Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Display Problem

Oh noes!! As you can see in the video below I got a nasty display issue whenever the screen is at an angle. Everything seems to be fine when the screen is flat, however this needs to be resolved, either by myself once I have acquired the replacement parts, or sending to Open Pandora to repair which I am somewhat reluctant to do as that means a lengthy period of being Pandoraless!

Got Flash Working

While a form of Flash is shipped with Pandora, it has unfortunately never worked for me.  However now there is Maemo Flash plugin which being ARM compiled can be used with FireFox on Pandora.

As it stands performance is not great, although YouTube is watcheable when you change the video quality to 240p. Other Flash heavy sites for example Groove Shark fails completely. The good news is that the plugin is not making the most of the Pandora's capabilities and once hardware acceleration has been unlocked, then surely together with other optimisations the experience will improve significantly.

 Here are the four simple steps to get of Flash working with FireFox4:
  • If you have not already done so, get hold of FireFox4.pnd, beta version 7 can be found here. Once you have downloaded, fire it up to ensure that it creates its own entry for App dir.
  • Remove the original Flash plugin by running the following command into the console:
sudo opkg --force-depends
remove swfdec-mozilla swfdec-gnome swfdec
  • Install the new plugin by typing this in:
    sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

I noticed by mistake that the plugin when installed using the above steps also works in the Chromium browser, although for the moment FireFox would be the weapon of choice as it is far more stable for the time being.