Angstrom

[Singpolyma]

Why was Angstrom chosen as the distro base for the Pandora? I've had experiences with that distro before, and it tends to be very, very bad. The repos are littered with broken packages and the like.


Why not use a stable distro with a good track record as the base, like Debian? That's what Nokia did with Maemo and that's a bit part of why Maemo is so amazing to use on the n900.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, MAEMO runs way slower for me than Angström.


I got an N900 and it struggles even with an NES emulator or native games. They skip frames like hell.


It has the same SoC as the Pandora, so it should easily be able to do the same things. But it seems to be very bloated.


Angström is a distribution especially for mobile devices, and I have to say, I like it.


With our small NAND, we are limited to a minimal OS anyways. APT-GET would be our enemy, as it installs everything into the NAND.


Additionally, back when we started the OS, no distribution was as advanced for ARM as Angström was.


The package and building system of Angström actually is quite nice, but you need to be keep it nice and clean.


The Pandora OS is based on a very outdated version, so you WILL have problems installing packages from recent Angström Builds.


If you stay within the Angström version however, you shouldn't have problems with broken packages.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Why are we on an outdated version, then? Or is this something that Yars will fix?

 

[lomaxx]

I personally plan to try a pseudo-Gentoo-installation, where I configure a cross-compiler, compile all packages as binary packages for the Pandora on a Gentoo-PC with optimized compile-flags and configure the Gentoo on the Pandora to run all Portage-(Gentoo)-related directories from either a network-file-system or an external USB-HDD. That way I can not install anything through Portage while I'm on the run (unless I take the HDD with me), but hope to be rewared with a lean, fast system on the SD-Card.


Not sure if something like this could be configured to work in an easy way for the everyday user - probably not. Though the whole cross-compile environment wouldn't be needed. Just access to portage-directories including the binary packages. For myself I am looking forward to try this. Though it will take a while, maybe early next year - when I bought a new PC. My current PC isn't much faster than the Pandora at the moment.

 

[Blue Protoman]

I wonder if there's some universal benchmark that can be used to compare apples to oranges, aka my Pandora to my Dell Inspiron Mini. I bet it'd be in Java.

 

[Garg]

I wonder if there's some universal benchmark that can be used to compare apples to oranges, aka my Pandora to my Dell Inspiron Mini. I bet it'd be in Java.

I've been meaning to try this:


http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/

 

[sebt3]

Why are we on an outdated version, then? Or is this something that Yars will fix?

Yep : the goal for Yars is to be up to date with upstream.