Ubuntu On Pandora

[Prometheus]

My 2 pence on Ubuntu.

If people really want Ubuntu, and I know that there will be people who do, we would work towards getting it running really well.

Ubuntu could be what pushes the Pandora from our community in to the bigger computer world, we are aware of this and it's been a topic of conversation many times.

What do you guys think?

I quite agree, really.

Personally, I'd rather like to see Ubuntu (or, indeed, Xubuntu, or Kubuntu if possible - the latter of which is the OS I use personally and really rather like :lol: ) available pre-set-up - and persistent - on bootable SD Cards, purchasable as an optional extra. (I think I might have said this in another thread at some point... I can't remember where, though.)

That way, there'd be no need for people to be messing with trying to get it onto the NAND, or whatever else of potential risk that might be tried, and it wouldn't go far from the "just works" sort of thing that tends to be expected of Ubuntu.

I'd happily purchase such a thing, for what it's worth. Especially if Kubuntu were available as an option.

 

[cosam]

Personally, I'd rather like to see Ubuntu ... available pre-set-up - and persistent - on bootable SD Cards, purchasable as an optional extra.

I'm all for the preconfigured approach (mainly because of the impracticalities of manual installation) but I'd rather just download an image which I could copy to my own SD card.

 

[PoisonedV]

I, personally, will not use ubuntu. but this is the first real opportunity to see the raw power of the pandora. amazing work notaz.

also, gimp running is very exciting.

 

[IsSuE]

My 2 pence on Ubuntu.

If people really want Ubuntu, and I know that there will be people who do, we would work towards getting it running really well.

Ubuntu could be what pushes the Pandora from our community in to the bigger computer world, we are aware of this and it's been a topic of conversation many times.

What do you guys think?

I quite agree, really.

Personally, I'd rather like to see Ubuntu (or, indeed, Xubuntu, or Kubuntu if possible - the latter of which is the OS I use personally and really rather like :lol: ) available pre-set-up - and persistent - on bootable SD Cards, purchasable as an optional extra. (I think I might have said this in another thread at some point... I can't remember where, though.)

That way, there'd be no need for people to be messing with trying to get it onto the NAND, or whatever else of potential risk that might be tried, and it wouldn't go far from the "just works" sort of thing that tends to be expected of Ubuntu.

I'd happily purchase such a thing, for what it's worth. Especially if Kubuntu were available as an option.


as far as i am informed the u-boot is also designed to boot of an SD-Card. Setting it up does not look complicated to me (as long as it is the same way, as for the beagleboard)

At the moment I am trying to bring Arch Linux to an ARM platform.

 

[hessiess]

Personally I prefer Arch, but support for a 'main stream' distro on the Pandora can't be a bad thing.

 

[_VWV_]

As Pickle said here, a swap was in use.
If after boot up I find that my OS uses all the available RAM + some swap and nothing is left for apps, I'll immediately delete that OS because it will render my box completely useless.
@notaz
Can you tell us, please, how much RAM is left for user after you logged in? And have you tried opening something more serious in GIMP.. like a picture of medium size (3Mb)?

 

[conso]

I bet there will be several optimized versions of different distributions for pandora in the future. Still it would be nice to have one mayor distribution that is officially supported. Ubuntu should be the best choice, as it is currently the most popular one. People could just use the same software with a similar feeling on their desktop and gadget, what makes synchronization dramatically more comfortable - a win-win situation for ubuntu and pandora.

Given we have a dedicated device here, a lot of optimization on upstart, initial ram-images and several other things could be done - we don't need a whole lot of flexibility and several demons will be pretty useless. That will result in much better performance and dramatically lower boot-times (my guess 0s). Intrepid should be the best choice for the pandora, since it's kernel will already contain some usefull modifications. Not sure what will be the best choice as an DE - probably xubuntu's xfce-desktop-package (xubuntu-desktop) is already to bloated, but a vanilla xfce with some proper chosen apps might do a good job and several other DEs will be right available.

Still, every pandora-ubuntu user should know, that he can't treat the pandora like a desktop pc. Installing the wrong packages might make it extremely slow or even unusable quite fast.

About desktop-effects: I don't think this will be possible. Would be very surprised, if the sgx-drivers contain support for aiglx or xgl had support for openGL-ES, but I might be wrong...

