Always Innovating Multi-OS switcher


klapse

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It might be the wrong subsection, apologies if it is...


"Always Innovating has just released a “Super-Jumbo” image (FREE) for the hacker-friendly $149 BeagleBoard that allows users to switch operating systems, with a touch a button, without having to reboot or make use of virtualization. As you’ll see in the demo below, the 1Ghz ARM OMAP3 chip on the BeagleBoard capably runs AIOS (an Ångström fork)..."


http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/beagleboard/


http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Beagleboard


Being an Omap3 kernel, that could run on the pandora. As far as I can tell, they have open-sourced it all.


It installs to SD card and uses uboot


"the image is 3.9GB once extracted... Then three partitions should be created:


* the first (0.8GB) will mainly contain the x-loader, u-boot, and the kernel


* the second (2.6GB) will contain the rootfs of all the four operating systems installed (AIOS, Android Gingerbread, Ubuntu Maverick, ChromiumOS)


* the third (0.5GB) is a swap partition"


How about that to boost 1Ghz sales - switch between 4 operating systems...


One modification needed would be to map the beagleboard's "user button" to something else (power switch on pandora) to switch between OSes.


Limitations:


3D


So far, it's not possible to use the GPU of your beagleboard for both AIOS and Android when they are running at the same time. When starting Android from AIOS, we indeed need to unload the 3D kernel modules so that Android can use them full time.


Sound


So far, when starting Android from AIOS, it will preempt the hardware, so sound will stop functioning in AIOS.


.........


If it would take someone like Notaz 8-12 weeks to put Superzaxxon in place of AI's OS, and patch up the switching mechanism to be mapped to some pandora button or power switch, would we be able to fund this? 100 donations of 100 euro = 10,000 Eu for 2-3 months work.


The quad OS can be downloaded right now for testing on Beagleboard -- source seems to be available on GIT.


Being able to announce multi-OS capability for the 1Ghz Pandoras would be a sure way to get mentioned in a lot of tech blogs and possibly save the whole enterprise in 2013.
 
As we already have PanDebian in Zaxxon without switching needed and Android as a PND which also doesn't need any reboot I don't see a reason why Notaz should work 2 months on such a thing.


Having Slackware like PanDebian would be a great addition for OS switching.


Some way to shut down PanDebian would also be nice.


There's really no need for me to get this working.


I forgot: We can also switch to Windows via quemu. Without a reboot.


If it would be done fast it's surely nice but not worth 2 Month of work.
 
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