Ubuntu On Pandora

[Pickle]

I think if we are going to be serious about using this it needs to load much faster. If we cant improve the boot time, it should support hibernate/sleep modes without draining the battery much. Coming out of hibernation would be much quicker than a full boot.

Is that screen the standard size? Maybe I need to watch it again it just seemed like it was larger than what the pandora will use.

 

[Determination]

+1 for Arch Linux. I have it running on my Acer Aspire One and desktop. While it's less approachable and well-known then Ubuntu (which I also run), it has a very active community, and smooth + simple package management system. ARM is the major hurdle here, but I can imagine that it can be remedied before the end of the year: It's inevitable.

Arch Linux continues to be a learning experience for me, and does take a lot of my time that could be otherwise filled with gaming. It that regard, it may not be optimal for those Pandora owners that want to turn the device on and begin playing immediately.

 

[ashdjones]

What do you guys think?

I think that ideally we need at least three development strands:

- The Gamey Handheld front end (GPMenu)

- The official distro which is optimised and configured to work perfectly with the handheld for doing Linuxy stuff

- The flashy show-off desktop distro that pushes the limits of what the Pandora can do.


The latter might as well be Ubuntu because it seems to have a cult following and people like it!

 

[cb88]

and there are cult ubuntu haters too... your point?

ubuntu will not push the pandora to its full potential just as a steam engine cannot push a rail car to its maximum speed just because it is less efficient than other better alternatives such as openembedded or T2

ubuntu is not just flashy it is bloated meaning that other distros can be just as flashy with less resources

 

[Julius]

Ubuntu would really be only a PR thing (it's not that different from other Linux distributions anyways).
The Unbuntu MID/Mobile interface would be cool to have however (running on ubuntu or not).

But sure why not... it is good publicity after all.

P.S.: I don't think a full blown desktop with windows would be a good idea though.

 

[notaz]

Is that screen the standard size? Maybe I need to watch it again it just seemed like it was larger than what the pandora will use.

Yes this is the same screen that will be used for production. This is what I was told, at least.

 

[jellmoo]

What Ubuntu would bring is name recognition. Even my friends who are not not all that computer savvy have at least heard of Ubuntu.

If Pandora can support Ubuntu (heck, even if it's a stripped down version and just use the Ubuntu name), in a realistic way then that might be an appeal to those outside of the hardcore gamer/emulation grouping.

Pandora could be promoted as a smaller Eee. Given the popularity of Ubuntu, I think it would be a mistake not to at least look into the possibility.

 

[craigix]

Yes, that's the real production LCD.

 

[Vorporeal]

I originally looked at this video just because I wanted to see more Pandora videos. (because I wasn't interested in ubuntu) But I about freaked when I saw the Gimp load. That made me happy.

<snip>

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 understand that some people will want it, but I think that you should hold back on the development on that for now, and look more to the development of the more core Pandora utilities and apps and such.

-God Ginrai


I don't think Craig means that they'll work on this right away, but that they could work on it for the second batch or so in order to drum up more interest.

 

[Pickle]

Yes, that's the real production LCD.

not bad, i mean we dont have the greatest angle or quality recording, but that looks pretty usable. pretty nice with a touchscreen.

 

[ma10]

how about something like eeePC's native linux distro Xandros? quick booting and the gui is simple enough for the beginner and the beginner/moderate users can hack it before moving to something more text based and/or native to pandora?

or, you could consider using "Fastinit", the init replacement that Asus used in the eee's Xandros so that it boots quicker? currently supports Mandriva 2008 and some development was done incorporating it into eeeXubuntu and eeebuntu........

http://helllabs.org/finit/

 

[ma10]

after browsing for abit longer I found this article showing how Intel modified Fedora and Moblin to boot up on an eeePC (SSD) in 5 seconds and on a standard HDD in 10 seconds...

http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/299483/dcf26b96e737c664/

and here's a youtube video apparently showing this fast bootup:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7NxCM8ryF8

I know that this prob is heavily optimised for Intel but still, surely some of its techniques can be used to shave some seconds of an optimised linux distro for pandora right?

