How os friendly is the pyra?


2coop4

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I understand that it runs full debian with some changes to make everything work out of the box but as far as testing out a other OSes such as archlinux are all the packages to make everything work available at least if not its totally fine i'd just like to know
 
I already tested :
Pyra-OS

Debian

Slackware-14.1 : mini and full image
Slackware-current : mini and full image

Slackware-armhf : old unsupported build
Gentoo : stage 3 archive
Archlinux
Opensuse : quite nice
Kali : not working, but should with more work
Fedora-mini
Fedora-xfce : graphically slow
 
Looks like you tested most of the ones I would want to use.

Has anyone tried out Free-BSD?
 
I use Linux on my PC and notebook and love to tweak them but I have to say that Linux on ARM I just don't like to mess with. I think on x86 I'm used to everything just working on the architecture but on ARM I hit a lot of walls and just give up.

My Pandora is pretty much stock. I also use android but I never mess with it much, the only reason I have my phone rooted is so I can use a VPN, that is as far as customizing my phone OS gets.

The Pandora works pretty well as is as I'm sure the Pyra will after a few tweaks after release. if the Pandora was more powerful maybe I'd mess with it more so maybe I will with the Pyra. Also, Linux has come a long way on ARM so that will help a lot. Debian is a much more mature distro than Ångström, so that make it a little more friendly to hack also.

With the Pandora it has worked very well, it isn't like it came with Windows that gets infected every 15 minutes so I don't have any reason to mess with it. I did at first, got Gentoo running on it, the distro I used on my PCs at the time, but after a while I just flashed my Pandora to stock and it has worked really well since.
 
When I was younger, I would love tinkering with things like this, but now I'm more interested in actually accomplishing things. =)

You can sharpen your axe all day, but it doesn't even matter if you don't ever get to chopping wood.
 
I wonder how easy it would be to in-place replace Debian with Devuan. systemd can suck an egg.
I never seen a point at devuan.
Within debian systemd have become the default. You're still free to select the init manager you want. sysvinit is still available and *supported* by the debian community. Just like gnome is the defaut desktop, but KDE works fairly well too.
But if you want absolutly to use a less maintain distribution for the impression that you're freer (while you are actually less free since you cannot choose your init manager...), go ahead...
 
http://www.voidlinux.eu/ looks like an interesting distribution that does not use systemd, is not based on any other distro and has other ARM ports available..maybe it can adapted for pyra??
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I already tested :
Pyra-OS

Debian

Slackware-14.1 : mini and full image
Slackware-current : mini and full image

Slackware-armhf : old unsupported build
Gentoo : stage 3 archive
Archlinux
Opensuse : quite nice
Kali : not working, but should with more work
Fedora-mini
Fedora-xfce : graphically slow

I am a long time user of OpenSUSE - so how nice is "quite nice"?? ;)... any issues?
 
http://www.voidlinux.eu/ looks like an interesting distribution that does not use systemd, is not based on any other distro and has other ARM ports available..maybe it can adapted for pyra??

Uh...
Not only that, we are also optimising your experience with Void Linux based on your personal process table (ps) and your .bash_history, using a small cron job.

This information will let us focus our efforts, and make the work we do help you more. This service, just like Void, will be provided free of charge.

How generous!
 
Isn't simply having a Gnu/Linux device in your pocket obscure enough? There are so many tiny sub-niche distributions out there that it is difficult to know by their name if they're a Linux distribution, or a desert, or furniture, or prescription drugs.

At least everyone who has ever installed Linux in their life is highly likely to have heard of Debian at some point.
 
To me, it sounds like Pyra handheld owners will be able to run any 32-bit ARM GNU/Linux distro. BSD will be tricky. I think Android may be able to run on it? I'm not sure. You'll just need to copy over the firmware from /lib/firmware, and there may be some other blobs that need to be copied over, but I'm not sure. I'm only speculating at this point....
 
I'd *love* to have Android working.

Regarding systemd, that's not a useful conversation to have anyway. For my next experiments, I'm waiting for a stable distribution that uses Wayland. I hope it will remove DVD playback screen-tearing.
 
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