drago said:
4. You can do all the above on gp2x, it would just be a little slower.
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in normal way: no. if i want to dedicate haldf of my life for this, then yes. but as in normal device, like as an pentium pc, where i can set up linux in a hours and compile kernel without any problems, run midnight commander - on gp2x i cant it do in normal way. midnight commander who i find for gp2x cant work. terminals is very uncomfortable. very annoying is a non existent keyboard. x11 is very slow and not compliant with linux programms for x11 - i cant run on this a xplns / xephem / kstars / xplns / stellarium / pdf / jpeg /viewers / etc / etc / etc. really a gp2x is toy with very limited configuration capabilities. it is good for emus and old games, butr another...
if pandora is for similar story, i buy a eeepc901.
i want a box not only for games and with very limited movies support ( normal mplayer on linux is far better and more support than a gp2x movies playing tools - i cant view a lot of movies, who i view with my pc linux,and on gp2x i cannot view mpeg at all), but for my astronomy hobby too ( want a planetarium programm), with text reading possibilities ( also on cyrillic / russian text), text editing possibilities, email client, web / ftp client, pdf viewers, and so on...
If I'm understanding you correctly, the short answer is "No".
The Pandora is built on a completely different architecture than desktop PCs. It is possible to get different Linux distros installed on the Pandora, but those distros must first be tweaked to work with the Pandora hardware and recompiled for ARM. This requires a significant amount of programming skill. The same holds true for any software you would like to run (if it can be made to run at all).
If you want to be able to run any old Linux program without waiting for someone to port it, then an eeePC may be a better choice for you.
You can, in many cases, run any old Linux program, however - remember that demo of Ubuntu ARM running on the Beagle Board? Sure, there will be some that aren't portable due to lack of source code (e.g. Unreal) or x86-dependence (e.g. ZSNES) but for the most part, standard Linux apps are available in the Debian/Ubuntu ARM repositories. Most of the things you mention (media players, word processors with alternate character sets, email, web/ftp, pdf viewers, etc.) are already ported, essentially. I don't know about planetarium programs, as they might not fit in memory and may have to be trimmed down, but for the most part anything will run - it just might be very slow if you have to use swap or whatever at first.
Of course, none of this is necessarily guaranteed to run out of the box - you may have to install a stock Linux, which will incur speed and usability penalties as it's not optimized for the Cortex-A8 or the Pandora's controls, but at least you can run it if you need to.
