[Nook Touch General] Shagbark:
It took me two full days to set up my Glowlight 3+ (7.8", BNRV700), mostly because certain basic information isn't given anywhere on the web that I could find, because f-droid & RelaunchX aren't really documented. This comment is

to note the awful things about the 3+ that you can't find in the ads

to confirm that you can install apps on the Glowlight 3+

to spell out some of the simple but necessary bits of info that aren't spelled out anywhere I could find

to ask 4 questions that I haven't solved by myself

I bought the 3+ just to read PDFs in landscape mode. The print in journal articles is too small to read them in portrait mode, even on this 7.8" e-reader. (Using a magnifier is too slow.)

My first problem was that the Nook, using its factory software, couldn't see any of the files I transferred to it via USB. It turns out--and this isn't documented anywhere that I found, and I searched for it a long time--that to sideload books onto the Glowlight 3+, you have to create directories (that don't exist beforehand) inside the directory /NOOK with specific names: Books, Documents, and My Files. (These directories all pre-existed on earlier Nooks, at least on the NST.) By /NOOK I don't mean the top level of your Nook as it shows up in Windows Explorer; I mean you make new directories inside the NOOK directory that's already in your Nook's root directory. As far as I can tell, there's no difference between Books, Documents, and My Files. Maybe the Nook store puts different kinds of books that you buy in different directories.

There's also an "Everything else" choice, which doesn't seem to be located on the Nook at all; for me it listed nothing but one book, which definitely wasn't anywhere on my Nook 'coz I didn't put it there. I'd bought it for a Kindle years ago, and I think the Nook found some mention of it thru my Adobe ID?

I was then shocked to learn that the Glowlight 3+, unlike earlier Nooks, ignores the directory structure of your files. I put a few thousand books on it, organized in about a hundred directories, sub-directories, and etc.; and they were all treated as if they were in one directory. There was no way to organize them unless I wanted to take a week out of my life to move them all onto shelves (which would still suck).

No problem, I thought; I'll add topic prefixes to each file and then use Search to find all the books on one subject. Wrong again--the Search functionality on the 3+ is crippled. It ONLY SHOWS THE FIRST 4 RESULTS. There's no way to scroll through the rest. I'd just loaded about 60 books and articles on deep learning, 56 of which were inaccessible unless I wanted to spend half an hour every time I wanted to find one of them by paging down a few hundred screens through My Files.

Also, the 3+ software can't do landscape mode.

I came here to learn how to install something that could rotate PDFs. I tried to follow the instructions, but was terribly confused because, in all the docs I read here and RelaunchX and f-droid docs and discussions, nothing explained what a launcher was, or that f-droid wasn't a launcher. I spent several hours trying to figure out why I couldn't get f-droid to show up in the list of launchers. It's just a store, like Google Play.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to use adb. A few sticking points:

"Install adb" means install it on the desktop PC, not on the Nook.

(You don't really need to install it; you can unzip a file containing adb, like the Android Studio zip, anywhere, and run the binary platform-tools/adb.exe . But that becomes a pain, bcoz then with every package install, you have to type out either the path to adb, or to the package's .apk file.)

Android Studio comes with adb. Installing Android Studio on Windows will NOT put any of its tools on your %PATH%; you have to do that by hand (on Win10, under Settings > System > Advanced system settings > Environment variables). adb is in %ANDROID_HOME%\platform-tools , where %ANDROID_HOME% is where you installed Android Studio (you'd have to set that env var by hand to use it).

Every adb command is run on the PC, not on the Nook.

A file that ends with ".apk" is an Android package. (It's actually a zip file.)

When you install a package by typing "adb install foo.apk", you type that on the PC, where adb is installed, and the file foo.apk is ALSO on the PC, not on the Nook. You don't transfer files "by hand" first; adb copies everything needed from the .apk onto the Nook.

There is no device specification in the "adb install" command because it assumes you want to install things on whatever device is connected as "device". I don't know what it does if more than one is connected.

The Glowlight 3+ might run Android 4.4.2. I haven't found any confirmation of this--the user manual doesn't say, nor is it reported in device settings, nor have I found anyone claiming to know what version the 3+ runs. But plenty of people say the Glowlight 3 runs 4.4.2. The Glowlight 3+ will install packages requiring 4.2, and won't install ones that require 5.1 (such as the current f-droid).

I installed ADB on my Windows 10 machine and installed the RelaunchX 2.1.5 apk from f-droid.org as instructed in the first post in this thread. I was then able to use RelaunchX on the Nook, and used Rotation Manager (com.spydiko.rotationmanager_foss_18) to lock it into landscape mode. I didn't root the Nook, because I don't know what the purpose of "rooting" is, and RelaunchX worked without doing it.

I then had these problems:

1. RelaunchX, unlike the Nook software, would let me navigate the directory tree, but it was hard to find the directories that Windows Explorer showed as being on my Nook. They're there, under /storage/spsd .

2. The RelaunchX virtual keyboard, used to type things like passwords, doesn't work in landscape mode. It maps screen touches to the wrong keys, and the far-right keys--which includes the delete key--can't be used. Touching the backspace key enters an 'n'.

3. Opening any PDF in landscape mode crashes the Nook.

4. Something got my Nook into an unbootable state, such that any attempt to boot it would hang looping the Nook "LOADING" animation endlessly. I still don't know what caused this; it went away when I used adb to uninstall everything that I'd installed. (Use adb shell pm list packages to see a list of packages. To remove one, adb uninstall [everything after "package:"].)

I realized I had to install a separate PDF viewer. I eventually settled on Orion Viewer. Since Orion Viewer (unlike the Nook software!) could navigate the directory tree on the Nook, I didn't need RelaunchX. I now use the much-simpler Text Launcher (ademar.textlauncher_8). [UPDATE: I just switched to Koreader, which is fantastic, and doesn't require your device to have a hardware go-back key.]

I never rooted the Nook. Maybe my weird problems with RelaunchX were due to not rooting it. I don't know what "rooting" does.

Remaining problems:

I would like very much to get the Nook to go straight to Text Launcher when I boot it. Booting the Nook launcher takes a LONG time, and I don't want to use it except on epubs. Also, pressing the upside-down U just hard enough to get the launcher menu, but not so long that it interprets it as dimming the screen instead (and I have to wait a long time to know which thing it did). After the lengthy boot, it takes me on average maybe 10 seconds of fiddling with the nook U button to launch Text Launcher. Same story every time I want to switch apps or view a different PDF. It gets annoying.

Every PDF viewer, and most other apps, at some point rely on the Android device having a "go back" button, like all Android phones and no e-readers do. With Orion Viewer, if you change anything in Settings, you're stuck; you can't go back to choose a file to view. You can go back to Text Launcher and choose Orion Viewer again, and it will take you back to the main menu. With others I tried, you have to reboot the Nook whenever you change any setting. I'd like to be able to map one of the Nook buttons to be the Android "go back" button.

Orion Viewer has no "back" button to return from viewing one document, to go back to the main menu and choose another document. I think that every time I re-run Text Launcher to run Orion again to view another file, the process for the previous file is still running in the background. I'd like some way to (a) list running processes, and (b) kill running processes.

I still don't know what "rooting" is, or why I should do it. I read that you need to root the device to install packages with f-droid, but that's not true. I got F-droid Classic working fine.