gruso
thunderbox
Benefit to power users / hackers: not much. Benefit to sales: massive.PoisonedV said:
Will Linux Ubuntu be preloaded?
- Thread starter kennyk
- Start date
FWIW, I agree strongly about being debian-based. apt alone makes the decision an easy one, not to mention the large base of pre-compiled software.
Of course, part of the beauty of the Pandora is that it's going to be a piece o' cake for each of us to run a differently configured system with a different window manager. I'm sure several will be downloadable, ready to throw onto an SD card & be booted up. But it sure would be nice to have the default (internal) be such that most of us are content with it. And such that it plays nicely with the "Joe user" crowd as well as being inviting to the rest of us who like to push it a little harder.
Re: Ubuntu, I can see the argument about riding on their coattails. So maybe a CD (or even a bootable 512Mb SD card) could be included with the machine. Maybe just a bootable distro linked online so we can say it's done. But Ubuntu wasn't made for a machine like the Pandora. It was made for my full-size desktop with my full-size mouse/trackball. It's very cool, I agree, to see it running on the Pandora hardware. But only as a demo. It's too bloated. Running it would be a gimmick. By the time you've configured it properly for the Pandora (it's just Debian underneath: perfectly malleable) you're no longer running THEIR set of packages. It's no longer Ubuntu. How much better to forget the name and run a purely custom-fit set of packages with an interface and a design made just for the Pandora. As, e.g., Nokia did with their "web tablets".
Speaking of interface, the Pandora fits a niche in computing which is still fairly new. I hope that it will hit a sweet spot that replaces my Palm device completely and my desktop/laptop for everything except for those applications which particularly call for big screens and fast CPU's (software development, video editing, etc.). This new device may call for a different kind of interface.
I'm specifically thinking of the Nokia N800. I owned one for a couple of weeks. It was nice, though slow, and the lack of a keyboard eventually became a deal-killer for me. But its interface wasn't terrible. I definitely don't want a window manager which relies heavily on a mouse. A joystick as a mouse is even worse. On the other hand, we have a touch screen! Even on my ancient, keyboard-less Palm I rarely have need of the stylus. Which window managers/panels/etc. are going to be friendly to the touch screen, giving us big buttons to grab and intuitive gestures for control?
Personally, I'm partial to fluxbox and its family of window managers. I love their speed, their simplicity, and how easy it is to configure them. But for the most part they still seem tied to the traditional paradigm: big screen and a mouse. Yes, I configured & used lots of keyboard shortcuts with fluxbox. But multi-key keyboard shortcuts on the Pandora's little keys would be just as bad as a joystick-mouse! Both will work in a pinch, but they would be most unfortunate as primary interface methods.
Of course, since about a year ago, the new standard everyone is looking at for touch screens is the iPhone. I've not played with one, but they look snazzy from afar. What can we learn about touch-screen interaction from them?
--Todd
Of course, part of the beauty of the Pandora is that it's going to be a piece o' cake for each of us to run a differently configured system with a different window manager. I'm sure several will be downloadable, ready to throw onto an SD card & be booted up. But it sure would be nice to have the default (internal) be such that most of us are content with it. And such that it plays nicely with the "Joe user" crowd as well as being inviting to the rest of us who like to push it a little harder.
Re: Ubuntu, I can see the argument about riding on their coattails. So maybe a CD (or even a bootable 512Mb SD card) could be included with the machine. Maybe just a bootable distro linked online so we can say it's done. But Ubuntu wasn't made for a machine like the Pandora. It was made for my full-size desktop with my full-size mouse/trackball. It's very cool, I agree, to see it running on the Pandora hardware. But only as a demo. It's too bloated. Running it would be a gimmick. By the time you've configured it properly for the Pandora (it's just Debian underneath: perfectly malleable) you're no longer running THEIR set of packages. It's no longer Ubuntu. How much better to forget the name and run a purely custom-fit set of packages with an interface and a design made just for the Pandora. As, e.g., Nokia did with their "web tablets".
Speaking of interface, the Pandora fits a niche in computing which is still fairly new. I hope that it will hit a sweet spot that replaces my Palm device completely and my desktop/laptop for everything except for those applications which particularly call for big screens and fast CPU's (software development, video editing, etc.). This new device may call for a different kind of interface.
