Will Linux Ubuntu be preloaded?

[Grench]

Since there are twin analog sticks on this, was there any thought given to layered radial menus?

Much easier than grid selection on a hand held device.

 

[notaz]

The full-blown Ubuntu is not really an option, because it just won't fit to 256MB of flash. Unless Craig decides distributing Pandora with special SD card, that is.

 

[Drack]

We need it to be lightweight.

Me personally? I'd recommend a much lighter environment based on Debian

How about Maemo?

Looks good from what I read about it, but I have no experience with it so can't comment.

 

[the_darkside_986]

It's gonna have a lot of empty space

Hopefully the Pandora homebrew packagers could use a higher icon size then. I still like the idea of using gmenu.

 

[mkinzler]

Or more icons

 

[Coder_TimT]

Um, yeah larger icons and text will be in order. Come on everybody, the entire contents of the large white box depicted above will be squeezed into a box closer in size to that gmenu screenshot(more or less depending on your monitor resolution). In other words, if that image above were displayed on the pandora screen, the gmenu section would only be about 1.5" long.

That leads into my opinion on Ubuntu, or any full fledge desktop distro for that matter... I just don't get the appeal. I see it as cool and fun to play with, but day to day how usable is it really going to be. You'll either have to use the analogs as an emulated mouse or drag out the stylus for every little action to be undertaken. Either of those methods just doesn't seem the most efficient for this platform. Plus, are multiple windows really going to be useful on a 4.3" screen? Maybe it will work out better than I anticipate, but even if it works decent, an interface such as gmenu will be much more efficient from a usability standpoint...and if we launch all apps fullscreen we don't waste any vertical space with things like window decorations and really lose the need for a traditional window manager entirely. Throw a task switcher in the mix as they are planning and it seems like we should be good to go.

Anyway, just my humble opinion...

 

[the_darkside_986]

I like the idea of TAB'ing through each window instead of having them all on the same tiny screen. But how will gmenu2x serve as a window manager or is that not possible? It is my understanding that it is written in SDL, but could Xlib code be added so that it can be a very light weight window manager? (An ideal window manager would use less than 1 MB if that is even possible.)

I've used systems with ~128 MB of RAM and a desktop environment, and believe me, it is NOT fun at all. Not even with XFCE.

 

[Vorporeal]

IIRC, Craig or ED said on the "old" ("real"?) forums that one thing that had been/would be done on the Pandora port of GMenu is increasing the size of the icons due to the higher dot pitch of the screen. Don't worry, they know what they're doing. The icons in the Pandora port will probably be larger from a pixel perspective, but approximately the same size from a real-world, inches/centimeters perspective.

 

[Coder_TimT]

Just to be clear, my post was in no way intended to insinuate, that Craig and Co. and in this case Ryo aren't aware of the need for icon/text scaling. It was simply directed at the last few posts which didn't seem to grasp the scale of the items we're dealing with...

Sorry for any confusion...

 

[sebt3]

I've used systems with ~128 MB of RAM and a desktop environment, and believe me, it is NOT fun at all. Not even with XFCE.

GTK is doing double-buffering, QT is doing double-buffering, and X is doing the same in most distribution.
So masically, every single windows is stored at least once completly in this RAM. Even the root-window is double-buffered.
24-bits mean 3 Bytes.
So, on a display that provide 1024*768*3 = 2,25MB just for the background... On the pandora that's 800*480*3 = 1,1M

Currently, my full blown Xorg use 117M (mostly for double-buffer). But the pandora use kdrive X server wich is very lightweight.
A full distribution, startup automatically, a "few" deamon that eat a lot of memory.

I still belive that a full desktop is doable on the pandora. but a full generic distribution is a no go for sure.

 

[the_darkside_986]

Sorry I meant 1 MB besides the obvious requirement of video memory stored in RAM.

 

[Gilrad]

Since there are twin analog sticks on this, was there any thought given to layered radial menus?

Much easier than grid selection on a hand held device.

You know, that is an amazing idea. Definitely something to keep in mind for a variation on Gmenu. It would easily make things like multitasking and context-sensitive actions intuitive and powerful.

(edit - in fact, I'm going to create a thread on this!)

Another thing that I think should be addressed, is whatever we have loaded on our NAND flash should be 128 megs or less total. Why? When we suspend to disc (for launching games or for extended sleep modes, for instance), we can take advantage of the super fast speed of Nand memory. If I am loading up a PSX emulator, 1 second loading versus 2 seconds loading makes a pretty big difference.

 

[PokeParadox]

(I kinda bumped this post due to the time fixing weirdness that occurred earlier)
As an "underling dev" of GMenu, I can say that Ryo has already added some Pandora specific stuff to the SVN.
This includes Pandora icons, wallpapers and such.

