Ubuntu On Pandora

[hch]

hi wizardstan,

yes, no use of dragging this into religious territory. i just have very bad personal experience with angstrom from my zaurus. while it was much more responsive, there just was no software. the community here seems to be quite a bit higher caliber so i hope i'll be pleasanlty surprised.

the other thing i hope for is, that the special pandora kernel will be easily compatible with other distros. or, ideally, that the modifications notaz&co make will go upstream. this is the area where i believe the standard os will be way ahead of everything else.

 

[viridior]

the other thing i hope for is, that the special pandora kernel will be easily compatible with other distros. or, ideally, that the modifications notaz&co make will go upstream. this is the area where i believe the standard os will be way ahead of everything else.

Maybe I need to be corrected here, but I see no reason that a linux kernel cannot be interchangeable for most other Linux OSes. There are usually quite independant and I'm 99% sure that this is the case for the pandora kernel that will be used under Angstrom. You may need to install extra software on Distro X to take advantage of kernel options, but unless your distro natively uses unionfs, squashfs, specialized usb drivers, etc, etc then you should be fine.

The biggest issue I have with using Angstrom is that its low-level system is not configured, organized, or executed the way I want. For a large majority of instances this is what separates many of the different Linux distros. I realize that I'm probably in the 5% category of people that care and hence have worked on a project to port the OS that does what I want, the way I want. +1 to the people that want to see their OS of choice on an open platform. I doubt you will get anything but encouragement from the pandora devs and anyone else working to expand on this platform.

 

[dflemstr]

Maybe I need to be corrected here, but I see no reason that a linux kernel cannot be interchangeable for most other Linux OSes. There are usually quite independant and I'm 99% sure that this is the case for the pandora kernel that will be used under Angstrom. You may need to install extra software on Distro X to take advantage of kernel options, but unless your distro natively uses unionfs, squashfs, specialized usb drivers, etc, etc then you should be fine.

The biggest issue I have with using Angstrom is that its low-level system is not configured, organized, or executed the way I want. For a large majority of instances this is what separates many of the different Linux distros. I realize that I'm probably in the 5% category of people that care and hence have worked on a project to port the OS that does what I want, the way I want. +1 to the people that want to see their OS of choice on an open platform. I doubt you will get anything but encouragement from the Pandora devs and anyone else working to expand on this platform.

The kernel should be usable with other distros of course, and a lot of changes have already been pulled upstream. Someone could even set up a weekly "make-kpkg" for a Ubuntu repository, so that any Ubuntu users wouldn't have a disadvantage of not being up-to-date just because they use another distro.

I think that the largest issue will be general configuration issues; for example, the number of disk writes Ubuntu does might harm the SD cards too extensively, and things like wrong ALSA-timings might lead to lag. But if enough users use Ubuntu, this shouldn't be a problem since configurations can be changed very easily through new package releases.

 

[lingenfr]

The Angstrom ARM app repository is already full of a large collection of apps. The Ubuntu ARM repository is for all intents and purposes nonexistent.
Check the listings to see what should be available at launch (or within a reasonable time frame)
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/repo/
If you are looking for something that isn't there, request it. Someone could port it, or suggest an alternative.

Did you check the link? I did, there was nothing there. Maybe they are having a problem.

 

[WizardStan]

seems to be working for me.

 

[cb88]

@wizardstan I can't see anypackages in that repo... although there are some kernels and packcage databases from what i can tell

 

[hells_dark]

About ubuntu…
Yes, it's easy. I use it on my desktop and enjoy it.

But i installed arch linux on my laptop yesterday… it was really easy too !

I find it stupid to say ubuntu is just for noobs. It's a linux and it works well !

 

[lingenfr]

@WizardStan I can't see anypackages in that repo... although there are some kernels and packcage databases from what i can tell

Wait til the categories come up on the left and then click on one of those and then a letter. Kind of a non-intuitive design.

 

[Grench]

I am not trying to belittle the work done to make Angstrom work great on our future Pandora devices. I am going to try out the Angstrom before I experiment with any other platform on the device.

However, there is interest (myself included) in the new ubuntu ARM release with Jaunty.

I understand that Jaunty is going production in a few days. Would it be possible for someone with a Beagle board to try out the new release and let us know if it is good bad or ugly? I have played around with the beta a bit on a 2 year old notebook and it's shocking how fast it boots that machine.

Thank you.

 

[YokoZar]

Hi everyone, I'm an Ubuntu developer.

Needless to say, we're all very interested in the Pandora. There's no reason the new Ubuntu ARM version can't be made to work very well with every feature the Pandora has, if it's not working already. This is exactly the kind of device that Ubuntu Ultra-Mobile was designed for.

The main advantage of using Ubuntu over something like Angstrom is the immediate access to Ubuntu's giant software library. Many, many games have already been packaged, and most of them have working arm ports already - installing something like frozen bubble or hedgewars or UFO: AI would be very easy without any additional work by the distribution.

 

[Vorporeal]

Hi everyone, I'm an Ubuntu developer.

Needless to say, we're all very interested in the Pandora. There's no reason the new Ubuntu ARM version can't be made to work very well with every feature the Pandora has, if it's not working already. This is exactly the kind of device that Ubuntu Ultra-Mobile was designed for.

The main advantage of using Ubuntu over something like Angstrom is the immediate access to Ubuntu's giant software library. Many, many games have already been packaged, and most of them have working arm ports already - installing something like frozen bubble or hedgewars or UFO: AI would be very easy without any additional work by the distribution.

How much do we get out of the Ubuntu library that we don't get out of the Debian ARMEL software library?

 

[YokoZar]

Hi everyone, I'm an Ubuntu developer.

