Learning Curve...

[3n19m4]

Hi all,

I am new the forums and just stumbled across Pandora last week when looking at the DS and PSP.

I have to say I am extremely excited about this device. When reading the specs/news/forum I was nodding to myself, thinking 'Wow! This thing sounds fantastic, I have to get one!'

One thing I am wondering though is how easy it will be for me to pick up using Linux.
I have worked in IT for a few years and have always loved PCs although I have never touched Linux apart from a brief period when at Uni studying computer science where we used it for lab work.

I have always wanted to start using Linux but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Can anyone point me in the direction of a Linux command help guide or something similar so I can familiarise myself with commands I will have to use if getting a Pandora please?

Built a Pico-ITX box a few months ago and am currently using it as a base for a touch screen coffee table.
I could always install Linux on that to play around with.

Another thing that I am interested in is the whole homebrew/modding scene for various devices.
It amazing me some people have so much knowledge and can happily open up PSP's and other such devices and apply their own modifications. When would be a good place to start learning how to perform modifications like these. I know they all involve a lot of very technical knowledge and would like to go about at least trying to learn the basics.

Will definitely be trying to get my hands on one of the first 3000 even though it is risky I just cant wait to play and show it off to people!

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Cheers,

3n19m4

 

[Kyo]

Not having any linux experience should not be a problem at all, though it can't hurt

 

[AireTamStorm]

One thing I am wondering though is how easy it will be for me to pick up using Linux. I have worked in IT for a few years and have always loved PCs although I have never touched Linux apart from a brief period when at Uni studying computer science where we used it for lab work.

I have always wanted to start using Linux but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Can anyone point me in the direction of a Linux command help guide or something similar so I can familiarise myself with commands I will have to use if getting a Pandora please?

Since Linux was created by people who wanted things to at least make some sense, it shouldn't be too hard. If you can open a command line and comfortably move around inside the filesystem with cd, ls, etc you should be off to a good start. The Pandora will likely have a GUI to do most of its stuff so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Use a Linux system as your desktop for a bit, and if you need help with any specific issue, you can always come here for an answer.

 

[Null]

Another thing that I am interested in is the whole homebrew/modding scene for various devices.
It amazing me some people have so much knowledge and can happily open up PSP's and other such devices and apply their own modifications. When would be a good place to start learning how to perform modifications like these. I know they all involve a lot of very technical knowledge and would like to go about at least trying to learn the basics.

Here's a good place for reading up about modding consoles.

+ I found this place.

 

[Mutilator]

wouldnt most of it run off the sd cards like the gp2x anyway so you probably wont have to learn anything major

 

[redstar1949]

I really wouldn't worry abuot the Linux brother... but you should Ubuntu a try!

 

[mindlord]

As long as you're happy with the default GUI and default apps and can drag and drop files, no Linux knowledge will be needed. However, you will not be getting the most out of the Pandora this way. The real love comes from getting down to the OS and tinkering around.

If you want to learn a bit more about Linux I strongly suggest picking out a few live CD distros and messing around on a PC first. Live CD's are a safe way to play with Linux. When using the live CD you can break anything you want, just reboot and it's new again. Just be careful not to install it over Windows if you don't want to make it a permanent fixture on your PC. It's really obvious you're about to do this, it's not like one click will screw your windows install. Or do it anyways, you might find you like it better than Windows after all.

As far as the Linux distros are concerned they are all good for different reasons, since they all cater to a target audience. Unfortunately, we do not know exactly which distro the Pandora's flavor of Linux will be based off of. Debian seems to be the consensus due to it already having an ARM cpu port. So you might want to start with a Debian based distro first. Examples are: Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint.

Don't fear Linux, the developers have made it very easy to try, and you will probably find you're already comfortable with it because many of Microsoft's recent "innovations" have been part of the Linux world for years. It is extremely well documented, if you are curious about a command just google it, or open a terminal and just type "man [command name]" to learn more about it.

 

[3n19m4]

That's great, thanks for the replies everyone.
Now I just need to hope I can snag one of the first 3000... Hopefully we are all lucky and get one!

Lurkio - Cheers for the links, I will check those out.

Mindlord - Thanks, I would indeed like to play around with the OS and apps when getting it as that sounds like the most fun part! I always tinker around with the Windows OS so if I read up on things enough I guess I should be fine.

I am going to take all of your advise and go ahead and try a few different versions.

It's great to have such helpful people on the forums.
Thanks again!

3n19m4

 

[TaG]

If you have a few gig of space on your hard drive you could "dual boot" with XP. Ubuntu and particularly Mint do this very well (Mint also comes with many multimedia codecs). They will create a partition, install the OS and "Grub" which allows you to choose to boot Linux or XP. The speed increase over a live cd can be significant. Then if you try to live with Linux for a few days and not boot Windows you will find yourself learning very quickly.

 

[Rivus]

If you have a few gig of space on your hard drive you could "dual boot" with XP. Ubuntu and particularly Mint do this very well (Mint also comes with many multimedia codecs). They will create a partition, install the OS and "Grub" which allows you to choose to boot Linux or XP. The speed increase over a live cd can be significant. Then if you try to live with Linux for a few days and not boot Windows you will find yourself learning very quickly.

I'll second Mint... It's basically an easier Ubuntu.

 

[mindlord]

I personally use Mint on my lappy and Xubuntu on my desktop, but I must say, Mint may be taking Xubuntu's place soon.

 

[Gilrad]

Not directly related to the topic at hand, but it makes me wonder...

Since the Pandora will have standardized hardware and a standard operating system, does this mean we could be saying goodbye to the bane of all new Linux users' existence? You know, for some reason, something doesn't work, so you then post on a forum and the gurus suggest you troubleshoot it by entering these five configuration files, comment out this line, add 'cvg=500' after that line, change 'xab' to 'xmb' over there...


In other words, it has always frustrated me that something that should work out of the box (such as mounting a usb drive in read/write mode, as an example) doesn't, and so to fix it you have to dig through a bunch of configuration files and make a lot of unintuitive changes and hope that fixes it.

I mean, I'm hoping that because the people involved are much more local that (what I would imagine) a full-blown linux distro team would consist of, if something does come up that requires some unintuitive troubleshooting, somebody could just upload an update to the repositories that would fix it without having to fuss about with config files... To the average user, if video files suddenly crash your pandora for some reason, clicking on the update is certainly more intuitive than going into some sort of xorg config file and changing some values that you haven't the slightest idea what they do.

 

[sindbad]

By having uniform hardware, such issues will be rare, if any. Good examples are apple notebooks and dell xps notebooks that ship with ubuntu.

 

[Sphinxter]

Install any distro, as root execute, 'makewhatis', this creates the documentation database for every command in the system and takes a while. The command, 'man', is your interface to it, type, 'man man', to learn about it, 'man -k subject', to search the short descriptions for subject.

$ man ls

 

[Gilrad]

***@****:~$ sudo makewhatis
sudo: makewhatis: command not found

any distro, eh? (ubuntu 8.1 here)

 

[Ravnos]

I've never heard of makewhatis, but man pages are generally part of any decent Linux system's base install. Type man <command> and you're likely to find fairly detailed information on the command you're looking for, or info <command> for some Gnu utilities. Anything that doesn't have a man page is probably not part of the base system, so then it's googlin' time.