I don't have a link for you, but the OS used to be available in a lot of different formats on the official server. You'd probably rather stumble upon the specific drivers and stuff when trying to emulate it.
The OS will probably be mostly the same, backwards-compatibility is everything but off the table. But it will definitely have a different CPU, else people would literally go on rampage mode. It will most likely be an OMAP5 SoC, all others are simply not available in lower quantities or just not guaranteed to be available long enough. It offers a lot of backwards-compatibility as well, it even still has a similar type of DSP.
It literally already went out of production, some parts are no longer available. If the request is large enough ED might consider investing some money to replace those components for more Pandoras, however. Still, backwards-compatibility will be kept as good as possible.
It's worth nothing that Angstrom was based on Debian, though.
In theory. In practice there may be something like Ginge/Wine (could be tightly integrated if /really/ needed), but it would be better to break compatibility with the PND system for something better instead. It would rather be the other way around, that maybe the new format could be backported to the Pandora if well made.
Trading in should perhaps be something ED should consider. Those could then be refurbished and sent to folk still stuck on the original queue. Not an ideal solution, but perhaps some would go for it.
I think the biggest obstacle will be the OS architecture. Ever tried SZ executables on Pandian (Debian on armhf [hard float]) or vice versa? They do not run.
ebian-based_distributions
