Trisquel on ARM
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Hello Everyone,
Yes I know that Trisquel isn't available for any ARM out there and this even knowing that a port could be easy when we know that Ubuntu is available for several ARM chips. But my question is, I wouldn't buy a Raspberry Pi anymore since the Broadcom GPU Chip don't have free drivers. So my question is, what ARM Base Computer (or Atom... something really low energy consumption and very portable) would you recommend where Trisquel could be ported ?
On Monday 22 October 2012 21:48:34 name at domain wrote:
> I wouldn't buy a Raspberry Pi anymore
> since the Broadcom GPU Chip don't have free drivers
It's worse than that. The GPU orchestrates boot and you therefore
require a proprietary blob to boot even if you're happy with just
using the serial port on the GPIO pins.
Hum :s... Then it is worse than I thought :S...
On Monday 22 October 2012 22:08:29 name at domain wrote:
> Hum :s... Then it is worse than I taught :S...
Yeah, I found out as a consequence of buying one based on a Cambridge
University (UK) Fresher's ARM assembler course that has enough
documentation to write a basic unaccelerated 2D driver for the display
and a serial driver for the GPIO port. There sitting in the FAT boot
partition is proprietary boot firmware used before the kernel is
loaded. I was one seriously unhappy bunny. It's not as though even
giving away an unethical computer is acceptable.
I'd recommend the Genesi Efika MX Smarttop I bought instead, sadly it
has been discontinued. The drivers for the Freescale SoC are AFAICT
freely licensed even though Freescale hasn't got them into mainline
kernel yet. Plus the boot flash / 'bios' is the free uboot IIRC. Only
the codecs for the GPU acceleration are proprietary, I can live
without those.
Andrew M. 'Leny' Lindley
The only ARM (but *not limited* to arm) hardware I would put my effort
into is Rombus-Tech. The future is very exciting.
http://rhombus-tech.net/
Look at the mailing for what’s happening. Do say what you want. when
people have agreed on a product they will go about getting produced. The
infrastructure is in place.
I already saw that one (If I remember right you send me the link in another thread), but didn't quite understand how it works :s...
On Monday 22 October 2012 22:38:54 Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross wrote:
> The only ARM (but *not limited* to arm) hardware I would put my effort
> into is Rombus-Tech. The future is very exciting.
> http://rhombus-tech.net/
>
> Look at the mailing for what’s happening. Do say what you want. when
> people have agreed on a product they will go about getting produced. The
> infrastructure is in place.
Perhaps I was misled by the extensive use of the future tense on the
Rhombus Tech website. But I did look and thinking there wasn't any
actual hardware now I went elsewhere.
On 22/10/12 23:36, Andrew M. 'Leny' Lindley wrote:
> On Monday 22 October 2012 22:38:54 Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross wrote:
>> The only ARM (but *not limited* to arm) hardware I would put my effort
>> into is Rombus-Tech. The future is very exciting.
>> http://rhombus-tech.net/
>>
>> Look at the mailing for what’s happening. Do say what you want. when
>> people have agreed on a product they will go about getting produced. The
>> infrastructure is in place.
>
> Perhaps I was misled by the extensive use of the future tense on the
> Rhombus Tech website. But I did look and thinking there wasn't any
> actual hardware now I went elsewhere.
LOOK at the mailing list. it's very busy. Hardware HAS BEEN produced.
Though they hard a opps but are usable. Just go and look at the
discussion and say WHAT YOU want. Eg Tablet,Always Innovating touchbook
(or the asus copycat transformer) like tablet/laptop, plain old laptop,
HDA, just the card and a simple board that it plugs into for the rest of
the ports, etc, look at the wiki. More possibility’s have been added to
the wiki or look at the mailing list for them. A lot of the recent ones
were my suggestions.
For that price (129$ as I can see) it would be better to be an Asus EeeBox PC with Atom and the (non optimus) nVidia ION with the Nouveau drivers :S... This is only my opinion, but yes the point of buying it is not the same since one is portable and the second not... but I was thinking of a Multimedia Player when the Server Side is not used..
