If Given The Choice, Would You Want Pandora With Beta Or Release Os?

[skeezix]

I think most people are assumed to know this is a new piece of technology and are ready for 'adventure' .. but I thought I'd like to ask and really get a better idea here.

Do most pandora pre-buyers expect to have a well oiled experience? or are ready to tinker day to day for awhile? what do you want/expect?

jeff

(Aside from us peeps, there are considerations for reviewers and blogs/magazines and so forth .. they expect to see pretty stable. Some people love to get in early, while sometimes that backlashes on the seller. Interesting stuff!)

 

[JayFoxRox]

those who ordered know that it won't be stable on day-0.
I can live with that, the first batch is pretty much the start of the development anyway.
I would have voted for: "pretty much feature complete..." if you asked about the second batch tho.

 

[mali]

I'd love to get more Linux knowledge, while tinkering with a beta OS. Learning by doing

 

[Azure]

I just want the hardware as soon as possible as I can live without a polished operating system (it's all about the individual apps to me!). Though part of the fun will be tinkering with it and seeing first-hand the OS and other software being improved, getting new features, optimized, etc.

 

[Phawx]

Have to agree . This is a different environment. Part of the fun of the Pandora will be seeing it grow.

 

[Capn_Fish]

I don't care how beta/alpha (and that's relative with Angstrom, given that really the only things to do are to build drivers and tweak configs) the OS is when I get it. If the OS is unusable, I'll just use Debian armel (which somebody will likely get working quite soon after getting hardware), Gentoo, or Ubuntu (I'm going to use one of the latter two anyway, though).

 

[atomicthumbs]

I like updating firmware except in certain cases, but the Pandora is unbrickable, so those cases are null.

Ship it ship it shipitshipitshipit! Yay!

 

[mindlord]

Hook me up. The more people with Pandora's in hand the faster the bugs can be found and tackled.

 

[PokeParadox]

I have a 1st Ed GP2X... I am not scared of a few rough edges. I've always said as long as I can run applications I'm happy. The polish can come later.
I want this piece of kit ASAP!!!

 

[skeezix]

Theres a lot more to it than just Angstrom. I can spell it out if you want, but we're doing lots of customy stuff on it. (ie: consider we're supporting matchbox and gmenu, and doing PXML magic, and what drag ang drop app support from SD without installing over the OS. We don't want people havcing to install to /usr/bin in NAND to get apps going, possibly screwing up their OS and so forth. Lots of cool magic going to be going on.)

The good news is -- the basic Angstrom build, plus some magic we're working on, should be ready in time for the hardware I imagine. Its just a question of polish. If people just used a plain Angstrom (or whatever Linux) build, then it lacks Pandora-ness and would lead to struggles down the road; We want to establish some standards first-cut, so that they will be continued down the road. (ie: All apps following same standards, etc.)

Don't take any implication of soon or distant launch dates from me. Don't get all meta on me

jeff

 

[Capn_Fish]

Theres a lot more to it than just Angstrom. I can spell it out if you want, but we're doing lots of customy stuff on it. (ie: consider we're supporting matchbox and gmenu, and doing PXML magic, and what drag ang drop app support from SD without installing over the OS. We don't want people havcing to install to /usr/bin in NAND to get apps going, possibly screwing up their OS and so forth. Lots of cool magic going to be going on.)

The good news is -- the basic Angstrom build, plus some magic we're working on, should be ready in time for the hardware I imagine. Its just a question of polish. If people just used a plain Angstrom (or whatever Linux) build, then it lacks Pandora-ness and would lead to struggles down the road; We want to establish some standards first-cut, so that they will be continued down the road. (ie: All apps following same standards, etc.)

Don't take any implication of soon or distant launch dates from me. Don't get all meta on me

jeff

I didn't mean to belittle your efforts (I hope it wasn't taken that way)! I just meant to say that even if only the drivers were implemented in the Angstrom build, it would still be far from what people normally think of as alpha or beta software.

 

[Svartalf]

I didn't mean to belittle your efforts (I hope it wasn't taken that way)! I just meant to say that even if only the drivers were implemented in the Angstrom build, it would still be far from what people normally think of as alpha or beta software.

Heh... If the stories I've heard are true about the firmware sets on the GP32 and GP2X, that alone puts it above those units.

 

[TaG]

those who ordered know that it won't be stable on day-0.
I can live with that, the first batch is pretty much the start of the development anyway.
I would have voted for: "pretty much feature complete..." if you asked about the second batch tho.

First batch ship as long as it 'works'. Whatever is there will get speedy improvements. Second batch needs polish for the wider audience. That's what it's about.

 

[TheGrandPubaa]

I don't mind if it's lacking polish at first, so long as the hardware is bug free.

 

[Frogboy]

If it is truly unbrickable then I'll flash early and often.

 

[echisketch]

In the end, after the base os and drivers are established - the software is left to the community.

I would flash this thing on the hour if I could

 

[White Demon]

It needs to at least work well enough to run apps out of the box. If I can't get a app from the file archive, put it on my SD card and run it on the P on the day I receive it then it will be useless to me.

edit: why do people always put 'I didn't preorder' in these polls? People who didn't preorder shouldn't even be here, so there's no reason for it. Please don't encourage them.

 

[magicman5421]

flash me an os
i'm ready to get my hands dirty

ship ship ship ship ship ship ship ship

 

[mali]

why do people always put 'I didn't preorder' in these polls? People who didn't preorder shouldn't even be here, so there's no reason for it. Please don't encourage them.

Why shouldn't potential second batchers inform themselves here? I find that perfectly ok

 

[gruso]

Naturally I went with "Ship ASAP", and I'd love it if that happened. I am wondering though, whether decisions will be made based on this poll, or if it's just an exercise in curiosity.

As we all know, only a portion of preorderers are active in the forums. And I think those (us) people will be inherently more inclined to play with betas. But maybe that's not the case for all the other people - the ones who aren't voting...

Mali suggested elsewhere that we announce this poll in the community blog, to encourage more readers to get involved, giving us a more accurate result. If the results of the poll are going to hold any weight, then I'm all for the idea. But before putting it up I wouldn't mind hearing from Skeezix.

So, paging Skeezix. Thoughts?