The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now

You can indeed use the Guix software on ARM, however there's only instructions on how to install the GuixSD operating system on x86. I can't wait for someone to port it to ARM! Perhaps I'll take a look into it once the EOMA-68 is sitting on my desk!

Also, it would be a nice learning experience to see if Trisquel could be ported to it. It will be very convenient to swap "hard drives" by just plugging a memory card out and another back in instead of having to open a laptop with a screwdriver each time.

> Sorry for all the questions -- and thanks for taking the time
> to answer ... just a few more from me

no problem, i got time :)

> For the laptop, does the LCD connect to the Computer Card via a LVDS?

EOMA68 is RGB/TTL. there's an LVDS converter IC (a TI SN75LVDS83b)
on the laptop housing "Main PCB1".

> Will your business sell different LCD screens (perhaps higher res,
> perhaps just replacement screens) in the future that we can buy and
> swap in to the current laptop body (perhaps with a case mod, perhaps not)?

higher res for this laptop? no, sorry - higher res means "more power".
more power means you're over-budget (15 watt max), more power means
"redesign of PCB1 due to increased backlight current", also a totally
different connector would be needed.... it's really not as simple
as "plug in a different screen"

the whole *LAPTOP* has to be customised based around a holistic
approach. staggering, but that's how it is.

the LCD that's been picked is one that's mass-produced, commonly
available and pretty low-cost. you'll be able to get replacements
for years.

> Will your business sell replacement keyboards, batteries, wiring,
> battery controllers(?), etc?

the customised and bulk-bought items - battery, wiring, PCBs: yes.
the PCBs will be (are) available as GPLv3+ "Open Hardware" so
that other people can make them as well for you.

keyboards: we will deliberately pick one that's commonly available on
ebay so you can order replacements easily. likewise the LCD.

> Is Parabola appropriate if I want a stable, reliable OS to use for work?

for basic stuff - internet, email, libreoffice, printing - yeah.
you won't have adobe flash (but that's not such a big loss - bye bye
adverts hmmm i'll really miss you).

> I have heard over the years that Parabola is for advanced computers

ultimately, software is pretty much the same regardless of the OS
Distribution. it's more about the window manager than it is about
the distro.

XFCE4 is pretty much the same look-and-feel as Windows 95 was, and
it's still just as easy to use.

personally i prefer KDE 3.5 (now Trinity Desktop) but it's not available
for ARM at the moment.

> and that people who use Parabola must regularly fix bugs because
> Parabola gets all the newest updates.

people who *want* the latest updates can get them. but here's the
thing: what you can do is either:

* take a copy of the microsd card OS before doing an "update"
* get 2 Computer Cards and use one for experimenting.

the 1st way is a cheaper version of the 2nd way, but basically
you can check if an update works for you, and if it doesn't
then you just go back to the older card (memory card or
computer card).

> I am fairly novice and won't have time to learn how to fix bugs

as long as you can _report_ them clearly, explaining what's
wrong, and are happy to follow instructions that people ask
you to, to help track down the problem, then you won't be
the one actually _fixing_ the bug.

remember to respect the fact that the people you will be talking
to are volunteers: don't *DEMAND* that they fix *YOUR* problem.
be patient with them (and yourself)

and, given that you can copy (and then swap) the microsd card
or just use a 2nd computer card, the problem of "argh i updated
and need it fixed right now" goes away.

btw when applying fixes / patches recommended by the developers
treat it as an entire upgrade ok! use the same procedure:
make a copy of the micro-sd card (or use a 2nd Computer Card).

> ... reliability is really important to me. Would Debian be safer
> in this regard? How can I use Debian while sticking with Trisquel's principles?

the OS is on the Micro SD card, you could actually try both out.
debian has more developers, but i found that the parabola team
were actually much more responsive, they surprised me by packaging
some software within two days! you can't get that kind of response
from debian!

you can however meet *most* of trisquel's principles by removing
the "nonfree" repository from /etc/apt/sources.list (or just
not adding it in the first place). however you also need to
watch out for browser default search-engines.... a stack of
other things as well... i actually don't know the full details
but i know there exists a package called "vrms" - a "Virtual
Dr Stallman" which will help you find things on debian and warn
you :)

hiya mzs114,

tom and prince were inspired by the early work on gpl compliance with allwinner that i did back when the A10 first came out. tom (and many others) did not have the restriction of strict gpl compliance for the bootloader, nor of having to develop a standard. Tom however worked very hard internally (before he quit working for allwinner) and even harder afterwards to get gpl compliance and to create fantastic documentation. he's actually been supportive of *me* because without that persistent pushing behind the scenes (which the linux-sunxi team worked on as well) he wouldn't have been able to start his business.

now, about working with him _in future_, i'm sorry to have to tell you that when we worked with aaron seigo on the Improv, we had agreed that we would handle the CPU Card, and his team would handle the "engineering board". we had everything ready to go (despite what i learned only two weeks ago he had been telling everybody in the free software world), but he stopped communicating with us despite repeated attempts to ask what the numbers were on the campaign.

we'd guessed that they were low, but we had no idea how low. so we had to think ahead, *WITHOUT* any input from aaron, because he'd stopped replying to our repeated and urgent requests for clarification and progress reports, what numbers he could potentially have got. i asked tom's team, as an emergency measure, for help, and their factory went to all the trouble of quoting for an extremely low production run of only 500 units (which is a lot of time and a very small run for very little profit). he did it as a favour because we'd helped him get his business started.

