Sugar + Joysticks = Amazing.

[thantik]

I'm sure a lot of you have seen Sugar for the OLPC - For those of you who haven't, here's a screenshot of what it looks like:
http://regmedia.co.uk/2008/01/16/home.jpg

Using the L & R buttons for Back / Forward + Either the left or right joystick for menu selection would completely rock.

What would it take to get this working? - I'd love if someone were interested enough to pick up a project like this to run on p&|a. The beauty of it is that it could fade in/out of transparency based on if the joystick was centered or not so we wouldn't have to have any kind of ugly taskbar taking up screen space.

Are there many UI projects going on for the Pandora? - I'd love to see something similar to ubuntu's netbook remix launcher app as well.

I guess even better would be some sort of simple library/application (that's autorun) that we could just edit a config file to make our own UIs...but I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm just getting into linux programming so I'm really interested in this stuff I just don't know where to start (I haven't coded in so long that I've lost a lot of my previous knowledge of java, php, asp - which are just web-languages I know but it should still give me a step up from the average user)

 

[carlos]

The Zodiac used to have a menu like that and it worked so well that it was copied on the GP32 in the Aquafish firmware: http://www.gp32x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,42,456

I'd like to see it too, but for now I'd be happy with anything as long as I get my Pandora.

 

[valhalla]

There is work in progress at sugarlabs to port sugar to other distributions / devices, and that includes Angstrom on the beagleboard, so there may be hope to see sugar on the pandora one day (I will probably try to do so if I'll have time).

A few caveats.

• Sugar has been designed for the XO custom screen with a monochrome resolution of 1200×900 and a slighty lower color resolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Display_resolution, and it may not fit on the pandora display.
• Distributions other than fedora on the XO are still very work in progress: many activities are not working yet and chrashes happen; this will be solved, with time.
• Sugar is not just a gui: you won't be able to use it to launch existing games; activities (the sugar almost-equivalent of applications) must be written for it, using it's modules and the only language supported (python). A few common apps have been sugarized (wrapped in a sugar activity), but it's not common and requires serious work.
• Also, the interface in the current sugar release has changed a little from the screenshot: currently the launchers are in the main window and running apps have been moved to the frame.

It may be interesting to know that sugar uses the same window manager as pandora (matchbox), of course with a custom desktop and panel, just to say that matchbox is not limited to the ugly default interface.