.next development

[aTc]

It's official enough to get its own section on the boards. This will eventually be the next official firmware. Plans are to make one final HF for zaxxon, then move all development to this one.


Despite all the "nothing works" in the posts here, it's not that far from beeing complete. Basically everything angstrom and openembedded related works, it's just that the pandora addons need a bit of work.


It shouldn't take that long to get everything going, but I will need some help with that. Which is why this section on the boards appeared.


Firmware development wasn't open enough imo, all that you saw on the boards was that some HF magically appeared, and that was it. This is meant to make it easier to see what exactly is going on, and to jump in and help with things.


Work on this was started not that long after the first zaxxon firmware was released, which was really more of a "oh no, some pandoras have been produced, we'd better quickly throw some sort of working OS together".


Ofcourse in the usual pandora way, there were some delays. People were too busy with their day jobs to work on a completely new firmware, and most work went into trying to squeeze as much out of zaxxon as possible.


Which of course got more and more outdated, and harder to upgrade to the latest openembedded stuff as time went on. Somewhere along the way openembedded moved to a completely new way of doing things, making it even harder.


Which is where I heroically jumped in, and saved the day with a brand new firmware.


Well... not quite...


It's more that I started messing about with the whole openembedded thing just after I got my pandora, and in a few years got to know more and more about it.


First only doing a lot of complaining, then slowly getting some actual work done.Most of this happened on IRC, so there's not much activity from me on the boards.

 

[Pickle]

First only doing a lot of complaining

Only first?


aTc thanks for working on this and getting it going.

 

[mcobit]

+1


aTc might be complaining a lot but he has done quite some stuff behind the scenes.

 

[fusion_power]

These are completely news for me. I don't even know aTc but a completely new Firmware sounds good. More details please? Is it still based around Angström or another base? new and faster drivers or features? What is planed, what are the main differences to the current OS branch?

 

[TrashyMG]

Ah, I though aTc only rudely insults people on IRC.. Glad to know he actually does stuff and insults people on IRC..

 

[aTc]

These are completely news for me. I don't even know aTc but a completely new Firmware sounds good. More details please? Is it still based around Angström or another base? new and faster drivers or features? What is planed, what are the main differences to the current OS branch?

It's not that completely new, it's still based on openembedded and angstrom, but this time keeping things cleaner and more in sync with the rest of the OE world.


The kernel is the same as the experimental one in superzaxxon, so the same features and drivers as that, alhough with a slight advantage of having more up to date tools available.


Newer gles drivers are available, but there's a bit of a problem that those don't work with the gpu revision in the first batch of pandoras (everything freezes up after a few seconds).


There aren't that many features planned yet, first priority is to get this to a fully working state first.


Ofcourse you do get all the features OE and angstrom bring, with a usable package manager this time, and a crosscompiler toolchain that uses the exact same stuff the firmware itself was built with.


The selection of packages isn't that great compared to some other distros, but it's enough to get a basic system going with a few extras on top.


And before anyone asks the "why don't you use <distro of the month> ?" question , most other distros need way too much work to automatically generate firmware images optimized for pandora, and generally waste a lot of diskspace by including all docs and dev headers/libraries into a single package, which is fine if you're running from sd, but this is supposed to go on the nand too.

 

[Pickle]

Ok i had a quick test run with this image.


image has libjpeg.so.8, apps expect libjpeg.so.62, a softlink to 8 for 62 works


all opengles apps segfault (i.e hurrican , quake 1/2)


libboost missing for wesnoth, i suppose i could try an get this from the repo


had a missing libxinerama, didnt look into it


only pnd I did get to run was chocolate doom

 

[fusion_power]

It sounds like a complex and long term project, good luck with it.


I really suggest to build a possible "Pandora 2" around an OS that already supports every hardware component. Pandora 1 had the problem that the Hardware was choosen without having proper working sofware components.