Personally, I'd very much like Arch-Linux with a KDEmod, once the KDE-team has done more work on getting their apps to run comfortably on nokia's tablets

 

[quadomatic]

WOWZ!

This is pretty cool.

I wonder what desktop environment would be good for Pandora?

 

[Prometheus]

I'm all for the preconfigured approach (mainly because of the impracticalities of manual installation) but I'd rather just download an image which I could copy to my own SD card.

I probably should have mentioned that I'd be all for that, as well. I was really more just thinking of the whole "from our community in to the bigger computer world" part of what Craig said, with regards to the preconfiguredness I wrote about. (That said, I would still buy such a thing as I don't currently have any spare SD Cards to put to that purpose, and would have to buy another to try it out anyway. )

EDIT: I probably also should have mentioned that I'm thinking in terms of running it from the SD Card, as opposed to wanting to install it, personally.

 

[Gilrad]

If people really want Ubuntu, and I know that there will be people who do, we would work towards getting it running really well.

Ubuntu could be what pushes the Pandora from our community in to the bigger computer world, we are aware of this and it's been a topic of conversation many times.

What do you guys think?

Is there some way we can have our cake and eat it too? I.e. use Ubuntu as the main windowing environment, heavily optimized for the P, and then add a program loader that can run programs dedicated like? Don't know much about the guts of operating systems, but so long as Ubuntu runs smoothly, and there's a snappy transition between Ubuntu and any major full-screen program, I think it could work.

Only downside I see this being, no matter how much work you put into it, Ubutu (and any other linux distro, in my experience) will always have its little quirks that make it an unfriendly environment for casual users or those without Linux experience.

 

[jellmoo]

If people really want Ubuntu, and I know that there will be people who do, we would work towards getting it running really well.

Ubuntu could be what pushes the Pandora from our community in to the bigger computer world, we are aware of this and it's been a topic of conversation many times.

What do you guys think?

Just a random thought in regards to possible future accessories, but if an optimized for Pandora is developed, perhaps selling it ready to go on SD cards.

A lot of the people currently interested in Pandora would probably install Ubuntu on their own, but a wider more mainstream audience would probably benefit from having a simple "pop it in an install" option.

 

[emil10001]

If people really want Ubuntu, and I know that there will be people who do, we would work towards getting it running really well.

Ubuntu could be what pushes the Pandora from our community in to the bigger computer world, we are aware of this and it's been a topic of conversation many times.

What do you guys think?

That sounds like a pretty keen observation. I tend to think that Ubuntu may not be the favorite of the Linux community, however it does seem to be a favorite of the larger tech community. So, if your goal is to reach out to the larger tech community, I think that Ubuntu would be a good selling point.

I might use Ubuntu as long as it didn't interfere with the gaming apps, especially if it were running well. To me, the preferable situation would be to be able to launch Ubuntu, Android, or whatever else from Pandora's standard menu, similar to how the Maemo platform handles this sort of thing.

 

[benjiro]

That sounds like a pretty keen observation. I tend to think that Ubuntu may not be the favorite of the Linux community, however it does seem to be a favorite of the larger tech community. So, if your goal is to reach out to the larger tech community, I think that Ubuntu would be a good selling point.

I think to many people are putting to much focus on Ubuntu. Lets be honest, what is Ubuntu? A Debian based distro, that has been made more user friendly. Thats it. Its more newbie friendly because of the driver support, but in case of the Pandora, thats hardly needed. Its a fixed hardware platform, so no messing with Ati / Nvidia drivers...

Take any Linux based distro, strip it down, place gnome or kde on it, and a lot of people won't notice the difference. I don't have anything against Ubuntu, but, i have found Debian actually more stable, and less problem prone then ubuntu.

To me, the bootup looked ample speedy. A few slow points, but most of the time was spend on the ext3 recovery during the boot. And that being only at 500Mhz? Now imagine it at 900Mhz.

Also, what was the speed of the SD used for the booting? Class 2, 4, 6 or higher? This will also greatly effect the bootup time, and even more when the memory was swap'ing already.

 

[emil10001]

That sounds like a pretty keen observation. I tend to think that Ubuntu may not be the favorite of the Linux community, however it does seem to be a favorite of the larger tech community. So, if your goal is to reach out to the larger tech community, I think that Ubuntu would be a good selling point.

