Pandora gaming handheld runs Ångström
Posted September 18th, 2008 by koen
For all the gaming enthousiast out there: The Pandora gaming handheld will run Ångström by default!
As one of the developers is quoted saying:
"We derive our current filesystem from Ångström with lots of custom Pandora buildrules and string the whole lot together with Open Embedded."
This is correct. Openpandora is not Dell or Gateway. They're not looking to load down your new computer with gigabytes of software you may or may not want. There is only 256MB of on board flash, so it should be up to each user to decide what is important enough to be "built in".Lobo said:It seems almost certain that it will ship with just the OS only, and all other apps will need to be downloaded at some future date.
Don't quote me on this one, but in the way I understand it : yesLobo said:OK, so I'm still a little confused about this and thought I'd ask here:
I understand that Pandora will be using Angstrom, and that it's the ARM7 architecture, right? So does that mean that all the ARM7 stuff in the angstrom repository can just run on Pandora without recompiling or anything?
Lobo said:If that's the case then I'm gonna be very happy. I've been browsing the repo and think that the following should be the very first stuff to be installed on p&|a
-Mplayer or VLC
-XMMS
-Firefox
-Pidgin
-Abiword
-ZIP
Be sure that even if there will be emulator ready for lunch time, it won't be preloaded by default, but will a download away from your pandLobo said:I think those apps would be of general interest to just about everybody who has bought a Pandora.
Then on the games front I see we have Quake 1,2 and 3 already in there! Too bad we don't have a PSX emu already done![]()
Nope, Lobo is referring to the instruction set. Its not an ARM11 (which supports the ARMv6 instruction set), its a Cortex A-8 (which supports the ARMv7-A instruction set). That said, i can see how it can be confusing.Don't quote me on this one, but in the way I understand it : yes
But the Cortex A8 is a ARM11 (I readed this somewhere...)That's a gap in CPU features as it look like its 4 versions. So I guess that if running 386 code on 686 CPU is not very efficient (think gentoo...) that a recompile will help performance. If I understand correctly what's is going on on the dev side, they are currently doing this![]()