some developer libraries. Once I get those devel libraries loaded up, I’ll be compiling SDL and then my favourite SDL-based emulators. The new kernel should be bringing us accelerated graphics and video playback… I can’t wait!

  • Pepper Pad Community Forums and WiFi upgrade

    Pepper Pad Community Forums – the official Pepper Pad forums are open now! Can’t wait for that SDK now…

    Also, apparently all new Peppers being shipped will have an upgraded Wi-Fi card, according to mypepperpad.blogspot.com. No idea yet if this is a B/G mode card or what.

  • Pepper’s Internal WiFi Adapter

    It’s a Gemtek WL-672, connected through a CF slot on the Pepper’s mainboard. It’s pretty damn clear in the photos from the FCC that I posted earlier.

    I can’t for the life of me find its POWER CONSUMPTION SPECIFICATIONS though! Argh!

  • E-Books on Pepper – not much yet, but promising

    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!