PocketBook 2.0.x development

[LoneTech]

Yes, inkview can. But in the web browser, you can't drag the scrollbar handle with the stylus, and anytime you tap, it taps where you put the pen down, ignoring where it was picked up. It doesn't seem to tell if you do a long tap, either. Remember the web browser uses a quite separate interface - Gtk+DirectFB - than the other programs, which use Inkview. I am guessing it simply has the bare essentials, as a proof of concept, much like the scribble program. It's all at a stage I'd have expected back when the 302 was proposed internally, not at a launch of a second generation of digitizer equipped models.

[sergeyvl12]

Great! Thanks a log, I managed to start environment, but:
1. Please add -m 256 in qemu-command;
2. libinkview.so is missing and I can't build my app

Sorry, I've found libinkview.so

[kacir]

Originally Posted by LoneTech

As for Del, I'm not even sure what device had such a button.

PocketBook 301
The very first one. The one where PocketBook programmers did it right. One has to wonder what happened to programmer[s] that made 14.2 firmware. Are they still at PocketBook?

Even slightly younger brother of '301' - PocketBook 360 doesn't have Del button, but NOBODY bothered to change poterm, so you can't rotate display.

There are quite a few PB projects that seem to have been abandoned. At one point in history PB organized a competition in developing games and programs (such as poterm) but to this day there is no central place where to download them. For some time those programs were hosted on some obscure Russian server, but that got switched off and nobody bothered to provide support.
The same situation is with themes that were developed during competition. There is no official place where you can download Cleanlook, Sheeps, Sherlock and other interesting themes. And those fine themes were developed during competition that was sponsored by PocketBook company at the-ebook.org forum.
An SDK seems to be abandoned as well. As far as I know there was no SDK for newest firmwares for 301 and 360.
And do *not* get me started on 302 - the unwanted stepchild of PocketBook reader family ...

[review]

Originally Posted by kacir

but to this day there is no central place where to download them.

Hi,
I'm not sure if I get you right but to me this page

http://pocketbook-free.sourceforge.net/en/index.shtml

looks like a fairly central place of all community added projects. Correct me if I misunderstood you.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by review

http://pocketbook-free.sourceforge.net/en/index.shtml

looks like a fairly central place of all community added projects. Correct me if I misunderstood you.

Some of the programs I am talking about are on the page above.
If you click on a file to download it, it opens site
http://bookfast.org/
Bookfast site is that obscure Russian site I am talking about. Some time ago it was down for months. Just search the forum for "bookfast"

[rkomar]

@LoneTech: How do you get files into and out of your qcow image? NFS mounting through a TAP interface?

Edit: Nevermind, I just found out that I can ssh to the host at 10.0.2.2 over the default user network stack.

[LoneTech]

Nice. People are starting to find out things I didn't know about the tool I just tossed together. I've been using outgoing connections (mostly scp) to a third host from the qemu system myself.

[paola]

on annotations, PB should thing about speeding things up considerably - check out the video in post #2 in this thread, the device looks pretty good to me!

[bogdaniosif]

Originally Posted by paolamanzini

on annotations, PB should thing about speeding things up considerably - check out the video in post #2 in this thread, the device looks pretty good to me!

Thank you paolamanzini. This tiny snippet of info made my day so very happy . Finally!

[Lowlandr]

Originally Posted by bogdaniosif

Thank you paolamanzini. This tiny snippet of info made my day so very happy . Finally!

I'm pretty satisfied with my Pro 903, but I agree they should really hurry up or release the SDK much, much sooner.
Apparently Onyx took the time for and invested in actual software development.
By the time Pocketbook will release their SDK in March, this Onyx (is that a Pearl screen I see??) will probably be on the market, Hanvon's color ereader will be on the market and there's no telling how many other vendors will have released something by that time.

Having said that, I don't know why everyone is so keen on scribble annotations. Sure, they can be useful, but for academic purposes, I want to be able to select text out of a document and save that in a separate file with the correct bibliographic reference and page number. To my knowledge, not a single ereader on the market currently does that in a useful way.

How hard can it be? I've even seen really simple C-apps that can extract text out of pdfs and programs like Foxit's pdf reader do a good job.
They should be able to do this in weeks, not months...

[Lowlandr]

It also somewhat annoys me, that there are no regular firmware updates...
Why isn't there an overview of planned releases? Does this mean we all have to wait until March for a next firmware update?

[paola]

Originally Posted by Lowlandr

By the time Pocketbook will release their SDK in March, this Onyx (is that a Pearl screen I see??) will probably be on the market

indeed, it looks like they will be preordering from early February (and on a cached page I saw a price of $379, which if true would be ubelievably good value, but as they have taken that information off, I doubts they'll keep the price that way.

Originally Posted by Lowlandr

Having said that, I don't know why everyone is so keen on scribble annotations. Sure, they can be useful, but for academic purposes, I want to be able to select text out of a document and save that in a separate file with the correct bibliographic reference and page number.

I guess different people work in different ways - for me it is really important to be able to scribble down comments on the margins of a paper (which is what I do with real paper articles), or around the text - the Boox M90 seems capable of doing that!

[sergeyvl12]

Hi

I had problems with compiling and running my pbchess (http://pbchess.sourceforge.net/en/) with the described SDK, because it uses the gcc/g++ 4.4 compiler. But the PB 60x 90x was compiled using the 4.1 compiler and I had the following error for C++ application (pbchess):

/mnt/ext1/games/pbchess.app: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.11' not found (required by /mnt/ext1/games/pbchess.app)
/mnt/ext1/games/pbchess.app: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9' not found (required by /mnt/ext1/games/pbchess.app)
/mnt/ext1/games/pbchess.app: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `CXXABI_ARM_1.3.3' not found (required by /mnt/ext1/games/pbchess.app)

and for C application (gnuchess):

Atached mp shm: id 0 addr 40c5b000 size 17256
Atached fb shm: id 8001 addr 40ca0000 size 489616
gnuchess: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.7' not found (required by gnuchess)

So, I've build my own SDK for 602,603,902,903 using arm-gcc-gnueabi crosscompiler for linux based on gcc/g++ 4.1.2. You can download it here:

http://pbchess.sourceforge.net/files...ux_60x_90x.tgz

The linux users can use it without virtual machine.

Installation:
1. Unpack;
2. Copy "usr" contents to /usr;
3. Copy (or link) "pocketbook_eabi" to /usr/local

SDK contains 2 examples: grays and inkdemo.

Tested with ubuntu 10.04 and Debian lenny.

Goodbye slow qemu-system-arm, thanks, LoneTech for the great idea!

[sck]

sorry for the many questions:
so, now it's possible to test the PB web browser without having the device?
how did you manage to use inkview with qemu?
where do you get the browser app?

thank you!

[LoneTech]

No, the PB web browser is binary only (armel-eabi) and requires both gtk-directfb and inkview. While we can copy those libraries, we don't have the eink video driver that inkview library uses. The web browser is a stripped down Midori, so try that for an impression of how it handles pages. I did not manage to use inkview with qemu, I merely used it to build programs.

@sergeyvl12: Well done! I had not bothered to make a cross compiler partly because it's a little harder, I find it easier to fetch libraries with apt. Probably should've used dpkg-cross instead, but the single system image was at least a stepping stone.