Pandaboard ES support here yet?

[joakim]

Hello, I have a Pandaboard ES and I'd love to run Arch, just like I'm running Arch on my x86 desktop now. The Pandaboard page on this website claims that Arch runs on the newer ES but Phoronix couldn't get it to run, when they tried Arch last week. Does Arch run on the Pandaboard ES yet?

If so, is it stable? In my experience, the various Ubuntu releases and the Linaro Android build are pretty unstable, at least when I tried them last month. Also, is video decoding hardware-accelerated for the Pandaboard ES? TI claimed that they have hardware-accelerated video for Ubuntu 11.10, though not for 12.04 yet, and it kind of works on 11.10, but it seemed to be dropping frames to keep up. The video looked a little choppier than when I played the same Apple-encoded trailer on my x86 desktop, with outright artifacts when I tried another x264-encoded video.

I'd like to use the Pandaboard ES as my desktop: stability and proper video support are the only remaining obstacles, plus would be great to run Arch. Any info from others already running Arch on this hardware would be appreciated, thanks.

[WarheadsSE]

This is odd. I wonder what off-configuration they used.

[kmihelich]

The ES works fine using the install instructions we have posted, I just got one running here last weekend. I do need to change up the instructions to make use of the xmkcard.sh script we package in the bootloader tarball, since partitioning the SD card manually doesn't seem to work well at all. That's where most people get hung up.

Stability isn't really there, which is more to do with the kernel than anything else. 3.4 has been pretty awful for me so far, even on the original Pandaboard. 3.5 has a lot of improvements that should make things a lot more usable, and running some of the rc kernels has shown marked improvement.

[joakim]

kmihelich, thanks for all the info, looking forward to Arch running the 3.5 kernel.

Hmm, just as I was posting yesterday that TI hadn't released the hardware-accelerated video drivers for Ubuntu 12.04 yet, they posted them. Looking forward to trying them out to see if they work any better on Precise. If I could just get those video drivers on a stable Arch desktop, I think my search for my next desktop would be over.