Firefox addons for the Elonex ONEt

I've been checking out the recommendation from Leven2e in our email group that Firefox addons can be installed in the Bon Echo browser on the Elonex ONEt - despite the unusual processor in the ONEt.

The first recommendation is MediaPlayerConnectivity - this creates a connection between sound and video links on a web page and the Xine media player on the ONEt - so you can click on a web link and result in Xine being launched to play the music or video - I'm listening to the radio over the web courtesy of this addon at the moment.

The best way to load an addon into the ONEt is to browse to the appropriate Firefox addons page, for example by clicking on the appropriate link in this blog then click on the link to Download the addon - after a while Bon Echo will bring up another window where you click on Install, watch the progress bar as the file is downloaded and installed, then click on Restart Bon Echo - then typically the addon will lauch a preferences window where you can make any settings changes that you need.

MediaPlayerConnectivity automatically detects and sets up the links to Xine. Leven2e recommends a couple of web pages listing suitable radio stations: http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/mp3.asp and http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/wmp.asp - I certainly found that a lot of general web pages were "too clever" - telling me that the browser was incompatible without giving me chance to see the links to the appropriate media...

Another useful addon (for me at least) is the British English Dictionary - through it I discovered that the ONEt already had an American English dictionary installed - when you are typing words into a web page (e.g. composing an email on webmail) any mis-spelled words will be underlined in red, right clicking on them gives a choice of words you might have meant and the chance under a Languages sub-menu to change your language to "English/United Kingdom".

Adblock Plus is very good at stripping distracting ads from web pages, you can subscribe to a list of known advertising sites which means that most adverts are removed automatically and if any slip through you can right-click on the image and add that site to your blocked list too.

Leven2e suggests a few other addons which I haven't quite got into yet:
Video DownloadHelper promises much, but the video conversion program it offers couldn't be enabled on my ONEt.
Locator launches Google Maps for an address you have selected on the screen - but I find Google Maps very hard to use on the ONEt because it is obviously designed for a much bigger computer screen.
Firefly offers to turn Bon Echo into a file browser - but it already is in that you can type "file:///" into the standard Bon Echo address bar and look round all the system files on the computer without needing any other browser - the Firefly file copy and rename functions may be useful, I'll see.
Facebook Toolbar is one I haven't investigated.

But, all-in-all, it's good news that the ONEt runs much more software than I ever expected when I learned that the processor was not Intel X86 compatible.

New Elonex ONEt kernel released...

Elonex are now offering a separate download for the ONEt kernel file "uImage" if you follow the links on: http://www.elonex.com/support/products/lnxonet.shtm - and the instructions there indicate that Fn+Shift+F1 are used to update what they are calling the "Master Boot Record" but elsewhere is called the kernel.

For example: http://194.150.201.35/cnmlifestyle/downloads.htm indicates that the V66 version of the kernel includes support for a 3G modem driver and improved USB printer handling... there are also files to download for gFTP (if you ever need to use File Transfer Protocol to load or save files) plus some of the usual games and programs found elsewhere.

Elonex also now have a ONEt home page at: http://www.elonex.com/landingonet.html

It looks there's more things to play with...

Meanwhile for Elonex ONE(+) owners things seem to have gone quiet - maybe interest or news will pick up once the next batch of ONE(+)s start being delivered?