Dual Boot

[jonlad1]

I have a hunch this may have already been asked on the old forum...

Would it possible to dual boot, say with Gmenu2x and another flavour of Ubuntu? Use gmenu for the emu's and use ubuntu for firefox, openoffice, any other linux apps.....

Long live p&|a !!

 

[Tom`]

It would certainly be possible, but why not use firefox and other apps with the default installation? Apps like OpenOffice would run much better anyway, since there would be more available memory than if you were running Ubuntu.

 

[jonlad1]

I'm just thinking about being able to easily install other linux apps (Pigion, for example). From what i understand, apps will have to be rewritten/modified to be usable on gmenu

 

[Tom`]

They'd have to be modified to run well on Ubuntu as well - the main reasons why this is true are to reduce memory, make the apps work better with the Pandora's controls, and in the case of apps using OpenGL, convert to OpenGL ES to be able to use the GPU properly. None of this is distro-specific, so you're better off just running things in the default OS, probably, unless you like tinkering with things (not that that's not a perfectly valid reason, of course).

 

[jonlad1]

Well my knowledge of Linux blows goats to be honest so all that makes sense

I may as well just stick to the default like you say

 

[valhalla]

Dual boot would also be useful to have a clean system to test one's applications, or just to experiment with different systems (that's one of the things I plan to do, just for the fun of it, mostly)

 

[Edy]

It has been already stated that Pandora will be able to boot from the SD card using a special key combo on startup (this is which makes the console unbrickable). So you would be able to have as much OSes and setups as you like, just configure each one in a SD card.

 

[cosam]

I take it we'll be able to boot straight from SD? In which case you don't really need dual boot as such. You'll have "as-many-operating-systems-as-you-have-SD-cards boot" by default ;-)

 

[Pleng]

What would be really cool (though I don't know if it's even technically feasable) would be the ability to boot from different directories on the same SD card. ie holding down the given key combination at boot would present a simple file browser which would allow you which directory you want to boot from, allowing several distros on one SD card!

 

[cosam]

What would be really cool (though I don't know if it's even technically feasable) would be the ability to boot from different directories on the same SD card. ie holding down the given key combination at boot would present a simple file browser which would allow you which directory you want to boot from, allowing several distros on one SD card!

I would image you'd be able to boot different partitions of the SD card, just like you would with a hard disk. I'm not sure how you envision booting a directory but a bootloader capable of reading the filesystem in question could feasibly do so, just as PC boot loaders can boot the same OS with different kernel versions.

 

[the_darkside_986]

You don't need dual-booting to have a different GUI. You would just need to change your configuration of X server so that instead of automatically starting, you could start it manually and pick a script that initializes the appropriate DE.

It should be feasible to create launchers for "normal" desktop applications in gmenu. Isn't gmenu just a fullscreen application that launches other programs? If you need a window manager (which gmenu probably doesn't provide) then evilwm is good and lightweight compared to others. Well then again, evilwm would need to be modded to use Home key instead of the alt keys for the Pandora keyboard.

Or even better, you could write your own window manager for Pandora. This might be a good starting point: http://tigerdyr.wheel.dk/ctwm-archive/1328.html