Sadly not all needed changes for APP Installer made it into firmware 3.5RC. But they should be in 3.5 final.
Still you wanted long enough. Want to try APP Installer? Here is the how to.
I need to explain a couple of things first how it works so you can more easily understand why some things are needed.
APP Installer is based on SSH/SFTP communication between application and the Prodigy. That is why R&D added inside firmware Dropbear SSH and OpenSSH SFTP server. They also added the new root right user
admin with default password
sysadmin which will be used to connect APP Installer with Prodigy. You can connect to it as first using Putty SSH client. Dropbear is running on non-default port
2022. Later you already have connection inside APP Installer you can use integrated Console.
Prodigy has a 2GB NAND flash drive to store setting and to be used with Android applications. The NAND is not that fast for file copy and 2GB can get quickly filled. APP Installer COULD work with only NAND flash but it will be very slow and impossible to use with file downloaders.
So best and advised solution is to use the internal HDD. But here comes the problem. HDD gets formatted as NTFS which is useless in Linux environment but perfect for file copy also over USB slave. Together with R&D and vpeter we decided to use a loopback flat file based ext2 partition file.
HDD format from Prodigy GUI should create this 2GB file automatically. But if you don't want to format the HDD you can create it manually using following command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/usbmounts/sda1/epkg.ext2 bs=1M count=2048
mkfs.ext2 -F /mnt/usbmounts/sda1/epkg.ext2
/mnt/usbmounts/sda1 is the path of where you internal HDD is mounted. After reboot of your Prodigy the file will be automatically loopback mounted on /data/epkg folder. You can check that with terminal command
mount.
/dev/loop0 on /data/epkg type ext2 (rw,relatime,barrier=1,data=writeback)
/dev/block/sda1 on /data/epkg/download type ufsd (rw,noatime,nls=utf8,uid=0,gid=0,fmask=0,dmask=0,force)
As you can see there are two mount. One is the flat file based ext2 Linux partition. Second one is the download folder mount. This is where all the downloaded files will be saved (torrents, usenet, 1-click hoster, etc...).
Prodigy environment is now set. In 3.5 R&D should tweak all this setting a bit more.
Now you can try to install custom packages using APP Installer .NET application.
Later after it is widely tested you will be able to upgrade your older version off APP Installer if you used it before for eTRAYz package management. But for now download APP Installer version 3.0.4.0 which also support Prodigy devices.
APP Installer .NET 3.0.4.0
You need .NET framework installed on Windows or Mono on Linux/OSX. Start it up and create new profile. Under
Use default select Prodigy and most of the fields will be filed automatically. Change default SSH port to
2022. Under
FTP home folder input
/data. This is the default root folder for FTP connection which I'll explain later on.
The package index will be updated and you can start installing applications. First one is
Libraries. This is an absolute must to install first as it include all the libraries and useful binary compiled especially for Prodigy.
So far lets call version 3.0.4.0 BETA version as for now I was the only one testing the packages. I am sure that they need more tweaking but I will do that when I get more report.
Also autostarting is NOT yet working. We still need to determine with R&D how it should work properly with Prodigy. It should be properly added by final version of 3.5. Next step after this first part is working will be TV GUI to manage the application with remote control... But lets get this first part working first
.
Please give it a test and post as much as possible feedback into this topic.
