Will Linux Ubuntu be preloaded?

[kennyk]

If not, will it be hard to install for a newb? I have never used the Linux OS before, but think it's cool the Pandora will be able to run a full blown operating system.
Thanks for any responses, and thanks for making a great open source console. My preorder is already in :mrgreen: .

 

[craigix]

Yes it is possible that it will.

We will also have another option which is a very simple gMenu based interface for advanced users.

 

[kennyk]

Okay, thanks craigix. I appreciate your efforts to making Pandora the best

 

[cosurgi]

Even better would be a community made "pubuntu" distribution However if created at all - this would require more time...

Personally I'd see it with rox file manager and sawfish window manager (because they are light & efficient) but that's just me

 

[craigix]

How light and efficient? Let's make that list

 

[TrevorBradley]

Once we all get our pandora in hand we'll spend way less time posting and more time developing. Let's face it, at the moment we all have *way* too much time on our hands.

One question to the person who did get Ubuntu working on Pandora. I know the boot time is a while, that's to be expected. What was the Sleep/Wake time? Will we be able to "hibernate"? (I know Ubuntu has some issues with sleeping on some laptops, hopefully wont be an issue here)

 

[atomicthumbs]

Time for me to open up a connection to my ancient, dust-covered Ubuntu print server and research packages.

16:24:55 up 118 days, 36 min, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00

 

[cosurgi]

How light and efficient? Let's make that list

Serious question here.

Puppy linux (one of the smallest distros out there) is using rox file manager already. Rox is very good for day-to-day use - I use it daily on my power-user workstation.

Sawfish is light and powerful - currently is using 20MB of RAM on my workstation. There are other a bit lighter window managers, but they are less configurable'n'powerful. As a bonus - I am the sawfish maintainer so you can expect here a good support for sawfish.

Of course without a unit I can't tell how it works.

 

[quadomatic]

I love puppy linux. Maybe it would be a good idea to make the OS based on Puppy instead of Ubuntu, since Puppy would be less bloated? Or it could be set up real well using Arch?

 

[Loswave]

Window Maker wouldn't be a bad idea, I run it on all of my older systems that can't handle KDE or gnome. xfce wouldn't be bad either, although window maker's ability to look incredibly high tech, while being really lightweight would probably be really nice.

 

[craigix]

The Ubuntu focus is for casual users who are scared of Linux - it works very well with them, but we still want it polished and as optimised as possible, no doubt. Very good PR too - gives us a chance to compete with bigger devices.

Everyone else can use whatever they like, I'm pretty sure we will seem many versions available.

 

[cosurgi]

Or it could be set up real well using Arch?

Arch uses 'pacman' a homegrown package manager. I can tell you that most of people here (including me) would prefer to use .deb + aptitude. Be it [?u]buntu or debian based distro. There was a voting about that on previous forum.

 

[kennyk]

I have to admit, Puppy Linux does look nice

 

[dockthepod]

I was always a fan of fluxbox. It was sooo minimal. I haven't used linux in a bit but I'd like to be able to run fluxbox. I guess we should be able to chose pretty easily right? We will have a normal X server?

 

[rokdcasbah2]

A tabbed WM seems like the best way to go for me (rather than screwing around with window sizes, what's in front, etc). Sawfish fits that bill nicely.

As far as Arch...I'm not sure what the benefit would be, since you'd wanna cross compile things anyway...I don't think pacman would "just work" and building from source can take a long time depending on the program, even on a decent PC. But along those lines, I was wondering how much work LFS would be on Pandora.

 

[cosurgi]

A tabbed WM seems like the best way to go for me (rather than screwing around with window sizes, what's in front, etc). Sawfish fits that bill nicely.

To be honest, I must admit that tab support is currently in experimental phase in sawfish. But I hope that it will stable in few months.

 

[cb88]

puppylinux does not support ARM and it *barely* has support for x64 and ppc (some users have hacked up thier own never released though)

DSL... pretty much the same boat

.... I am 100% for a from scratch openembedded or T2 based distro with simple slackware esc package management and maybe 1 release every 6 months

that way we don't get soo many binaries floating around that are incompatible with each release ..... they should also have a release name like gutsy etch etc... maybe like version 1 "roudy" etc

there are two ways to go on this ubuntu/debian (ubuntu on the pandora seems pretty cut down to me prolly more could be done though my debian etch desk top used about 24mb at the console and it had some services running...)

or we can go the slackware route witch no dependancy management except in the users mind

IMO we should have both options because even though debian is stable and gets the job done the first time.... slackware is just a whole lot of FUN!

NOTE im not saying port slackware what im saying is just build a distro that uses minimal extract a tar to / and go packageing with maybe a md5 tacked on this is essentially all that puppy linux does asside from the custom livecd boot scripts which are useless on the pandora

also the pandora packge format seems like it is going to be fairly distro independant and the whole base system with all libs needed that is on the pandora nand sounds very slackware like

 

[mkdx]

Another option would be using Ubuntulite (the name is going to be changed though). They claim that it can run with 32 MB RAM reasonably. It uses LXDE and PCMan which makes a good compromise between ease of use and low resources usage.

..Or one can start from Ubuntu server [Or debian server] and install LXDE only.

 

[atomicthumbs]

I might be weird, but for devices with touchscreens and keyboards, I'm a huge fan of ion3.

big pic

 

[sHARD]

Personally I'd like to see us stick with XFCE as a window manager and apt as the package manager. Why? Well one of the best ARM Linux ports out there is Debian/Ubuntu, which is apt based. Plus apt just rocks. Secondly, XFCE rules at being very very low resources while still retaining a very user friendly interface. It's almost as light at Fluxbox but still retains the welcoming interface of Gnome, which would really help a lot of basic users use the device without troubles.

Does that mean stick with the already partially ported Xubuntu? I'm not specifically recommending it, but it might be a good start, the XFCE/apt combo is hard to beat on limited devices.