when aaron finally got in touch, he was pissed off and blamed *us* that he had only managed to get 250 preorders (1/10th of the planned 2500). what he hadn't told us was that he was running out of money, so couldn't buy the 500 units, let alone the 2500 planned on which the *pricing* of the improv had been based. and because he'd set the pricing of the improv so low (based on a 2500 production run) there *was* no profit based on the unit cost of the 500 orders. and i certainly couldn't go back to tom's factory and ask them to redo the quote for as little as 250 units: they were too big a factory for that kind of production run.

so he destroyed not only the reputation of his own project, but also destroyed our reputation with a China State-Sponsored Factor (and lost the entire Free Software community a massive funding opportunity in the process), destroyed our reputation with Tom *and* adversely affected Tom's reputation with his main factory.

and i hear only 2 weeks ago that aaron's been telling everybody that *we* were the ones who failed to communicate and were trying to "hide failures" and "weren't ready". total and absolute utter bullshit but of course it would have helped "placate" his team and his friends... temporarily, until they learn in other ways that he operates in an unethical way.

anyway. leaving that aside....

the micro-desktop has only 2 USB ports because to add more would require an on-board USB Hub, plus an uprated Power IC (which is already at 15W). that would potentially involve heat-sinks so it is all extra cost and complexity that i'd like to avoid. you can always use a powered USB hub.

one thing that would be nice which i'll consider in the future is an RS232 port, but they're quite big so have to be evaluated to make sure it can fit without changing the size of the box. in the meantime a USB-UART on the 20-pin header does the job for early boot debugging.

"other ports by EOMA68"? EOMA68 won't ever change, it's final. that's really important. standards should never be changed (they should only get faster in a future-compatible way, like both USB2 and MicroSD do).

if you mean "will the micro-desktop bring out any other ports that are on EOMA68"? everything's brought out already or used up already: there's a 20-pin expansion header inside - that's where "everything else" is brought out that's not already on external connectors http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/micro_desktop/

the A20 has pretty amazing OS support, it's because it's been around for a while, and the fact that the A20 has both SATA and RGMII (GbE) makes it really popular. there simply isn't any other low-cost SoC out there with as much support for free software with the same extensive level of interfaces, it's really very unusual.

let's hope the R40 due out soon has been designed with the same set of interfaces.

thanks :) still have to get another 87 computer cards before we reach the first critical threshold (MOQ 250 computer cards)...

hiya hack, yeah we find it takes too long to explain the whole thing in one go, we need someone to "ask questions of" if you know what i mean. we tried the "explaining" video it just didn't work, and it's because there's nobody else in the world actually doing this!

but, also, i don't mind that we won't be doing 2,000 or 20,000 straight away, it would be too much: we need to go gently and make sure everybody is happy.

yay! https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/07/31/0323255/new-crowdfunding-campaign-offers-modular-eoma68-computing-devices

> Also, why isn't Trisquel one of the suggested OS?

Not possible. Trisquel doesn't support ARM.

onpon4 is correct. There is no ARM port of Trisquel as Ubuntu discontinued its ARM build back around 8.04 I believe. That makes it a tad bit difficult. It would probably make sense to do a Debian-based version of Trisquel as there are Debian ports for ARM.

The way NAND flash on these devices work is such that there is not a controller with proprietary firmware (this is how a SSD works, but really all modern drives including the spinning disk kind have proprietary firmware in there controllers). Thus with the on-board raw nand there is no firmware. This means extra steps are ideal to prevent killing the nand. There are what I'll refer to as wear levelling file systems to compensate even though they are rarely used in practice. This is in part probably why microsd/USB flash drives/and internal nand flash has a particularly high failure rate. Many SSD drives also have a high failure rate. However there is also something called SLC nand flash. Unlike MLC nand flash it doesn't have some of the problems that MLC nand flash has. It's also much more expensive and used in industrial environments where things can't fail. We're going to try and get SLC nand. We're hoping this combined with a wear levelling file system will increase the longevity of the on-board storage. If it ends up not being adequate enough for a laptop (and even if it is) we'll be investigating a USB to SATA adapter (or similar) so that you could still stick in a traditional hard drive. Many of the USB to SATA chips are garbage so we've got some work ahead of us. There supposedly are some decent ones though...

Thanks guys.

I don't understand much of what a lot of writes on disk involves exactly (changing location of files, things like that?), but looking for it on the web, I found this (https://askleo.com/can_a_usb_thumbdrive_wear_out/):
The best use of USB thumb drives and other flash memory-based devices is simply copy-to and copy-from. By that I mean copy the information to the thumbdrive to store it, copy it from the thumbdrive to a local hard disk to use it, and then copy it back to the thumb drive to store it.
Never run disk-intensive applications directly against files stored on the thumb drive.
If you copy to and from even ten times daily, you’re looking at three years of usage for the low end of the flash memory lifespan. (Yes, I know that’s not exact. In fact, it’s way more complex than that; factoring in things like the type of file system, FAT or NTFS, the efficiency of the device driver, and even the circuitry on the specific flash memory device – but it’s a good order of magnitude.)
You may also note that your application speeds up when you copy your database to the hard disk for use. While reading flash memory is typically quite fast, writing is not.

So the best strategy as a user for longevity would be to copy to and from the NAND, but not use applications that do this often (can't figure out examples. maybe intensive saves from a video editing software?)?

but since there's a possibility to have external memory cards, I suppose it's possible to use the 8GiB of NAND for anything that's not meant to move often.
Supposedly, reads wouldn't affect its longevity as much as copying to and from.