Ubuntu On Pandora


C

chame

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Dec 19, 2008
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I am new in this comunity, but fortunatelly I could order a pandora before they run out.

It is a nice piece of hardware, I couldnt find anything simmilar on the market. but I am a bit worried about the OS. This is not related with the last news about wifi and movie HW acceleration, I am pretty sure those problems will be fixed in a short period. I am thinking in long term, from now to the next 5 years.

while this project is supported by lets say 4000 developers, (much less for sure), I am afraid the developing rate will decline until very few people continue with the coding. Is not about knowledge or sacrifice. Quality of the OP products, software etc can be excellent, but is just that the developers life change, and they will have other priorities, other projects etc.

Ubuntu by contrast seems to have a wider support. many other devices with arm cpu will benefit from the ubuntu distribution. It is a much bigger company supported by hundreds of thousands of users. and this is what I am looking for, a long term support.

we could make a big effort to have the OS and other SW ready and updated, but at the end, we are a very small community. developers are working 100% right now, but they cannot have that work rate forever. it is difficult and expensive to mantain a system in such way.

so my primary desire is to install ubuntu and stuck with it. update with the ubuntu repositories and eventually update pandora specific drivers. I think pandora developers should center in this aspect, rather than develop and mantain the whole OS. but anyway my worries are: ¿there will be updated drivers for ubuntu? I saw a video of a pandora running ubuntu in 2008. ¿did anyone try a recent distribution? ¿which is the compatibility with available pandora drivers? (wifi, BT, TVout, 3D-ogl...)

thanks
 
chame said:
¿there will be updated drivers for ubuntu?
Click to expand...
Maybe, probably. Who knows? It all depends on how large the OMAP34xx ubuntu community becomes in the next 5 years. Right now, I can imagine development being a bit slow dur to a fairly small pool of hardware. Ask again 6 months after volume shipments start and there might be better guesses...
 
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When you say supported, what do you mean?
The Pandora hardware is fixed and will not change, so it won't need the level of on going driver support that something like Ubuntu would need, with changing hardware etc.
Pandora's Linux, is a tweaked/updated Angstrom Linux version. So It's supported by that whole community also.

I'm by no means saying don't run Ubuntu, just trying to see if your reasoning is due to the thought that we will not be able to support it going forward well enough?
 
The trick with random other distro is they often are 'desktop fat' .. GB of ram, GB of disk, etc. They fire up piles of services and plugins and so on.
So you need to strip them down, and add pandora specific stuff ...

And then you have what we have done :)

you can get another distro built for ARM, swap in our kernel, pop in our pnd-file stuff, switch to a lighter desktop (xfce or w/e) and be ok, too. Especially for lighter distributions, too. Cpasjuste got Android going a few weeks ago :)

up to you :)

jeff
 
If you want to go with Ubuntu on the Pandora I'd look at porting over Crunchbang Linux (http://crunchbanglinux.org) which is Ubuntu with OpenBox as the window manager. They have a lite version which is really small and runs great on my netbook. Or you could roll your own using the Ubuntu minimal install which is what Crunchbang did.
 
Ubuntu ARM still isn't mainstream yet, not only because lack of devices but because Canonical won't officially support it until the next release, 10.4. I thought it was 9.10, the last release, but I think it's 10.4.

The lack of devices will be the main problem, when no one owns a ARM system to install Ubuntu on then development is pointless. Also, depends on if some freelance Ubuntu coders or Canonical employees get a hold of the Pandora.

In the end if you want to experiment with other Linux distros on the Pandora then I think Gentoo will be your best bet, it's right behind Ångström in ARM support. There are others that have been mentioned on here like Arch, you just have to look around on the web for Linux ARM distros. In a year I bet Linux ARM will be a lot more mainstream with every distro having ARM ports.
 
This is one of the reasons I'm trying to understand chame's motives.

If it's just because he feels it will be better supported i.e. driver support then I don't think he has much to worry about.

The thing with Arm devices is that it usually has to be hacked to run an alternative OS.
Until we get Arm nettops etc, then the only one that is open enough will be the Pandora.

I'm all for running multiple distributions on the Pandora, just trying to see if his motives are correct.
If he said he just wants to, just because he feels like it, then that is a good enough reason also :lol:
 
Im glad that we have an OS that's made for embedded devices and no bloated desktop OS :)
 
mali said:
Im glad that we have an OS that's made for embedded devices and no bloated desktop OS :)
Click to expand...
At the same time I'm glad it ships with a bloated desktop environment (okay, so Xfce isn't that bloated...). Gives me something more familiar to work with!
 
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Wheels said:
mali said:
Im glad that we have an OS that's made for embedded devices and no bloated desktop OS :)
Click to expand...
At the same time I'm glad it ships with a bloated desktop environment (okay, so Xfce isn't that bloated...). Gives me something more familiar to work with!
Click to expand...


Familiarity with an OS is not an issue with the Pandora.

P-Menu is a simple (yet awesome) Pick and Click system! EXCELLENT! Really! Excellent!

We also have Ubuntu launcher (I think Pmenu is better and when Pangea (spelling or current project name can't be remembered) we will have another GREAT launcher/OS.
 
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kingoddball said:
@rabid...

Any details on that GUI? I have never heard of it.
Click to expand...

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/51076-panorama/

An extremely informative (and updated along the way) post
 
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FWIW Ubuntu has been running on the Zaurus for some time now. It is installed on my slc-1000 and I use it daily for work. The Zaurus is ARM but not OMAP34xx. I am too much noob to know how the different processors affect things.

Omegamoon has developed the Zaurus Ubuntu packages:
http://www.omegamoon.com/blog/index.php

The Zaurus forum (with Ubuntu subforum) is here:
http://www.oesf.org/forum/
 
I don't think ubuntu will be necessary, Angstrom will be supported in the long run. Also I'm just probably going to use PMenu for must everything and then occasionally go into the full distro...

Sigh... I just can't wait any longer :D
 
Personally I would love to see Jolicloud ported to ARM. It looks like a pretty cool Linux distro and is designed for netbooks so it seems like it would work well on the small Pandora screen. Unfortunately, I can't tell if its open source or not :(
 
Given that Ubuntu support for ARM is only a fairly recent development, I'd imagine that you'd be better off going to the source and using Debian, which has been releasing on ARM since 2000 (and ported since before that), and has an enthusiastic crowd of ARM developers experienced in porting it to all sorts of odd bits of kit.

Also, you can strip Debian down with Emdebian, which allows you to cross-build firmwares, and filter out the fat in the desktop distro, while maintaining package compatibility.

I'd imagine that I'll end up installing Embedian Grip -- I'm guessing that Grip will be small enough to fit everything I want on the flash. (Crush is even smaller, but a bit of a pain being busybox based, so not 100% identical in use)

My hope would be to have a Debian system that will work fine, but lack man pages and the like with no SD inserted, and for it to fatten up to a full Debian system by automounting if it detects the relevant filesystems on SD. Meanwhile, if I (or someone else) gets round to porting the PND support to Debian, I'll even be able to shove games in and have them run (although that's not actually my priority as it happens)
 
meltingice said:
Personally I would love to see Jolicloud ported to ARM. It looks like a pretty cool Linux distro and is designed for netbooks so it seems like it would work well on the small Pandora screen. Unfortunately, I can't tell if its open source or not :(
Click to expand...
It is, but it depends heavily on WINE...
 
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