Ubuntu Netboot Edition

[badmonkey]

I know there have been discussions about Ubuntu (in all its various flavours) on the Pandora in the other forums, but are pre-built OMAP3 images a new thing ? and more importantly will they work on the Pandora ?


http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-netbook/ports/releases/10.10/beta/


Unfortunately I'm a few months away from receiving mine so can't experiment myself. The Netbook Edition looks like an interesting balance between a slick menu GUI and a full desktop.


There's supposed to be touch support coming in Ubuntu so I expect they plan to focus some love in the increasingly popular mobile/tablet market.

 

[Xenu]

I think it would be really slow.

 

[Wintersdark]

I'd definitely like to hear about practical experiences with this. Particularly with prebuild omap3 (that's the "system on a chip" setup the Pandy uses, right?) images. Ubuntu's Netbook Remix apparently runs really, really well on netbooks. My only real concern would be in regards to RAM - Pandy's 256mb is may require some extra pruning with Ubuntu to get things running smoothly.

 

[tsh]

I tried an earlier build, and it didn't seem to boot up properly. Possibly something to do with not having enough RAM to unpack the image. About to try this version now (once it downloads)

 

[badmonkey]

OMAP3 Beagleboards appear to only have 256mb ram as well, so I was vaguely hopefully that a build that specifically mentions the beagleboard could stand a chance of starting up. Obviously it would require a lot of hacking to get everything working, but interesting to see how far it gets. I look forward to your results.


... maybe I'll have to wait until a tegra2 tablet running UNE comes out .... without trying to start a fire, I've read opinions that Android isn't great, especially on larger screen sizes.

 

[Wintersdark]

OMAP3 Beagleboards appear to only have 256mb ram as well, so I was vaguely hopefully that a build that specifically mentions the beagleboard could stand a chance of starting up. Obviously it would require a lot of hacking to get everything working, but interesting to see how far it gets. I look forward to your results.


... maybe I'll have to wait until a tegra2 tablet running UNE comes out .... without trying to start a fire, I've read opinions that Android isn't great, especially on larger screen sizes.

Oh, it certainly runs. If you look up os extends, you can see pics of getting Ubuntu 9.04 (the full version) up and running on the Pandy, with ram to spare. The netbook remix, particularly one specifically set up for an OMAP3 chip, will very likely work.


The problem is that Ubuntu generally expects about a gig of ram, so while it'll work, you'll end up relying very heavily on your swap file once you start actually running programs, and when you're swapping to an SD card, it's not going to be very fast.

 

[tsh]

OK, yes it should work, since it is the same basic platform. I failed so far, but maybe it is the SD card I am trying, the image seems to create 2 partitions, and only 1 is mountable by my PC. it took an age to dd the image too... Maybe i'll try again when my class 6 16GB card arrives from Play.

 

[tsh]

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but the image I downloaded seemed to be missing omapfb (and the pandora version is no good). I get log files, but X can't find a display (even if I use the pandora boot options rather than DVI). Any pointers to anything else that might be worth a try?

 

[kuru]

Sheesh and there I was wondering what the freak a netboot version is. Spell-checking topics ftw!

 

[tsh]

well, netboot does exist, it loads up the OS over ethernet and installs it (only I don't remember seeing the option since a few years ago). Handy if your target has no removable storage.