Posts Tagged console
Will You Be Opening Pandoras Box Before Christmas?
Pandora - The Open Source Hand Held
You’ve never heard of the Pandora? OK, let me fill you in: it’s an open source, hand held, console running Linux. Just a hairs breadth bigger than a Nintendo DS this beast is far more powerful than the DS and PSP.
Today (Sun, 5th Oct) is the closing date if you want to pre-order one from the first batch. They’ll be released before Christmas. If you don’t get in today, you’ll have to wait until early 2009 for the second batch.
Some specs of this baby beast are:
- ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
- 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
- PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
- 800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
- Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
- Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
- Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
- 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
- Around 10+ Hours battery life
Test boards of the Pandora can already run a PSone emulator without breaking sweat and it’s SNES emulator is running so fast they have to hold it back! Similar to the GP2x (no relation) it has a TV-out which is excellent news for the plethora of emulators (and ROMs) it will have.
We meet again old friend
After posting my ‘KDE4 is dying’ sob story on the Kubuntu mailing list, I was advised to rename my hidden .kde4 directory then try logging in with KDE4. But just after reading the above solution I saw that KDE 4.0.1 would be released soon.
Sure enough, KDE 4.0.1 was released yesterday (Wed, 6th Feb) and I installed the updates, renamed my .kde4 folder and gave it a whirl…
Whoopee!
Ok, so I’ve only been using it for a few hours but already it seems much faster and polished. There’s now a separate resize icon and the border for the plasma widgets is now pale rather than dark, although I personally preferred the darker faded box but, what the hell, I can live with it. I’m not sure if it’s just me having not seen it for about a week but the K button appears smaller (to me anyway). The little ‘add a widget icon thingy’ at the top right of the screen is more faded now and the menu items swing in diagonally. I’m sure it may be handy later on but said icon thingy seems pretty useless at the moment I can add widgets by right clicking on the desktop.
One thing I noticed right away that they’ve fixed is the widget border thing, apart from now being pale, it doesn’t linger after you’ve moved off the icon, like it used to.
And Dolphin seems a bit faster too but, again, that might be just me…
Anyway, welcome back old friend… I did kinda miss you…
KDE4.0 – Day 2
Well, i’ve been using KDE4 now for two whole days and i’ve been noticing some ‘quirks’ which i’m not too keen on.
Why is it so difficult to create a new folder? I right click in Dolphin/Konqueror and choose Create New from the menu and… no, there’s no New Folder option. Ok, what about the File menu? Nope, not there either. Only way I could find to create a new folder was to right click in the left (tree view) panel in Konqueror and create a new folder there. How annoying! Especially ironic since both Konqueror and Dolphin are ‘file managers’.An update has been released which fixes the ‘New Folder’ problem. Hurrah!
- I still can’t find a way to make the items in the task bar smaller. They’re huge and I really preferred it when they were linked to the desktop they are running on. So for example I could have Thunderbird running on desktop four and it wouldn’t show up on desktop 1, 2 or three.
But on the bright side:
- I do like how you can download new widgets and make an uber-pretty desktop. That I do like!
- Dolphin has the option to have a mini console window at the bottom of it which is quite funky. Clicking on a folder automatically enters the command into the console so the console is always up to date with where Dolphin is. Nice!
But even with the gripes I still like KDE4, I’m sticking with it but just need to find where I should file bug reports as I’ve noticed a few things that I’d like to point out although I’m sure most of my small moans have been reported by now…
-
I use:
