There Is No Need To Include The Ubuntu Netbook Gui In The Nand

[spinghed]

Listen, the ubuntu GUI is really finger friendly - it's nice and simple and pleasant to use

- NO it's not great big command line linux, but on a small touch screen it should be a decent UI experience. This alone makes it worth having.

If you are experienced at Linux, as I imagine all the people who don't want it are, You should find it trivial to remove, because you know how...

I don't know much linux, but I know icons and pressing so It'll be fine for me


said my piece - thanks


Rick




edited 'cos it didn't make any sense

 

[torpor]

So there will be two repositories: One for games and apps and one for the firmware including updates.

Great, glad thats clear.

 

[mindlord]

The firmware that ships has to be more general purpose, I know. But I hope that the package manager is flexible enough for people like me who want to tweak away all the cruft. I like to squeeze every ounce of performance I can get out of any computer I use, and the Pandora will be no exception.

I hope the official firmware can be stripped down to the bare bones using the inbuilt package manager. So that those of us that are savvy can roll our own from the official packages. I for one will probably not ever use Pmenu or Ubuntu Netbook GUI, and I'm certain that I could find something more useful to me to put in that space. There will certainly be other packages that I will never use in there as well.

I get where Skeezix is coming form. We don't need a repo with EVERYTHING like Ubuntu, but an (un)official repo for testing and approval seems very beneficial. Not everything will work nice and tidy in a PND. And not every package can or should be submitted upstream to the Angstrom Repo, either. Packages from the Angstrom repo known to work with the official firmware could be pulled down in the the (un)official repo and used with some level of assurance that it's not going to break your OS. Maintaining a repo specifically for the Pandora seems too beneficial to take a pass on. It would also give the official firmware maintainer "popularity contest" info. So they know what can be removed from the "general purpose" firmware and what should be included in future revisions.

Running off an SD slot is not going to be a cure-all option for some people since SD cards will be slower than NAND, and it cuts into the overall storage available without sacrificing battery life to USB flash/hard drives or external card readers.

 

[dflemstr]

What prevents it would be the default OS image not including the official Angstrom repository in it's OPKG list
I'm trying to imagine a setup where it knows whether it's running off of NAND or SD, and decides whether it will just look at the official Pandora repository, or the include the Angstrom repository as well. Nothing is immediately jumping out at me as an easy way to do this though. I suppose it depends on how DJWillis sets up the Pandora repository.

That could still break the system. I don't want anyone to accidentally use any repositories that can break something without even knowing.

Why aren't all the existing community repositories included into Ubuntu?
'cause they could break it!

If you want to use them, you can include them manually.

Why would an additional repository break the system? If installing a package from the *official OS repository* (in this case Ångström) breaks the system, something is terribly, terribly wrong.

I.e., if the PND system stops working because a package is installed, it's not the package's fault, it's the PND systems. And I know from experience that the PND system is quite foolproof (aka it is very stable), so there must have been some mistake when packaging it.

By the way, you ARE using packages for Pandora software, right? You're not just dumping executables into the image; you create packages and then install them, right? Right?

(really hoping that your answer isn't "no")

 

[renwils]

What does the window manager look like in the netbook gui?

 

[mindlord]

What does the window manager look like in the netbook gui?

This video at the 2:05 mark.

 

[TrashyMG]

What does the window manager look like in the netbook gui?

This video at the 2:05 mark.

It does look pretty nice. Why I voted for it.

 

[Sphinxter]

My word did you not see the finger scrolling video? STFU.

 

[klikklak]

On the netbook GUI: In my experience a full desktop that you have to poke with a stylus is not very optimal on something that you're using on a bus or when travelling in some way. It's too many actions to do something that should be possible to do with your fingers. Also the whole WIMP interface breaks down on 4.3", what's the point of minimizing, maximizing, moving around etc. when what you want 90% time is fullscreen. The command line is where it's at for anything more complex.

 

[renwils]

What does the window manager look like in the netbook gui?

This video at the 2:05 mark.

It looks pretty nice. I honestly don't see the utility in having much of a desktop workspace, and the large buttons will be easier on a touchscreen.

Though a tiling window manager may be useful.

My word did you not see the finger scrolling video? STFU.

I was away from a computer with flash or sound for a few days, so I didn't watch ED's video until now.

 

[EvilDragon]

I.e., if the PND system stops working because a package is installed, it's not the package's fault, it's the PND systems.

Sorry, that wasn't the case here. Angström updated the "file" package (which is a tool that finds out what kind of type a file is) but didn't include the magic files. Therefore, the file command didn't work anymore.
That's not a fault of PND, but of Angström. Yet, it was an unstable package, but it's in their official repo and people might've installed that.

By the way, you ARE using packages for Pandora software, right? You're not just dumping executables into the image; you create packages and then install them, right? Right?
(really hoping that your answer isn't "no")

At the moment, there are no packages as packages are only for updates and we currently use full images for developing.
It's baked with recipes according to Angströms standards.
You can bake your own OS, just head over to the Angström site, learn how to do that and then head over to git.openpandora.org to find all the recipes you need.

If you think everything will be that bad, what prevents you from creating your own OS?

 

[second exodous]

Here is what I would do: Not touch the Pandora setup beyond what they supply, copy that over to an SD card and mess with it there. If it works on the SD card then copy it back over.

For most people that want to mess with things you might as well just install a fresh distro on SD or roll your own like ED says.

But back on topic of the Ubuntu Netbook GUI: I think it looks pretty cool, not as feature rich as I would expect from Ubuntu but I'll have fun playing with it. Why not include it?

 

[torpor]

You can bake your own OS, just head over to the Angström site, learn how to do that and then head over to git.openpandora.org to find all the recipes you need.

The *point* is that users SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO THAT in order to have a stable, well-maintained system - we want *YOU* to do it and provide the canonical distribution, so that we developers do not have library/dependency hell and can always depend on end-users having a stable, well-maintained distro.

Just saying "you can do it yourself" means nothing: we want *YOU* to do it so that 10,000 other people don't have to do it all independently without any kind of technical standards or control..

Of course, if you don't want to do that as part of the service to your customers, that is another story and it opens the door for competition in the PandoraOS space, but the point of you having a canonical distribution is to prevent all this stupid fork business in the first place.

 

[WizardStan]

The *point* is that users SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO THAT in order to have a stable, well-maintained system - we want *YOU* to do it and provide the canonical distribution, so that we developers do not have library/dependency hell and can always depend on end-users having a stable, well-maintained distro.

I think ED's point is that they don't want the average user doing that anyway, installing or removing things at will. "Here is the OS, the complete OS, nothing more and nothing less, and any programs written for the default OS can count on all these things being there".
If you want to customize, then you're already in a realm of being more than just an average user, and you can just change the recipe and bake an entirely new image with the features you do or don't want included.
Packages will come later as upgrades to the default OS

 

[mindlord]

The *point* is that users SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO THAT in order to have a stable, well-maintained system - we want *YOU* to do it and provide the canonical distribution, so that we developers do not have library/dependency hell and can always depend on end-users having a stable, well-maintained distro.

I think ED's point is that they don't want the average user doing that anyway, installing or removing things at will. "Here is the OS, the complete OS, nothing more and nothing less, and any programs written for the default OS can count on all these things being there".
If you want to customize, then you're already in a realm of being more than just an average user, and you can just change the recipe and bake an entirely new image with the features you do or don't want included.
Packages will come later as upgrades to the default OS

The problem arises from this:
Without proper package management, those of us who choose to customize the OS will be unable to do proper upgrades because our baseline install will contain files that the upgrade system will not expect. Or worse when an upgrade package appears it will try to install anyway even though the base package doesn't exist in our image. How is the package manager supposed to know what installed or not? Without proper package management from the get-go things can get really messed up really quick. So people building custom OSes will instantly loose access to one of the main reasons to love Linux in the first place, easy upgrades.

