Pandora Standard Distro: Armstrong Or *ubuntu?

[Svartalf]

So - has this set them back any?

Not that I'm aware of. Angstrom's completely capable of providing what is needed out of box for when it ships.

 

[sindbad]

buntu hostility? Its got name recognition for sure and is aimed at ease of use; only elitists are the ones who say 'burn in hell for making it easy to use!

I think nobody here intends to be hostile to Ubuntu, but it's simply not the ideal distribution as the standard OS. It will be great on the SD Card and will bring nice usability
to the Pandora, but on the NAND there should be something lite and fast ... like Amstrong ...

Also, the Pandora is imho a kind of elitist device. So the reactions don't make me wonder.

just my 2 cents ...

Yep, vanilla ubuntu is just not suitable. There's too much stuff in there that make it a bad choice for the NAND os. It's fine on an SD card, but personally I'd rather use the same kernel&libs all the time to limit fragmentatio (maybe it will?).

 

[skeezix]

Who said they would use a vanilla *ubuntu?

There seems to be a lot of assumptions that if they'r eusing ubuntu, they'r eusing a big fat giant desktop oriented one.

They coiudl remove 90% of it, and its still 'ubuntu', and not bloated all to hell. (ie: Using ubuntu apt repository, filesystem layout, baic gnome and widgets and iconsets, and so on.) Ditch a lot (a lot!) of the startup services and lkm's and daemons and it might be okay.

Have some faith.

Besides, its a small team in spare time.. the OS will almost certainl ybe unpolished on release, regardless of what it is; as long as it boots, offers the unique panda tools for that harsware set, people will grow it.

jeff

 

[hch]

a *ubuntu based primary rom would be F*A*N*T*A*S*T*I*C

just my 0.02$

 

[WizardStan]

They coiudl remove 90% of it, and its still 'ubuntu', and not bloated all to hell. (ie: Using ubuntu apt repository, filesystem layout, baic gnome and widgets and iconsets, and so on.) Ditch a lot (a lot!) of the startup services and lkm's and daemons and it might be okay.

This is my argument why Ubuntu is a bad choice: you start with something big and overachieving, and strip it down. When you do this, you often end up being unable to strip out unwanted features because they're dependent on needed ones, or the features you do want are themselves unoptimized to the purpose or platform and need to be rewritten anyway. You strip and strip and rewrite, and in the end only a small portion of what you started with remains; the rest has been removed or at least partially rewritten to match your specific case. If the base changes, a bug is discovered or something, working the bug fix into your heavily modified code could prove difficult.
Instead, it makes more sense in my mind, to take something small and build up on it. You ultimately get what you want, written exactly as you want it, on an already existing solid base which should have needed very little changes.

 

[skeezix]

Sure, maybe. (I'd start with NetBSD or FreeBSD myself , but they do want the *ubuntu recognition I think. That could be a powerful force .. making it easy for existing ubuntu users to migrate over, etc. *shrug*

I don't see it as a _big deal_ however .. but if its a game breaker day one, folks will fix it (dd as you say

jeff

 

[Etinin]

Why the *buntu hostility? Its got name recognition for sure and is aimed at ease of use; only elitists are the ones who say 'burn in hell for making it easy to use!'. As an Emacs and long term unix nerd I can see your pain, but ... just run another OS. Its not like its in ROM here...

I call shenanigans!

(Besides, the only OS you need _is_ Emacs.)

jeff

I do not see any reason for your hostilities, but I feel I should make three points:

1. Your statements about me are untrue.
2. I don't like to have a slowed down computer due to useless software being installed, especially with a device like the Pandora, it would suck to have a distribution that doesn't really care about memory usage or disk space.
3. Ubuntu has not been designed to be used for embedded devices and using it for that purpose would be stupid, as it would require heavy modifications.

 

[PoisonedV]

Why the *buntu hostility? Its got name recognition for sure and is aimed at ease of use; only elitists are the ones who say 'burn in hell for making it easy to use!'. As an Emacs and long term unix nerd I can see your pain, but ... just run another OS. Its not like its in ROM here...

I call shenanigans!

(Besides, the only OS you need _is_ Emacs.)

jeff

guess you dont understand why people use ubuntu in the first place.
oh well, have fun with your bloatware. i got over that phase after i started building my own pcs, but whatever.

 

[Sphinxter]

Aw c'mon, nobody needs emacs.

 

[Etinin]

Aw c'mon, nobody needs emacs.

Say that to the developers that developed probably more than half the code the Pandora is gonna use.

 

[WizardStan]

Everyone knows real programmers use butterflies.

 

[Vorporeal]

Or nano. That's what I use for programming...

 

[sterling976]

Or nano. That's what I use for programming...

No, no. Butterflies. :lol:

 

[Tinnus]

...but Vim is great.

 

[AireTamStorm]

Emacs? Vim? Whats the matter with all of you? Joe for the win.

 

[tazg]

Who said they would use a vanilla *ubuntu?

There seems to be a lot of assumptions that if they'r eusing ubuntu, they'r eusing a big fat giant desktop oriented one.
I don't think anyone assumed this, but basing it on ubuntu, period, is a bad idea.

They coiudl remove 90% of it, and its still 'ubuntu', and not bloated all to hell. (ie: Using ubuntu apt repository, filesystem layout, baic gnome and widgets and iconsets, and so on.) Ditch a lot (a lot!) of the startup services and lkm's and daemons and it might be okay.
This is exactly why it's stupid to base it on ubuntu. It would have to be stripped down so much that it would actually be, at most, "debian-based", not ubuntu-based. Even keeping xfce is a stretch, it really makes no sense to put a UI like that on a handheld. I thought they already had their own desktop and were using a lighter version of X. Why take this step backward?

Have some faith.
I have faith and hope that someone misinterpreted information and this isn't actually what's happening.

 

[Sphinxter]

Granted it lacks some rich guy and a foaming fan base but why not angstrom? It's very nice.

ed.
Sorry, had a flashback there, used to say that when I was the bastard sysadmin from hell, purposely leave it out of the default builds and get the new guys to buy me lunch, good times.

 

[likwidoxigen]

Good heavens what a cluster F* in here.

For those of you taking your steamy self-righteous dumps on Ubuntu, you're all over-reacting.

If you want to complain about bloat etc then stop being sissies and do your own damn LFS build. In fact till you've done one you'll still feel that one Linux Distro is "better" than another and not realize some simple facts.

Linux distros are a collection of tools running on a Linux Kernel..... that's it. Period... end of story.

If you dig down to the bare bones you realize they're all the same, you can do the same things on any of them.

I can re-comp my kernel on my ubuntu box and add support for a particular driver or I can do a high-level task like use the network manager for configuring my wifi access. It's up to me how deep in I go.

I use ubuntu because it gets out of my way when I need it to, and because it's just a collection of GNU and other software running on a Linux Kernel I can do whatever the F* I want when I need to as well.

It won't matter if they use Angstrom or Ubuntu. I like apt personally (rpm's blow IMO) so a Deb/Ubu base piques my interests. But I've spent a bunch of time hacking on OpenEmbedded with the Neo1973 and that's really not a bad system either, bitbake is a pain at times but it gets the job done.

The Pandora team has done nothing but a freaking awesome job on everything thus far. I'm going to TRUST THEM COMPLETELY with the default build.

After the first few weeks of me enjoying the handheld, I'll see how the Angstrom/E build runs on it and probably run with that for a while, and if it's at a point I like I'll stick with it.

 

[skeezix]

Why the *buntu hostility? Its got name recognition for sure and is aimed at ease of use; only elitists are the ones who say 'burn in hell for making it easy to use!'. As an Emacs and long term unix nerd I can see your pain, but ... just run another OS. Its not like its in ROM here...

I call shenanigans!

(Besides, the only OS you need _is_ Emacs.)

jeff

I do not see any reason for your hostilities, but I feel I should make three points:

1. Your statements about me are untrue.
2. I don't like to have a slowed down computer due to useless software being installed, especially with a device like the Pandora, it would suck to have a distribution that doesn't really care about memory usage or disk space.
3. Ubuntu has not been designed to be used for embedded devices and using it for that purpose would be stupid, as it would require heavy modifications.



Interesting; scanning up I see my posts, but I don't see them referring to anyone directly, and yet you take it as a personal attack. Certainly, I thought throwing in the cliche 'shenanigans' and making Emacs as an OS references would also tip off that I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek. Anyway, I meant no offence, but I do also think people are over-reacting .. is basing something (however vanilla or not) on ubuntu such a crime that it deserves an uproar? I think not. More to point, is basing it on ubuntu, then stripping everything out, worth its trouble weighed against the benefits? (Granted, it might be that all the benefits are in selling the device, which is only partly relevent to the users of sed device.. it is more important to the dev team making a profit perhaps. But getting bigger sales does help everyone to some extent -- thriving community et al. But possibly it also buys in the large ubuntu support network and gives newbies more places to hang out than just here..)

But as I say .. for servers I use FreeBSD; for an in-my-face I use FreeBSD and Gentoo. I don't use *ubuntu at all myself, for anything except build-tests - since so many other people are using it, one must ensure that 'ldd' is happy on the default install if you want binary releases to work for anyone. (I generally simultaneously release builds for a dozen platforms, built with a half dozen machines and VMs, all at once. Woot! When releasing software its often a good idea to both use and test on target platforms but with limited time I only test on target platforms, and dev in my preferred ones.)

For the record, while I'm stirring things up, not only is RPM utter crap, apt is not much better. Freebsd 'ports' ftw, or maybe Gentoo's system. The rest are far too fragile and prone to failure after awhile (which is why so many Linux distros suggest doing _reinstalls_ rather than _upgrades_ to do an upgrade. Sillyness!)

jeff

 

[God Ginrai]

Good heavens what a cluster F* in here.

For those of you taking your steamy self-righteous dumps on Ubuntu, you're all over-reacting.

If you want to complain about bloat etc then stop being sissies and do your own damn LFS build. In fact till you've done one you'll still feel that one Linux Distro is "better" than another and not realize some simple facts.

Linux distros are a collection of tools running on a Linux Kernel..... that's it. Period... end of story.

If you dig down to the bare bones you realize they're all the same, you can do the same things on any of them.

I can re-comp my kernel on my ubuntu box and add support for a particular driver or I can do a high-level task like use the network manager for configuring my wifi access. It's up to me how deep in I go.

I use ubuntu because it gets out of my way when I need it to, and because it's just a collection of GNU and other software running on a Linux Kernel I can do whatever the F* I want when I need to as well.

It won't matter if they use Angstrom or Ubuntu. I like apt personally (rpm's blow IMO) so a Deb/Ubu base piques my interests. But I've spent a bunch of time hacking on OpenEmbedded with the Neo1973 and that's really not a bad system either, bitbake is a pain at times but it gets the job done.

The Pandora team has done nothing but a freaking awesome job on everything thus far. I'm going to TRUST THEM COMPLETELY with the default build.

After the first few weeks of me enjoying the handheld, I'll see how the Angstrom/E build runs on it and probably run with that for a while, and if it's at a point I like I'll stick with it.

Off Topic: Just wondering, is that your real name? or is it some pun on Bruce Lee?

-God Ginrai