Needless to say, we're all very interested in the Pandora. There's no reason the new Ubuntu ARM version can't be made to work very well with every feature the Pandora has, if it's not working already. This is exactly the kind of device that Ubuntu Ultra-Mobile was designed for.

The main advantage of using Ubuntu over something like Angstrom is the immediate access to Ubuntu's giant software library. Many, many games have already been packaged, and most of them have working arm ports already - installing something like frozen bubble or hedgewars or UFO: AI would be very easy without any additional work by the distribution.

How much do we get out of the Ubuntu library that we don't get out of the Debian ARMEL software library?

Not much, but there are other reasons to go with Ubuntu (namely the release process will put 9.10 out around the same timeframe as the second run. 9.04 is, similarly in time for the first run.)

 

[Vorporeal]

Hm. The reason why so many people are averse to Ubuntu is that it jumps through a lot of hoops and implements a bunch of hacks to get the same exact distributed code running on every hardware configuration, and we feel that, on a system with defined and unchanging hardware, this is a bit overkill and would introduce a good amount of unnecessary bloat. How much will the "ultra-mobile" Ubuntu cut down on this?

 

[hch]

Hi everyone, I'm an Ubuntu developer.

Needless to say, we're all very interested in the Pandora. There's no reason the new Ubuntu ARM version can't be made to work very well with every feature the Pandora has, if it's not working already. This is exactly the kind of device that Ubuntu Ultra-Mobile was designed for.

The main advantage of using Ubuntu over something like Angstrom is the immediate access to Ubuntu's giant software library. Many, many games have already been packaged, and most of them have working arm ports already - installing something like frozen bubble or hedgewars or UFO: AI would be very easy without any additional work by the distribution.

this is great, i'll certainly be using it.

two questions: for which architecture will it be compiled? and is there any effort ongoing to port the packages to armel that work under arm (oabi) but up to now are refusing to being compiled with eabi? i'm thinking of stuff like clisp.

 

[conso]

Now that we have a ubuntu-dev on the board: will the ubuntu-arm-port contain the interface of the mid-edition? Afaik, that ran only on intel-atom chipsets till now.

I'm sure the ubuntu-arm-port will have benefits and I'm looking forward to testing it. Still, there is good reason to put it on a SD-card instead of the integrated memory, so Angstrom with PXML deserves it's status as preinstalled OS.

 

[ashdjones]

Couldn't you make Ubuntu PXML compliant?

 

[AireTamStorm]

Hm. The reason why so many people are averse to Ubuntu is that it jumps through a lot of hoops and implements a bunch of hacks to get the same exact distributed code running on every hardware configuration, and we feel that, on a system with defined and unchanging hardware, this is a bit overkill and would introduce a good amount of unnecessary bloat. How much will the "ultra-mobile" Ubuntu cut down on this?

I am also wary of installing another distribution without knowing what kind of additional overhead we can expect. If it is very low I could definitely appreciate having Ubuntu as my SD card distro. Massive library of software? Sure!

I had an iPAQ with Familiar- you could call it the predecessor to Angstrom, really. The library was terrible, packages just littered all over in a repository that was not up to date or maintained in any way. Having a mainstream distribution will help quite a bit with keeping things up to date.

Off topic, I switched away from Ubuntu to SuSE (again) on my desktop recently, because of issues in 8.04 and 8.10, I hope 9.04 will improve on some of them, as I've heard great things about it, but for now I'm a happy camper. And to think how much I hated zypper in 10.1.

 

[YokoZar]

Hi everyone, I'm an Ubuntu developer.

Needless to say, we're all very interested in the Pandora. There's no reason the new Ubuntu ARM version can't be made to work very well with every feature the Pandora has, if it's not working already. This is exactly the kind of device that Ubuntu Ultra-Mobile was designed for.

The main advantage of using Ubuntu over something like Angstrom is the immediate access to Ubuntu's giant software library. Many, many games have already been packaged, and most of them have working arm ports already - installing something like frozen bubble or hedgewars or UFO: AI would be very easy without any additional work by the distribution.

this is great, i'll certainly be using it.

two questions: for which architecture will it be compiled? and is there any effort ongoing to port the packages to armel that work under arm (oabi) but up to now are refusing to being compiled with eabi? i'm thinking of stuff like clisp.
Actually I don't really know how to answer these questions as I'm not really an Arm person (I make the Wine packages and a few others in Universe). I do know, however, that when I went to the last developer summit and talked with the mobile team everyone there wanted a Pandora.

So it's a fair bet it'll be made to work rather well

 

[Svartalf]

Couldn't you make Ubuntu PXML compliant?

There's certainly nothing keeping you from doing that- it's all in the launcher and the bit of magic that allows .pnd files look like directory structures when the system sees them. Once you've got that wired in, it's the same beast so long as the packaged stuff doesn't have off dependency issues. For that, you can package select .so's in the .pnd much like I've done for Caster for X86 Linux. I was going to see if there was a way to make a .pnd launcher tool for Beagle, Maemo, etc. so that I could provide one package for multiple OMAP3 targets for Caster and a few other projects in progress.

 

[lingenfr]

Hi everyone, I'm an Ubuntu developer.

Needless to say, we're all very interested in the Pandora. There's no reason the new Ubuntu ARM version can't be made to work very well with every feature the Pandora has, if it's not working already. This is exactly the kind of device that Ubuntu Ultra-Mobile was designed for.

The main advantage of using Ubuntu over something like Angstrom is the immediate access to Ubuntu's giant software library. Many, many games have already been packaged, and most of them have working arm ports already - installing something like frozen bubble or hedgewars or UFO: AI would be very easy without any additional work by the distribution.

Great, you will probably be on Zany Zebra by the time we get our Pandora's.