Give The Dev A Pandora!

Who should receive the donated Pandora?


  • Total voters
    113

Bosbeetle said:
So next to me there is nobody curious what the good doctor is up to?
it's not about who's curious about what, it's about what each one of us considers the most beneficial for the platform in the long run, among the projects listed. from my perspective, an optimised version of qemu could be very useful to have on the platform, as it'd allow for bringing more utilities/development tools over from PC land. otherwise i'd be among the first to cheer to some DC goodness on my pandora (once i have all ingradients in my hands, that is).

JayFoxRox, while i do agree with some of your points, i still think offering as functional as possible a pandora unit to developers doing things of potentially long-term significance for the paltform would pay back. it surely does not have to be in a box and gift-wrapped, but having all components working, down to actual controls, could make a difference, be that soleley in motivation. also, the less time a developer has to spend bringing the device up to a usable state for their project, the more they can spend on actual development. in this regard a fully-functional pandora can be a higher availability development platform than some motherboard strapped to some desktop equipment at somebody's workplace.

re the high-importance parts of the platform that need attention, like kernel, services and drivers - those are surely viable candidates for hw donation initiatives, but we need people to step up there. do you have somebody in mind?
 
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I voted Dflemstr because of all the work that he has done without a pandora or similar dev-board. Pandorama would be the most effective and pretty UI for the pandora IMO.
 
Maybe it'd be better to give it to a dev just as a thank-you for what they've already done. You know, no strings attached.
 
darkblu said:
it's not about who's curious about what, it's about what each one of us considers the most beneficial for the platform in the long run, among the projects listed. from my perspective, an optimised version of qemu could be very useful to have on the platform, as it'd allow for bringing more utilities/development tools over from PC land. otherwise i'd be among the first to cheer to some DC goodness on my pandora (once i have all ingradients in my hands, that is).

The problem is that while qemu compatibility might be high, qemu and wine together are going to be bloated probably. Most likely this will be too slow for many things and won't give a much better result than dosbox.
On the other hand, one could try to disassemble the x86 applications and create wrapper macros and a minimalistic implementation of used win32 functions.
Since a lot of modern, complex libraries (and applications using them) are out of reach anyway, one would only have to care about a small subset which could be highly optimized. Additionally one has the benefit that all functions can be fine-tuned on their own by rewriting parts of the code in ARM assembler. One will also benefit from all changes done to the C compiler and even problematic applications could be patched in a case-specific way.
However, personally I don't know how complex older win32 apps were, but I already took a similar approach for porting the 4klang synth and some complex checksum functions, expecting it to work on other windows applications too.

darkblu said:
JayFoxRox, while i do agree with some of your points, i still think offering as functional as possible a pandora unit to developers doing things of potentially long-term significance for the paltform would pay back. it surely does not have to be in a box and gift-wrapped, but having all components working, down to actual controls, could make a difference, be that soleley in motivation. also, the less time a developer has to spend bringing the device up to a usable state for their project, the more they can spend on actual development. in this regard a fully-functional pandora can be a higher availability development platform than some motherboard strapped to some desktop equipment at somebody's workplace.

re the high-importance parts of the platform that need attention, like kernel, services and drivers - those are surely viable candidates for hw donation initiatives, but we need people to step up there. do you have somebody in mind?

The problem is, that those who really care about the system probably ordered one. Working on most things doesn't require the actual Pandora anyway and nearly all aspects of the hardware can be emulated.
So unless you are into [pandora-specific] driver development (which is almost completed, except for some flaws with input, interfaces which could be more unified, .. - small things), you won't need an actual Pandora.

Think about it this way:
  • Sell this one and buy 2 new IGEP boards for other developers to improve OMAP in general:
    - Makes new Pandora owner happy, possibly a developer
    - 2 Developers can benefit from this
    - Thousands of users of OMAP devices can benefit from changes in the OS and kernel
  • Share it on the network, possibly sell it and share one or two IGEPs on the internet
    - Possibly hundreds of developers
    - Maybe even possibility to do collaborative debugging, shape the community and increase efficiency
    - 100% use of existing resources
  • Give this unit to a developer [who didn't ordered a pandora and doesn't have another OMAP device]
    - One possibly unmotivated developer who possibly has no expierence with the OMAP platform
  • Give this unit to a developer [who didn't ordered a pandora but has another OMAP device]
    - One new user who can't contribute much more than before
  • Give this unit to a developer [who also ordered a pandora]
    - One motivated developer who has 2 Pandoras now and possibly won't find good use for one of them
 
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If the dev already has a Pandora on order, they may be towards the back of the queue, etc. The idea was that the donation would be passed along.
If the dev already has a Pandora then I would like to hear about that because having two Pandoras is kind of pointless, and hence, this is why I have a donated Pandora to give away!

The eBay idea? It might be sensible but I've had bad experiences every time I've tried to sell anything with eBay and my feeback score is still very low only from the times I've bought from eBay sellers.

I think PMs will go out soon to find out if anyone needs removing from the list :)
 
I already have a Pandora, so it should be better off with another developer.
 
I'd like to be added to the possible devs. Experience is 6 years C++ and OpenGL programming for games, I went to Uni with Poke and have worked with him on several projects. CromoZome for the 2X and helped do some of the ground work with Pandora Panic before I was whisked away by work at my old Uni. I have several games that could be ported to Pandora fairly quickly and I have an interview with Imagination Technologies coming up for a programming job working with the PowerVR hardware directly, experience (if I get the job) that would be indispensable to the community, I would be able to help with driver updates as I'd have written the chips firmware. Also, currently unemployed so can't afford to buy one...yet
 
And added an info box for you to the first post! :)
For what it is worth I think it could be a good idea to bring something new to the table. As has been mentioned previously in this thread, many of the devs have access to some omap3 based hardware even if they do not have a Pandora. I know for a fact that Cameleon does NOT have any omap based hardware. The only complication being, I of course know him.
Unfortunately I do not think we are going to find our utopian kernel hacker, which I was hoping this thread would un-earth.
 
maybe gruso should put up a blog post about the free panda to unearth some kernel devs
 
Imagine the flood of applications! Might be a bit much to sift through.

Cameleon brings some interesting possibilities to the table. In late with no votes and no hardware on order, Aussies love an underdog. Don't let accusations of favouritism bother you if it comes down to it Poke, it's your decision at the end of the day.
 
Gruso said:
Imagine the flood of applications! Might be a bit much to sift through.

Cameleon brings some interesting possibilities to the table. In late with no votes and no hardware on order, Aussies love an underdog. Don't let accusations of favouritism bother you if it comes down to it Poke, it's your decision at the end of the day.
Thanks for the final push. I think that's what I'm going to do. Apologies to anyone that doesn't like this decision, as I'm sure there will be. I just hope that you can understand that to me it makes sense to go to Cameleon and I really do hope that this means we get a little more new and neat stuff into our community.
The other suggestions felt more like giving a dev another toy to play rather than a tool, since they already had some form of hardware... some of which already had Pandoras.

Thank you for all your insight guys. Cameleon gets the Pand.
 
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Gruso said:
And it is done. Good one. :)

GET TO WORK CAMELEON.

Jokes. Good luck with the job interview!

I shall, already working on basic red-cyan 3D support in Penjin, with a view to trying to get some form of good looking 3D working. As well as porting my already ES compliant Puzzle Game, and as it doesn't seem to be complete a port of SFML 1.6 (<- Better than SDL imo). I'm sure there are other things that could be thrown to me as well. Cheers for the good luck wishes for the job interview. I think I'll need it
 
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