Has anyone gotten any other distro working on the Pandora?


second exodous

second exodous

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I've seen Gentoo, probably my fav distro, but any others? I know people were talking about Ubuntu and Arch but I haven't seen either of those on the Pandora yet. Also, anyone gotten another distro on it and have the PND system working in it?


I'm thinking a lot more distors will be running on ARM pretty quick due to the dev boards like the Pandaboard outputting 1080p and systems like this.


In this regard Pandora is cutting edge, first real open ARM device.
 
With Debian and Debian-derived-distros-which-shall-remain-nameless, the easiest thing to do which makes a beautiful compromise is to use debootstrap to make a Debian chroot on e.g. an SD card, and run that simultaneously with Angstrom. I'm doing some development that way (what can I say, I'm very attached to development on Debian :p ), and it has the nice advantage that I can do all the editing, building, dependency management, etc on Debian, slap together a PND, then not only immediately run it, but immediately run it in the very OS that the Pandora comes with (since it's still running right there).


It would probably be possible to stuff the Angstrom kernel together with a Debian rootfs and get a perfectly-fine "proper" install of Debian, but I prefer my system :)
 
Gregor said:
With Debian and Debian-derived-distros-which-shall-remain-nameless, the easiest thing to do which makes a beautiful compromise is to use debootstrap to make a Debian chroot on e.g. an SD card, and run that simultaneously with Angstrom. I'm doing some development that way (what can I say, I'm very attached to development on Debian :p ), and it has the nice advantage that I can do all the editing, building, dependency management, etc on Debian, slap together a PND, then not only immediately run it, but immediately run it in the very OS that the Pandora comes with (since it's still running right there).


It would probably be possible to stuff the Angstrom kernel together with a Debian rootfs and get a perfectly-fine "proper" install of Debian, but I prefer my system :)
Click to expand...
That sounds cool!
 
I was going to attempt Fedora ARM upon receiving my Pandora.
 
Silent-Hunter said:
Gregor said:
With Debian and Debian-derived-distros-which-shall-remain-nameless, the easiest thing to do which makes a beautiful compromise is to use debootstrap to make a Debian chroot on e.g. an SD card, and run that simultaneously with Angstrom. I'm doing some development that way (what can I say, I'm very attached to development on Debian :p ), and it has the nice advantage that I can do all the editing, building, dependency management, etc on Debian, slap together a PND, then not only immediately run it, but immediately run it in the very OS that the Pandora comes with (since it's still running right there).


It would probably be possible to stuff the Angstrom kernel together with a Debian rootfs and get a perfectly-fine "proper" install of Debian, but I prefer my system :)
Click to expand...
That sounds cool!
Click to expand...
I don't know, kinda sounds a bit... Clunky?


There are other distros, but I haven't seen the pnd system ported to them, though. Most of them have a native package manager, though.
 
'libpnd' is the umbrella that contains all that stuff, and it generally ports trivially to most linux systems. The main condition to _use_ pnds, is the union filesystem mounter (aufs), which you may or may not need to build for your kernel (or may not be supported for some kernel versions, etc.)


But _libpnd_ itself ports _trivially_; its highly portable. (libpnd being headers, libs, couple of daemons, minimenu, etc)


jeff
 
Silent-Hunter said:
Gregor said:
With Debian and Debian-derived-distros-which-shall-remain-nameless, the easiest thing to do which makes a beautiful compromise is to use debootstrap to make a Debian chroot on e.g. an SD card, and run that simultaneously with Angstrom. I'm doing some development that way (what can I say, I'm very attached to development on Debian :p ), and it has the nice advantage that I can do all the editing, building, dependency management, etc on Debian, slap together a PND, then not only immediately run it, but immediately run it in the very OS that the Pandora comes with (since it's still running right there).


It would probably be possible to stuff the Angstrom kernel together with a Debian rootfs and get a perfectly-fine "proper" install of Debian, but I prefer my system :)
Click to expand...
That sounds cool!
Click to expand...

Hm ... I wonder if people would be interested in me making a PND to do this automatically?

Austin25 said:
I don't know, kinda sounds a bit... Clunky?
Click to expand...

Naturally you don't run all of the daemons that would come installed on a Debian system, but otherwise this setup is virtually identical to a conventional install of Debian, with the advantage that it lets you use it without rebooting or otherwise deactivating the host system. So yeah, it's not quite the same as a "real" install, but it has its advantages.
 
I'd love a PND! Are you kidding? That would be amazingly useful!
 
Tempel said:
I'm fairly certain that that's exactly what Stuckie's Extend Utils does. You should see if that suits your needs before you start developing. Even if it doesn't, it might be easier to modify it than start from scratch.
Click to expand...

A strategy like mine is simpler (doesn't require hosting huge images) and never goes out of date. Otherwise they're broadly the same. I still think a debootstrap-based system is worthwhile, so I'll probably go ahead, but yeah, I may steal stuff.
 
I tried getting PNDs working in Ubuntu (the one Stuckie released) and some of them worked. I think it's mostly an issue of missing libraries, for the ones which failed.
 
Wasn't someone trying to get Arch working? What about Knoppix? (Yes, I know: grave-digging.)
 
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Today I read some more stuff on Ubuntu and ARM, good things about unity running on OMAP3 and 4 but I can't find it anymore. I get kinda sick reading about Ubuntu and ARM though, it seems for at least the last two years Ubuntu was supposed to run perfectly on ARM but either it is difficult or there are just no real devices for it to run on. I run an Ubuntu derivative on my computers, Mint, and I'd give Ubuntu a try on the Pandora if it wasn't ugly orange or brown colors.
 
If someone could get a decent build of Gentoo working, since it's a rolling release distro (all the software updates to newest independently, without making you wait for a new version of the distribution), we should be able to upgrade that build to newest regardless of when it was made. In theory. Assuming the starting build works with storing stuff on the SD card, since Portage might kill the NAND.


Edit: Nevermind, looks like there's already a group working on embedded Gentoo: http://neuvoo.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page


Even better, they seem to have an install for the Pandora: http://neuvoo.org/wiki/index.php?title=Install_Pre-Built_Image#Pandora
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I thought I would just update this with a link to this blog post I found, in which the author details some of the work going on with respect to Arch, and contains links to an archive of the OS that apparently just needs to be extracted to an ext2-formatted card (>= 1GB), as well as an updated '2.6.37.2 kernel with additional Pandora specific patches'.


Arch is alien to me, however, so follow the link for better info.
 
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