I think to many people are putting to much focus on Ubuntu. Lets be honest, what is Ubuntu? A Debian based distro, that has been made more user friendly. Thats it. Its more newbie friendly because of the driver support, but in case of the Pandora, thats hardly needed. Its a fixed hardware platform, so no messing with Ati / Nvidia drivers...

Take any Linux based distro, strip it down, place gnome or kde on it, and a lot of people won't notice the difference. I don't have anything against Ubuntu, but, i have found Debian actually more stable, and less problem prone then ubuntu.

To me, the bootup looked ample speedy. A few slow points, but most of the time was spend on the ext3 recovery during the boot. And that being only at 500Mhz? Now imagine it at 900Mhz.

Also, what was the speed of the SD used for the booting? Class 2, 4, 6 or higher? This will also greatly effect the bootup time, and even more when the memory was swap'ing already.


What I was trying to say was that Ubuntu is a buzz word for tech blogs. If you say that Ubuntu is running on your device, you'll probably have a lot of positive response from the tech blogs.

 

[PoisonedV]

Exactly, which in essence describes what is wrong with ubuntu fans.
Ubuntu is turning into a brand name OS, instead of people using it for it's features, alot are using it just because it is Ubuntu.

 

[Babrios]

I think if Symbian really gets open source, it's far more suitable for the Pandora than any flavour of Linux.
It is the OS that's made for the ARM processors, very efficient and not as bloated as other OS's.
It's not just a smart phone OS, it can do everything other OS's can, but with its origins in limited hardware, it is built for efficiency while offering every recent buzz at the same time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS

"In 2008 Nokia announced plans to acquire full ownership of Symbian and start the Symbian Foundation, which will be an independent force for the future development of Symbian OS. They stated that Symbian OS (including the platforms S60, UIQ and MOAP(S)) will become open source in the first half of 2009."

I hope that really happens.

 

[emil10001]

Exactly, which in essence describes what is wrong with ubuntu fans.
Ubuntu is turning into a brand name OS, instead of people using it for it's features, alot are using it just because it is Ubuntu.

Sure, but it's still a pretty solid distro. There's nothing wrong with being popular, it doesn't make it the best Linux distro, but it doesn't mean that it isn't worth using. If the goal is to get publicity and generate the interest of the tech community, then something like Ubuntu might be a good idea.

QUOTE

I think if Symbian really gets open source, it's far more suitable for the Pandora than any flavour of Linux.
It is the OS that's made for the ARM processors, very efficient and not as bloated as other OS's.
It's not just a smart phone OS, it can do everything other OS's can, but with its origins in limited hardware, it is built for efficiency while offering every recent buzz at the same time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS

"In 2008 Nokia announced plans to acquire full ownership of Symbian and start the Symbian Foundation, which will be an independent force for the future development of Symbian OS. They stated that Symbian OS (including the platforms S60, UIQ and MOAP(S)) will become open source in the first half of 2009."

I hope that really happens.



I hope you're kidding. From what I've heard symbian is horrible to dev for. Worse than WinMo.

 

[PoisonedV]

"In 2008 Nokia announced plans to acquire full ownership of Symbian and start the Symbian Foundation, which will be an independent force for the future development of Symbian OS. They stated that Symbian OS (including the platforms S60, UIQ and MOAP(S)) will become open source in the first half of 2009."

I hope that really happens.

I love Nokia.

emil: supporting the exact kind of sensationalism that OSS is meant to counter?

 

[emil10001]

emil: supporting the exact kind of sensationalism that OSS is meant to counter?

Like I said, Ubuntu is still a solid distro. Just because it's popular doesn't make it any less useful. It may not be the best distro, but if it's a good distro, and it will help build your community a lot faster, then perhaps it is a good choice.

 

[sebt3]

What do you guys think?

A stripped down, optimised version of Ubuntu would be a massive selling point The fact you can have something like that in your pocket is amazing.

Sure a massive PR point. but would it be very practical on this specific hardware, not that sure.
I'm all for a custom distrib build specially for the andora1: .
Gmenu2x will be great for hard-core gamer. an other distrib will pop-up some time in the futur for the pand'