Please have faith that Ryo and (to some extent) I know what we're doing. The great thing about Ryo, is that GMenu2X is something that he actually uses for his own GP2X, thus it's my opinion that he wants GMenu to be very usable on the Pandora too. Basically you can trust that the screen space will be used effectively.

I did some prelim work on USB joystick mapping, which Ryo finished off, so it should be possible to map joysticks on Pandora too.

 

[cb88]

@gilrad I highly doubt that the system will be suspending to the nand we don't want it to get corrupted

 

[Username]

That gMenu looks fine, but couldn't you fit both and have the option to choose which one at startup?

 

[sHARD]

I dont know Craigs intentions with Ubuntu but I hope they still continue to use gmenux as the main OS and Ubuntu is a sideline project.

I guess what I am saying is, I would rather there wasn't any kind of delay in the Pandora release while they tried make Ubuntu work.

Ubuntu/Fully fledged linux desktop is a nice idea but I dont think its something everyone will want, its more of a 'because I can' feature but when it does happen it needs to be 'official', theres nothing worse than 5 or so variations which may have bugs, half working features etc

+1

I'd really like to see an XFCE desktop of some sort, but that should be for people who want it, as not everyone needs it.

I should also mention that most people here think that Ubuntu or a similar "heavy" Linux would only be for newbies. Read my post here (not pimping my blog, that's what the signature is for, just trying to explain my viewpoint): http://c63.be/pandora/?p=42

I think that Pandora can be much more than a console or a quick tool, I think it could work well as a fully multi-tasking platform. Slow, yes, but its got enough speed and enough screen real estate to do it. I think it should be kept in mind that a "heavier" Linux (not as heavy as Ubuntu of course) certainly has a lot more use than attracting the "n00bs".

For example, I've used the original EEE. Same size screen as the Pandora. Yeah sometimes its great for this and that in Linux but the horrible icon-based interface completely destroys its usefulness, for me at least. I want to have a terminal open with a firefox window, and quickly switch between them with all the advantages of a serious window manager. So yeah, I don't think that every unit should come with a real Linux distro, it should be something simple and use gmenu, lightweight which makes the built in apps fly. But when considering the "popularity-contest alternative" like many people seem to think of any Ubuntu-like port, remember that a real, solid window manager actually comes in handy for at least some number of users.

There are three additional things to note here when considering your "favorite" OS to port:

Debian, Gentoo, and Ubuntu have the best arm support out of *real* OSes, not ones shrunk and stupid-ified for small devices (please feel free to mention others if you find them)
ARM support may not exist for a lot of the applications, etc and may need to be ported (though Nokia's recent porting effort has greatly enhanced this)
Users who would want to choose this alternative OS over the default gmenu system probably want to do so thanks to its power, not just because it has a flashy interface, so there's a lot of reason to keep the power in there

Personally I want to see XFCE and other powerful utilities that look great (sorry, the alternatives mentioned so far don't fit the bill in terms of power in my book) on the "power" OS.

Though I think this should be a community effort, the official OS should remain a custom built gmenu-based system. There's no sense in supporting two OSes.

 

[Sphinxter]

Look at this ready to roll on the beagle all NEON accelerated, how can you not?
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/be ... -available

 

[Ryzure]

Look at this ready to roll on the beagle all NEON accelerated, how can you not?
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/be ... -available

Apparently it is
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/pa ... str%C3%B6m

 

[sHARD]

Look at this ready to roll on the beagle all NEON accelerated, how can you not?
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/be ... -available

Also if everyone does go with E17, please make sure the package manager has the packages in there for another window manager. I will despise that pretty-over-function desktop environment until the day I die. No offense to anyone who uses it of course, its your preference that matters to you.

 

[Vorporeal]

One thing that many people need to realize is that they don't really know what makes Ubuntu so popular. It is popular for the fact that it works well out of the box with all sorts of different systems, and includes many useful pieces of software. The interface is nothing more than a nice theme for Gnome - nothing we can't easily replicate.

The reason why devs and serious linux users don't think it totally worthwhile to port Ubuntu is the fact that it includes a LOT of features that we don't need on the Pandora due to the fact that every Pandora will have the same hardware. Sure, we can strip a lot of these features out of Ubuntu, but then you're just left with the Ubuntu interface and a bunch of applications. Many of these are also unnecessary (or many different of the same type of program is installed to give the user choices). We could strip a lot of these extra things out of Ubuntu, but then it's really no longer Ubuntu.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that we'd get much more out of giving people the option to run Gnome + the Ubuntu theme (Human is the name, right?) instead of really running Ubuntu on the device. Nobody would know the difference, really. That way we could just do a bit of optimization of Gnome (if possible?) and have a relatively efficient, Ubuntu-look WM/DE.