I'm sorry, but I find this to be a major disappointment.

 

[torpor]

Its not about 'tweaking', its about upgrading and staying in line, constantly, with the current canonical releases of the OS, coming from a single source. IF that isn't going to happen, then I think its going to be very difficult to maintain a codebase on PandoraOS over time, since we'll never be truly sure what the end users are running...

 

[Mithrildor]

Its not about 'tweaking', its about upgrading and staying in line, constantly, with the current canonical releases of the OS, coming from a single source. IF that isn't going to happen, then I think its going to be very difficult to maintain a codebase on PandoraOS over time, since we'll never be truly sure what the end users are running...

So if the devs work together and Ignore the non-canon OSs nothing bad is going to happen

 

[EvilDragon]

You can bake your own OS, just head over to the Angström site, learn how to do that and then head over to git.openpandora.org to find all the recipes you need.

The *point* is that users SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO THAT in order to have a stable, well-maintained system - we want *YOU* to do it and provide the canonical distribution, so that we developers do not have library/dependency hell and can always depend on end-users having a stable, well-maintained distro.

Just saying "you can do it yourself" means nothing: we want *YOU* to do it so that 10,000 other people don't have to do it all independently without any kind of technical standards or control..

Of course, if you don't want to do that as part of the service to your customers, that is another story and it opens the door for competition in the PandoraOS space, but the point of you having a canonical distribution is to prevent all this stupid fork business in the first place.

Are you even reading what I wrote about above?

I wrote more than once that we'll probably provide an official repo for firmware updates (which include new useful stuff if it fits the NAND and works fine).

You only need to edit anything if you want to use an UNOFFICIAL repo.
If everything goes right, the Pandora will be added to the normal Angström repo as official machine, so that one will be used.

But we don't want any occasional user start to install packages like hell from any repo and then whine about that this and that doesn't work.

Which is the exact same thing any other Linux Distro I know does.
Debian, Ubuntu, ArchLinux, SuSE... when you install them they only have the official repos included. All other repos need to be added manually.
This does work for most PCs since PCs have a lot of RAM and horsepower. Most distros supporting all kinds of PCs are bloated like hell.

This doesn't work for mobile devices like the Pandora - the stuff in there needs to be fit to the Pandora.
Nothing prevents you from installing the official Angström distro onto the Pandora.

But the default OS should be something that suits for most users and is easily upgradable and usable.

 

[EvilDragon]

Its not about 'tweaking', its about upgrading and staying in line, constantly, with the current canonical releases of the OS, coming from a single source. IF that isn't going to happen, then I think its going to be very difficult to maintain a codebase on PandoraOS over time, since we'll never be truly sure what the end users are running...

This is what is being planned by DJWillis, AFAIK.
However, we still shouldn't include ALL repos (like unstable ones) that could break over the system.

 

[second exodous]

Its not about 'tweaking', its about upgrading and staying in line, constantly, with the current canonical releases of the OS, coming from a single source. IF that isn't going to happen, then I think its going to be very difficult to maintain a codebase on PandoraOS over time, since we'll never be truly sure what the end users are running...

This is always a problem when a company picks an already existing OS for their device and expects you to get updates from them and not from the parent OS.

The Ångström package that broke PND, was PND in the Ångström repos? Anyone that was using PND and the Ångström unstable packages would have picked that up and submitted a bug report would have prevented that Ångström package from being released until it worked with PND, which should be in the repos.

Maintaining an entire OS is very complex so a lot of devices just take an image of a finished OS and just update it for the needs of the device. Both methods of rolling with the update punches of the OS or keeping everything stable and using a static image with updates that the company reviews for the device have their ups and downs. Pandora will use the later.