Pandora Os Snippet 3


Yeah, I just thought if you navigated to the sd card you could edit things on your Pandora so you wouldn't even need a computer.
 
darien said:
So are the contents of .PNDs hidden or can they be viewed?
They're just standard archives (I wanna say zip?), so yes, you should be able to view/modify them with ease.


I'm very sad to hear about oneup, I really enjoy spout (in fact I play it quite frequently on my dingoo, earlier today even. Very addictive & good way to kill time). I wish he could have gotten the help he deserved before things got out of hand. As someone battling with depression myself I know first-hand how tough it can be sometimes to do the simplest of tasks, and it is always a tragedy when it gets the best of people. Ed, please pass on our sincerest condolences to his family & friends if you're able to; let them know that he brought joy to at least a few complete strangers.
 
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second exodous said:
Yeah, I just thought if you navigated to the sd card you could edit things on your Pandora so you wouldn't even need a computer.

The Pandora's running Linux too... I'm saying that because the PND is an ISO with one or two files tacked on, you can probably just mount it like you'd mount an ISO. Even if that's not possible, I'm sure libpnd has support for it somewhere.
 
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Vorporeal said:
second exodous said:
Yeah, I just thought if you navigated to the sd card you could edit things on your Pandora so you wouldn't even need a computer.

The Pandora's running Linux too... I'm saying that because the PND is an ISO with one or two files tacked on, you can probably just mount it like you'd mount an ISO. Even if that's not possible, I'm sure libpnd has support for it somewhere.
As I understand, it mounts the PND to a hashed directory (which you can visit) in order to execute.
 
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libpnd is a bunch of stuff; pndnotifyd is the daemon that watches for files ot move or directories to appear etc, and then creates/removes .desktop files in response. When you run a .desktop, the Exec line refers to a pnd_run.sh with various arguments to invoke the pnd-file. I've also build pnd_run (binary, not sh-script) which parses the PXML.xml and then invokes pnd_run.sh for you, so you cna run pnds directly without figuring out the pnd_run.sh arguments. That all said, pnd_run.sh includes command line arguments for mounting the pnd onto a dir of your choce, and late runmounting it. Normally an exrecute is mount, run, and unmount .. but you cna do it in stages if you like .. mount, inspect and futz with, and unmount.

As the ISO-part of the pnd is at the front, you can in fact open up a PND with an iso tool and get a peek (though if you save it, you'll probabyl lose the icon and appended PXML.xml, so best to use pnd-aware tools to do that and thus preserve that information.)

To override files, just drop them in the appdata and the app will just see them as if they're in the pnd-file, without needing to modify the pnd-file itself.

It is pretty awesome, if I do say so myself ;)

Currently ISO and SquashFS is supported as the payload format, but we can support a long list of types pretty trivially .. its mostly a question of performance etc.

SquashFS and ISO are easy to make on pretty much all OSes, so should be very handy.

jeff
 
Is there some sort of global pnd config file?

I'm thinking it would be nice to customize things like where to search for PND files and what to do with them.

skeezix said:
Put pnds you want in menu in /pandora/menu
and for desktop, put them in /pandora/desktop
I would prefer this to be specified in the config file (with those values as default) allowing the user to change it to whatever if they want, or just leave them at default values.
 
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Interesting.

Can new "sections" be added to "/etc/pandora/conf/desktop"?

For example adding one that searches for emulator PNDs in some path, but "spits" the .desktop files into Desktop/Emulators instead.

It seems that all of it is configurable, so I'm happy. It's just matter of tweaking the config file (like everything in Linux :p).
 
Also see the libpnd hub wiki, which has the developer level docs. The conf examples are out of date mind you, but the docs are good.

For now, /etc/pandora/conf/desktop has only two sections and its aware of them, but one of these days I'm going to make it just iterate across any 'unknown' sections and just add them to the queue of searchpath->targets which could be handy. For now it knows about the two sectoins, but you can of course direct them to anywhere.

libpnd stuff doesnm't need a lot of configuration, but I made the conf system way overkill; you can turn the conf-file searchpath to include SD cards, and then override confs just by dropping copies onto your SD, without modifying NAND, say. (I had it doing that until very recently, but for security I have disabled some of the searchpaths scope .. ie: pnd_run.sh is now only looked for in NAND, just to make it a little harder to root yourself)

So yeah, you should be pretty happy .. nothing is hardcoded hardly. Its all script and conf behaviour, with directions from the daemons.. so you cna alter a script and do whatever you like

jeff
 
Hey Skeezix,

What format of icons can we use for the desktop? .ico .png etc etc?
 
jonlad1 said:
Hey Skeezix,

What format of icons can we use for the desktop? .ico .png etc etc?
You should use .png, but theoretically speaking it depends on what's showing the pnds. XFCE supports a plethora of formats but pmenu might not, so just use png. It can do anything you want anyway.
 
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