 

[Firefox]

notaz is unstoppable! B)

 

[danboid]

Thanks for that Notaz! That is exactly the video I've waited to see ever since I first heard about craiginator/Pandora

I've been secretly worried that booting a full Linux/xorg desktop distro was going to take agonisingly long but that video has put that worry to rest. It used to take about (as a guess) 4 or 5m to do a cold boot into X on my Zaurus, but that wasn't so bad as taking it out of suspend only took a few seconds.I was also worried that its performance under X wouldn't be as good as under those Ubuntu under OMAP vids I linked to a while back even though I knew the Pandora CPU has a slight edge over that model. Phew!

Someone had already asked but I don't think it got answered- what are you booting off- SD? If so what speed/grade card?

There were 2 things I really badly wanted to see in that video that I hope we can see in the next

1 - Suspend/Hibernate - Yeah, its boot time isn't bad considering but you don't want to wait that long every time you open up the Pandora. In fact you should only need to do that after installing a new OS or kernel. Is suspend/hibernate and resume working yet?

2 - VIDEO PLAYBACK! Does Xv(mc) work? Could you pretty pretty please play back a xvid/divx or h264 vid under mplayer? Purrr-leasssssse!!!

Ma10 - Great video also! Can't wait to get a 5/10s cold Linux boot on my laptop/ Pandora!

As for the distro/Ubuntu talk, let me dispel some myths and misunderstandings about all this.

The main reason Ubuntu and Debian are so popular is down to their large, reliable package repositories. Debian / Ubuntu running on a Pandora will be exactly like running it on a PC with a simliar amount of RAM- the only significant differences are:

1- 12/13k packages available under apt on ARM Debian/Ubuntu vs 22/23k packages under x86
2 - No x86 specific stuff of course (thats mainly you flash9 (flash-nonfree), wine and a few x86 only video codecs)
3- Ubuntu has no official arm/ armel repository unlike Debian

Apart from that you can run, configure and compile stuff exactly as you would on a Ubuntu/Debian PC, just a bit slower

Although all my PCs run Ubuntu (because its more up-to-date than Debian normally) I would much rather go for Debian (Lenny) over Ubuntu for running a 'desktop' distro on the Pandora because I like the fact that ARM has an official Debian port and Debian stable releases really are- Debian has a much better rep and the last couple of Ubuntu releases got a lot of flack for being buggy. Hardy got 100's of megs f updates on top of its .1 release. I think there's more people working on maintaining Debian ARM than Ubuntu ARM or OE. I've never had any luck with OE or Angstrom. The best desktop distros I ran on the Zaurus were Debian based.

But thats big, PC distros. I would like to dual-boot between Debian and a distro tweaked especially for Pandora- main reason being this: for the longest while now desktop apps have been written expecting the user will have a MIN display of 800x600 but an 'average' of 1024x768. The result of this is that lots of desktop X11 apps have windows that won't quite fit on the P's screen. Yes, you can move the big window around by holding down ALT a clicking in the window but thats not ideal. Instead the program code has to be tweaked a bit to play nice with the restricted res of the Pandoras display. It would also be good to have DSP/neon support in apps that could take advantage (mplayer, ffmpeg, lame etc)

 

[PoisonedV]

First law of thermodynamics

 

[_VWV_]

@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)?

I think I can. Post a link to an image you want me to open.

Well my first question about RAM is kinda more important for me! So if it doesn't bother you a lot, can you give us a hint on RAM usage after you log in. It'll be great if you could open this one and try out a few filters of your choice.

 

[notaz]

Someone had already asked but I don't think it got answered- what are you booting off- SD? If so what speed/grade card?

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.

I used an old Kingston 2GB non-SDHC card. No class numbers for those.

1 - Suspend/Hibernate - Yeah, its boot time isn't bad considering but you don't want to wait that long every time you open up the Pandora. In fact you should only need to do that after installing a new OS or kernel. Is suspend/hibernate and resume working yet?

Not in my current setup.

2 - VIDEO PLAYBACK! Does Xv(mc) work? Could you pretty pretty please play back a xvid/divx or h264 vid under mplayer? Purrr-leasssssse!!!

There is no mplayer in Handhelds Mojo repository for some reason, it's in the "waiting" list:
http://mojo.handhelds.org/hasty-armv5el