I'm specifically thinking of the Nokia N800. I owned one for a couple of weeks. It was nice, though slow, and the lack of a keyboard eventually became a deal-killer for me. But its interface wasn't terrible. I definitely don't want a window manager which relies heavily on a mouse. A joystick as a mouse is even worse. On the other hand, we have a touch screen! Even on my ancient, keyboard-less Palm I rarely have need of the stylus. Which window managers/panels/etc. are going to be friendly to the touch screen, giving us big buttons to grab and intuitive gestures for control?
Personally, I'm partial to fluxbox and its family of window managers. I love their speed, their simplicity, and how easy it is to configure them. But for the most part they still seem tied to the traditional paradigm: big screen and a mouse. Yes, I configured & used lots of keyboard shortcuts with fluxbox. But multi-key keyboard shortcuts on the Pandora's little keys would be just as bad as a joystick-mouse! Both will work in a pinch, but they would be most unfortunate as primary interface methods.
Of course, since about a year ago, the new standard everyone is looking at for touch screens is the iPhone. I've not played with one, but they look snazzy from afar. What can we learn about touch-screen interaction from them?
--Todd
Well I think it would be a good idea to build something based on Ubuntu. I personnaly think that, as far as pandora is a massive nerd handheld, it should be accessible to as many people as possible. I think it would be good to have the pandora come with a nice looking and easy to use system and ubuntu is very good for that and also has a reputation now. After that, we're free to install whatever slackware or puppy distro we want; but let's not forget about everybody else.
It would be bad for the console to become an elitist handheld. Make it accessible with the possibility of being elitist!
So, I pretty much agree with Gruso up there!
It would be bad for the console to become an elitist handheld. Make it accessible with the possibility of being elitist!
So, I pretty much agree with Gruso up there!
Tesqua
Still Fresh
dockthepod said:
I use fluxbox on my desktop pc, but I've tried it on an eee with 800x480 res and I had quite some problem with the size of windows; also, it uses the right mouse button quite exensively, so I don't think that it would be confortable to use with the stilus.
Anyway, I'd rather not have ubuntu preinstalled on the device: a minimal fast loading gui would be way better; it would be more interesting to be able to buy a separate SD with ubuntu preinstalled, instead.
Despellanion
Still Fresh
How about openSUSE? I use suse 11 on my computer at home and would very much like to see it in action on a pandora 
Despellanion said:How about openSUSE? I use suse 11 on my computer at home and would very much like to see it in action on a pandora
As far as I know SUSE is not available for ARM, so it would mean an huge work recompiling.
I believe that the only mainstream distros with arm packages are debian and ubuntu. Gentoo could probably compile for the pandora with little additional work, but I believe that custom distro are better off based on OpenEmbedded / Armstrong.
How about leave it with a homebrew OS and software, with the option of downloading the Ubuntu crap later. It would only be a "Right click and save" away anyway. It would also allow for "other" ideas for the mobile market instead of all the same stuff rehashed over and over again.
Noisome
Noisome
peca
Active Member
adamorjames
Member
noisome said:
I think I agree. Let's see the homebrew OS and stuff first. Ubuntu isn't the be all and end all.
the_darkside_986
Still Fresh
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2008
- Messages
- 34
+1
Ubuntu is completely inappropriate for embedded devices. I want to be able to use as much as that 128 MB of RAM for user apps as possible, which means having the simplest X server and window manager, no desktop environment except gMenu2x perhaps. Anyone that seriously tries to run Ubuntu on this will be disappointed when all the applications run slowly and constantly read and write from swap memory.
Ubuntu is completely inappropriate for embedded devices. I want to be able to use as much as that 128 MB of RAM for user apps as possible, which means having the simplest X server and window manager, no desktop environment except gMenu2x perhaps. Anyone that seriously tries to run Ubuntu on this will be disappointed when all the applications run slowly and constantly read and write from swap memory.
adamorjames
Member
qwerty15 said:
Tom said:
So, they have been trying out Ångström. Why make them change and ship with something different?
EDIT: s/make them/suggest that they/
gruso
thunderbox
No one's "making" them...
craigix said:
cb88
The mighty inverse laplacinator
cause that would be harder than doing it right in the first place.... why strip stuff out just write over the whole mess
cb88
The mighty inverse laplacinator
puppylinux 2.15CE .... a communuty edition of puppy linux with rox filer (pinboard and filer) and icewm (WM and panel)
http://www.puppylinux.ca/puppyfiles/pup ... -Final.iso
http://www.puppylinux.ca/puppyfiles/pup ... -Final.iso
