"a Few Months Tweaking The Os And Stuff"

[Gricey]

Hi (after posting this in the wrong forum...),

Not done any pandora development, in fact I'm not a software engineer - I'm a UNIX systems engineer/architect/lead by profession.

I know nothing about development on the Pandora, but I could certainly be of help if there anything anything on the OS that needs refining. I have been a user of Linux since 1999 and used it as part of my job since 2001/2. I now design Linux/Solaris based systems (think stuff like email platforms, storage, databases) that have scaled to hundreds of thousands of users, including the managment of them, automation, etc.

Are there areas that need help, and if its something within my skillset, how do I help out? The stuff on the FAQ seems to cover writing software apps and such, not much on the "system" itself.

Cheers
Mike

 

[lulzfish]

I suspect what they're doing is getting together the proper versions of software packages and getting everything compiled / linked / tested properly.

It might be hard to help with that, especially since most of us don't have Pandoras.

 

[skeezix]

I think the implication is that when the devices ship, they will not be perfect in terms of the software. ie: Theres no way EDs going to hold up the hardware shipping if the icons are the wrong colour or something, right?

I mean, theres only so much we can do in limited donated time ie: I'm still using an older distribution in my unit for various reasons, but even then it was very stable .. it always has been, in most areas. The stability issues over the lifetime of development have been at the fringes -- wifi, screen drivers, hibernate, the whacky kernel stuff. Theres a list of things MW keeps which are not perfect and could use work, but theres only a few of us and msot of us just don't have as much time nowadays as we used to, so mucking on the kernel drivers is very slow going. (ie: Its a lot of trial/error/hacking/voodoo stuff, so very time consuming. This is all mostly notaz and DJWillis efforts AFAIK.) I'm maintaining the software stack where I can (pnd support etc), with cpasjuste working on the launcher etc. So one person's spare time on one set of tasks, so nothing is perfect.

The good news is the base distro works great, and our additions and tweaks and such all seem to work great, and its all open source. so swhen devices ship, we (I know I anyway) are assuming people will run with it, tweak and fix up and improve as they see fit. ie: This where you see the gnetoo project and people diving into our git and such, good times. Theres a lot of configuration stuff we'd like to do and that DJW is working on, but even if incomplete.. who cares, peopel will fix it up quick once the devices ship, if we don't. Stuff like .. when the defvice is first booted up, does it go to a default 'pandora' user, or do we present a user cereation dialog (which we did in the past anyway), etc. These are all goofy little things that take a lot of time to fiddle out, but in practice don't matter all that much imho. (I forget how we decided on that, but in my opinion, just ship with a default user and let power users rename and/or change password, keeps it easy for first boot.)

So all told, the distribution works out of box very nicely, and you can run OpenOffice or whatever piece of cake, so you have no worries. The screwy stuff has always been wifi etc. Worst case is wifi is screwy day zero, but I figure that'd be okay.. piss off a few people, but it'd also be an army of a few hundred peopel banging on it so it'd get fixed quick.. but maybe DJW has it all sorted out now, or soon, or whatever. I am not current on that aspect of it.

So don't fret.. theres no 'months of delay' due to the distribution; its been 'good enough' for 8 months, its just little fixups around the edges we've been working on and would like to do more of, but it won't hold anything up.

jeff

 

[Gricey]

Cool. I wasn't implying months of delay, just wondering if there was anything I could help out with. Truth be told though I wouldn't know where to begin, but I'd be good once I got in there.