Would it be possible to load pdfs on here?

if so, what kinda stuff would I need to load (IE code and what not) in order to get this working? and I know pdf’s would be kinda impractical on this thing, but I think it would be cool.

It’s pretty easy, copy over whatever pdf file you want to read, then run this over ssh:

sudo apt-get install mupdf
DISPLAY=:0 whateverFileYouWant.pdf

Of course, the controls aren’t terribly useful from there, you can’t do much more than just scroll through the pages with the d-pad and light keys. To be really useful, you’d need to either get a bluetooth keyboard, recompile mupdf with new controls, reprogram the keypad, or find some other way to inject key events. You might also want to try other Debian pdf reader packages, maybe there’s another one out there that fits well on a small screen that also has configurable controls.

would I be able to switch between pages with the D-pad or would it only just allow me to move up and down?

I’ve been thinking that it would be really useful to have a multipurpose installer script for the GameShell that could provide temporary keybindings to use with the installed application. Loading PDF files seemed like a good way to test it out, so I set it all up for you.

Here’s the script, just copy it over to the GameShell and run it over ssh.

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Thank you so much my friend.

Thanks, your script is nice for setup of this app, and looks to be generally useful for setting up other apps too (with some modification).

I was surprised at how well mupdf works on the GameShell. The display is really the only issue, requiring zooming and scrolling. But the key mappings help with that and it seems to be as good as it could get. It looked like mupdf supports ePUB as well, so it might be worth tweaking your script, @centuryglass, to include that extension as well. I didn’t actually try to load any .epub files on my device though. Not sure I’d want to try to read an entire ebook on it anyway, but it might be cool to have the option.

PDFs seem to work great though, even with embedded pictures. So they might be a good way to display less text heavy material, since a lot of scrolling will be involved with anything that is primarily text. That’s still useful, but I could see it becoming a bit of a pain due to the 320x240 display.

Updated and tested it, .epub seems to work pretty well. It’s not really a practical or pleasant way to read a book, but it’s about as usable as possible for this device.

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