USB Peripherals

[Sugar_Kane]

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about this. I understand that the pandora will come with a gp2x style menu system rather than linux out of the box, but if you were to choose to use that rather than linux, or you wanted to dual boot, would you still be able to use any USB peripherals?

 

[Skofo]

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about this. I understand that the pandora will come with a gp2x style menu system rather than linux out of the box, but if you were to choose to use that rather than linux, or you wanted to dual boot, would you still be able to use any USB peripherals?

What will come with the Pandora is 100% Linux, as far as I know. Linux is not a user interface, it is a kernel/operating system. Linux is a raw command-line by default, the graphical interface is just built on top of that. You'll be able to use USB peripherals that can be used on Linux, as well as Linux programs, because it is, in fact, Linux.

 

[Trevsweb]

it will come with gmenu of sorts.. which will be the main user interface... im guessing like on similar devices like the GP2X and it will boot into a full linux distribution of angstrom which will work a bit like windows/ubuntu thats where your usb devices will most likely be used and abused...
The gmenu i'm guessing will really act as short cuts to pandora specific ports and apps like media players, emulators and games.
angstrom is where the majority of the people will likely head to. ive heard you click a link in gmenu for a full desktop experience... a bit like current netbooks. eg: eeepc linux verisons

 

[TheRain]

What will come with the Pandora is 100% Linux, as far as I know. Linux is not a user interface, it is a kernel/operating system. Linux is a raw command-line by default, the graphical interface is just built on top of that. You'll be able to use USB peripherals that can be used on Linux, as well as Linux programs, because it is, in fact, Linux.

That's my understanding as well, but I must say that the Pandora developers could make this more clear. I've seen the menu system, and I've seen Angstrom running but it would be hard to tell at this point what the actual user experience is like. Probably the reason we don't have a clearer demonstration of this is because the Pandora team is taking the angle that you get the device, and you can do what you want with it. They are preparing software for it, but they expect the system to take on a life of it's own with the community's ideas and developments. I think there are positives and negatives to that stance and I think that casual users will be the ones who lose out a bit.

 

[lingenfr]

If you haven't done it already, you should check out the wiki.

http://pandorawiki.org/Main_Page

 

[dflemstr]

What will come with the Pandora is 100% Linux, as far as I know. Linux is not a user interface, it is a kernel/operating system. Linux is a raw command-line by default, the graphical interface is just built on top of that. You'll be able to use USB peripherals that can be used on Linux, as well as Linux programs, because it is, in fact, Linux.

That's my understanding as well, but I must say that the Pandora developers could make this more clear. I've seen the menu system, and I've seen Angstrom running but it would be hard to tell at this point what the actual user experience is like. Probably the reason we don't have a clearer demonstration of this is because the Pandora team is taking the angle that you get the device, and you can do what you want with it. They are preparing software for it, but they expect the system to take on a life of it's own with the community's ideas and developments. I think there are positives and negatives to that stance and I think that casual users will be the ones who lose out a bit.

The Pandora is targeting a niche market, so "casual users" aren't the primary target
But don't think that casual users will have any problems; there might be some problems in the beginning shortly after the Pandora release due to unstable and untested software, but later on the system will gain stability.

There will be multiple window managers/GUIs available for the Pandora (as far as I can tell). Among these are
- Enlightenment (which has been shown in videos; it has a bar at the bottom not covering the whole bottom side per default, and has "real" windows that you can drag around)
- Matchbox (The default interface; it's more tab-based and you can only have one window open at any point in time, which then covers the whole screen except for the tab bar and activity bar)
- Maybe Fluxbox (very basic but very nice WM) and XFCE (As seen in Xubuntu), they are in the Ångström repository.
- Various menu applications (I don't know how these work as I haven't seen them in action; either they take the role as Window Managers and manage their launched windows on their own, or it might be that they rely on some WM mentioned above and just start applications, letting you take care of the windows yourself.)
- Work-In-Progress 3rd-party GUIs like Moblin or Android.
- The Console ^_^
- Completely different operating systems (aka Linux Distros) like Ubuntu ARM or Pandora Gentoo.