What Linux Distribution On Pandora?

[TaG]

That being said; Gentoo? Are you serious? Compiling a program or two on Pandora is fine, but compiling a whole system on the Pandora would be maddening. Can you imagine compiling KDE on Pandora. Not to mention the fact that You would likely need a swap file in order to even be able to compile things like the KDE base libs.
I don't want to compile my Gentoo directly on the Pandora, I will compile it on a real pc and then I will put binaries on pandora.
It is possible to compile ARM binaries from a x86 Gentoo, wich is very great.Then you've got to get Pandora's hardware, with some closed-source binary blobs, to work...

Then when you download some Pandora specific apps, you've got to hope it's still compatible with your version of Gentoo/[distroofchoice].

I know the theory is that you just compile your own distro and go, but if it was that simple in practice surely the Pandora team (and BeagleBoard team) would have got that done in a day. Read some of the discussions on BeagleBoard and that is far from the case. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it might be more involved than some are assuming. Whether it's worth it is then individual preference.

 

[Judge584]

I know this would not be easy (but if it was I would have no-interest to do it!).

But perhaps the best idea is to put a bootloader that allow us to choose between two options:

1°)Boot the Pandora OS
2°)Boot from SD slot

Then we could never touch the pandora OS, and still play with any distributions we want on a sd card...like with two real hard-drives in a real PC.

 

[TaG]

I know this would not be easy (but if it was I would have no-interest to do it!).

But perhaps the best idea is to put a bootloader that allow us to choose between two options:

1°)Boot the Pandora OS
2°)Boot from SD slot

Then we could never touch the pandora OS, and still play with any distributions we want on a sd card...like with two real hard-drives in a real PC.
I'm sure that is already the intention - I have seen comments about booting from SD so as to not touch the NAND.

 

[Judge584]

If it's already planned to do this then Pandora is really open: very good.

But you just have said that some drivers are closed-source: do you know which ones?

 

[TaG]

As far as I can remember, PowerVR and Wifi module need blobs. Might be others.

 

[Judge584]

Good! 3d is not necessary for my needs (because Pandora OS will still be there for this), and for wifi if it don't work then I could put a wifi usb-key in an usb port.

 

[TaG]

This post may be of interest:

have to build your own kernel then security will be a pain in the ass. If I get it correctly building a custom kernel is not easy since there are binary blobs (wi-fi and video drivers) that are not open source.

All kernel modules will be open source, so building a custom kernel should be as easy as on x86.

Just don't delete the binary blobs that some of those kernel modules will depend on, and you'll be fine.

 

[latiosu]

If it's well optimized I wold really don't care about it.

 

[ish420]

Damn Small Linux is a very neat OS. It's very quick and very small. I don't know if it has touchscreen driver, but it could be a very good companion to the Pandora, I think.

DSL. Impressive lightweight distro. I've used it for recovery purposes. An arm port is a great idea.

 

[AireTamStorm]

I said Gentoo, but actually for my purposes something like BackTrack 2 or BackTrack 3 would be much more useful.

 

[stormyandcold]

I've tried Ubuntu, it's actually really good. I have the live cd and it just "works".

Ofcourse, for a hand-held a lot of the superfluous stuff can be taken out. On pc it's so easy to use and I love the auto update feature

 

[b._.o._.b]

Full blown Linux distro's will be too damn slow. It would be nice to have a faster boottime than the GP2X. The only one I can think of being fast and small enough to be usable is Puppy Linux.

 

[TaG]

I said Gentoo, but actually for my purposes something like BackTrack 2 or BackTrack 3 would be much more useful.
Backtrack 3 would be cool. It's very usable as a day to day distro too.

 

[coniferous]

I said Gentoo, but actually for my purposes something like BackTrack 2 or BackTrack 3 would be much more useful.


agreed.. That would be one cool little "security auditing" device.

Good luck getting all the tools to work on ARM though...