I guess Android will be the only option for Pandora 2, at least it "just works" on a gazillion different Devices around the Planet. And I'm not even a fan of Android or iOS devices. But for example it is impressive to see how fluid every component can run on small mobile devices like my buddys iPod Touch. Pandora has (mor or less) comparable Hardware but is not even a glimpse as fluid and fast in handling like this device, fascinating, how my Buddy Spock would say.


I really welcome every project that pulls out more of our beloved Pandora, I know there is much more inside than we've seen yet.

 

[EvilDragon]

Don't mix up the OS and the kernel / drivers.


The kernel / drivers take care of the system (in our case: the Pandora hardware) while the OS runs on top of that and simply provides the system.


You could use our current Pandora OS and run it on many other devices if you have a proper kernel for that (of course, Pandora-specific hardware features would not work).


That's exactly how Slackware and ArchLinux ARM run on the Pandora: It's the standard ARM image using the kernel and drivers we got for the Pandora.


So if there's a Pandora 2, it's no big deal to get our current OS (or the next OS version) to run. Including all the drivers for the hardware into the kernel might be a lot more work, but that needs to be done in any case.

 

[mjohansson]

Dont understand to much of this, but will you make a built in compiler this time?

 

[ShleeDragon]

Notaz and the other kernel devs are working to send the kernel patches upstream - So we can start to consider the kernel Pandora friendly without a mountain of patches.


The OS, drivers and userland fun is another question.

 

[ekianjo]

Probably a question with no clear answer at this stage, but what is the target window for .next to be out for Pandora, as release ? Is it for 2012, or much more probably in next year?

 

[slaeshjag]

When its ready. As nobody's really working on it (aTc pokes it whenever he's bored, but that's about it), 2018 maybe?

 

[slaeshjag]

Since nothing is happening here, I think it might be appropriate to remind people of that pretty much all current issues in .next seems to br broken configuration or missing packages, and aTc needs help with hunting all that down.


The only thing I can think of that will require actually touching code would be to re-implement the double-click-the-titlebar-to-restart-windowmanager feature.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Untarring the xfce image.


What should i do first ?


Test .pnd first ?


Setting scripts ?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Did opkg update and upgrade, but nothing happened.


Seems the package lists are located @ next.openpandora.org, it's not synced to the official Angstrom repo ?

 

[slaeshjag]

All installed packages in .next are already the latest stable afaik.. Could be that re repo hasn't been synced since the image was built.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Ok.


I installed firefox, it's an old 10.0.2.


I migrated the Xfce panel settings, it's a mess :^).


Inserting an SD card does not show in Thunar, i had to go in /media/mmcblk1/


Nothing shows up in the Xfce menu.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Brightness up/down buttons doesn't work.


At first login (after the wizard) the logout menu only shows log out, not reboot and halt.


After a log out and login, they appeared, but still asks for the password to operate.

 

[aTc]

Untarring the xfce image.


What should i do first ?


Test .pnd first ?


Setting scripts ?

Installing the latest image would be nice, i just made a new one based on a completely clean build.


http://next.openpand...pandora.tar.bz2


Im not sure if opkg update/upgrade will fully upgrade it from the old image.

Did opkg update and upgrade, but nothing happened.


Seems the package lists are located @ next.openpandora.org, it's not synced to the official Angstrom repo ?

There are some advantages to having your own repo, and it saves the angstrom people some bandwidth.


The recipes themselves are synced to the stable angstrom ones, so everything should be the same.

Ok.


I installed firefox, it's an old 10.0.2.


I migrated the Xfce panel settings, it's a mess :^).


Inserting an SD card does not show in Thunar, i had to go in /media/mmcblk1/


Nothing shows up in the Xfce menu.

Brightness up/down buttons doesn't work.


At first login (after the wizard) the logout menu only shows log out, not reboot and halt.


After a log out and login, they appeared, but still asks for the password to operate.

great, now find out WHY it doesn't work, and come back with solutions