 

[hotblack]

Debian, Ubuntu, Windows Embedded (mentioning for the sake of completeness) and of course Angstrom are all registered BeagleBoard projects, but there's also a good post here mentioning Fedora, Gentoo, ARMedslack and Mamona

 

[grif]

ubuntu would be nice, but i would probably go for the Xubuntu version more so.

Of course either way it would need to be highly optimised for pandora, i would like it to eat up as little as possible ^^.

 

[mcfab]

Please stop judging Gnome based on Ubuntu's Gnome. Honestly, get something like gentoo or Arch, and do a Gnome install. It is as responsive as KDE and actually runs a little less power hungry.

That being said; Gentoo? Are you serious? Compiling a program or two on Pandora is fine, but compiling a whole system on the Pandora would be maddening. Can you imagine compiling KDE on Pandora. Not to mention the fact that You would likely need a swap file in order to even be able to compile things like the KDE base libs.

Also, why isn't Maemo choice? Honestly, the Nokia Tablets are probably Pandora's closest competitor. They have a good distro, that runs on an ARM device, targeted at the same niche of people that would buy a Pandora as a UMPC/PDA.

Angstrom may in fact be the winner in the end just because it will be the most optimized compile time for the OMAP3 set of chips. That being said, we should probably look to Maemo for a good GUI.

Hi!
I have a nokia N800 tablet and i use it every days. Yes, Maemo is better suited than distros like Ubuntu or Gentoo...but it is still too heavy for a such small device (eg CPU OMAP3, 800x480 display, 128MB RAM). The bad points are :
- It's a big peace of software, so it's very complex to manage.
- Many services are runnning, and they are difficult to tune/customize without a terminal+shell.
- Without launching any user application, the system "eats" about 35 % of the RAM.
- The GUI is not enough responsive (Gtk2).
- The (debian based) package manager is really a pain to use : Maemo needs _hundreds_ of packages to be installed, with many many dependencies that are not always resolved when you just want to install a simple application like a calculator. Many times I had to launch xterm and struggle with apt-get and dpkg to resolve the problem.

It's clear that Maemo and Hildon (the graphic layer) were designed whith "PC paradigm" in mind, not the "Handheld paradigm".

IMHO Pandora should have its own distribution. It should be very simple, fast, easy to update and easy to customize. Of course, people will always have the possibility to install their own distros (thanks to the Pandora boot features .

--

 

[Megamixman]

The N800 and N810 also don't have any Graphics Acceleration. This alone would change the ball in game in terms of performance. I will agree that Maemo is more suited for the PC paradigm, but it is targeted at Handhelds. The main problem is trying to keep in sync with the PC versions of the software that is used and still updating and adding features. Ubuntu is now putting a lot more effort into this are and his contributing lots of Up stream patches. Before it was Maemo .... and yah Maemo.

I understand where you're getting at with packages. Unfortunately this is a problem with aptitude in general when you're talking about incomplete repositories.

IMHO Pandora should have its own distribution. It should be very simple, fast, easy to update and easy to customize. Of course, people will always have the possibility to install their own distros (thanks to the Pandora boot features .
--

That is also known as the god distribution. AFAIK, Arch Linux is probably my closest pick for PC. So far Handhelds have no such Distribution. Angstrom is probably the lightest, and has packages that are compiled for ARM7. It is not optimized for Handhelds and doesn't provide much in the way for. It is really optimized as a PC replacement OS.

 

[ish420]

I'd like to see a lightweight version of Ubuntu Ultimate Edition for the Pandora. comes jam packed with codecs, themes, and applications.
http://ultimateedition.info/Ultimate_Edition_1.9/

 

[Megamixman]

I'd like to see a lightweight version of Ubuntu Ultimate Edition for the Pandora. comes jam packed with codecs, themes, and applications.
http://ultimateedition.info/Ultimate_Edition_1.9/




Lightweight Ubuntu Ultimate Edition is by definition an oxymoron. Even then, it is an unofficial Ubuntu not supported by Canonical. Canonical is only porting Ubuntu and the main sister distros: Kubuntu and Xubuntu to ARM. The reason behind using another distro is that they are already doing the work. If we're going to recompile everything, might as well make a distro from scratch.