I was "In Love" with the Raspberry Pi because (mostly) of the price since I am a student and don't have a lot of money for this :S... Just wanted something little to create a Personal Server for my work until I get the need to buy a professional hosting (if this situation ever occurs in my professional life), and mostly use it to connect to my television so I can have Multimedia and Gaming futures (but mostly Multimedia), and also use it for OwnCloud with my External HDD (instead of using Dropbox or Ubuntu One).
Need to think a little more about this... I will see those Chinese copies of the Raspberry Pi that are handled in a USB Pen-like case.
Thanks for the information :D
On Monday 22 October 2012 23:56:18 name at domain wrote:
> For that price (129$ as I can see) it would be better to be an Asus EeeBox
> PC with Atom and the (non optimus) nVidia ION with the Nouveau drivers
> :S... This is only my opinion, but yes the point of buying it is not the
> same since one is portable and the second not... but I was thinking of a
> Multimedia Player when the Server Side is not used..
If I was looking for a small server at the lowest price I'd simply
take a Trisquel i686 bootable USB around local secondhand computer
stores and see what sort of netbook I could get that worked well
enough. In the UK that would get me down below the total cost of an
RPi, power adapter and monitor cable. Plus they have built-in battery
backup for server use. If I wanted multimedia as well I'd get to know
the Intel video chipsets and do an lspci on my tour.
Andrew M. 'Leny' Lindley
Hum.... Maybe my old Msi Wind U100 could be useful for this with Trisquel 5.5 :D
But I still think that there is a need of Free Software distribution for Arm devices :s... If this is even possible due to the lack of GPu drivers most of the time.
On Tuesday 23 October 2012 00:39:50 name at domain wrote:
> But I still think that there is a need of Free Software distribution for Arm
> devices :s... If this is even possible due to the lack of GPu drivers most
> of the time.
I asked here about free ARM distros some time ago and was recommended
Debian, main only and be careful with what you install. From what I
can tell Trisquel isn't the only free x86 distro that is struggling
for developers. So unless someone shows up and just does it off their
own bat I don't expect any of them to adopt ARM. With Debian moving
towards FSF approved distro status that looks to be the best bet.
Andrew M. 'Leny' Lindley
I would say go for Debian but be a good boy and only have the free repositories active. Isn't the default kernel in Debian free software only and missing the non-free blobs used in distros like Ubuntu? Makes you wonder if the version of Debian for the Pi on the website has non-free firmware included to get the thing to work.
Since the Raspberry Pi needs the "blob" in order to boot, I think that is is integrated no matter what :S... Or I could use the Raspbian, created only for the Raspberry Pi.
It is sad to see no other cheap alternative to the RPi, but if there isn't then I will go with it... just scared about the fact that people that bought one are reporting it to be very slow even on Debian :S... Need to have a look at that.
В 21:00 +0100 на 22.10.2012 (пн), Andrew M. 'Leny' Lindley написа:
> On Monday 22 October 2012 21:48:34 name at domain wrote:
> > I wouldn't buy a Raspberry Pi anymore
> > since the Broadcom GPU Chip don't have free drivers
>
> It's worse than that. The GPU orchestrates boot and you therefore
> require a proprietary blob to boot even if you're happy with just
> using the serial port on the GPIO pins.
A great news from today on the topic. The software for the RaspberyPi's GPU core is now free software. [1] Quote:
As of right now, all of the VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM
is available under a FOSS license (3-Clause BSD to be precise). The
source is available from our newuserland repository on GitHub.
end of quote.
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221
[2] https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland
The problem still persists :S.. You still need the Firmware contained in the Proprietary Blob to use it (and to boot the OS).
But it is a good step forward :D
On Wednesday 24 October 2012 20:15:04 name at domain wrote:
> The problem still persists :S.. You still need the Firmware contained in the
> Proprietary Blob to use it (and to boot the OS).
>
> But it is a good step forward :D
Reading the comments and replies on the linked page what the boot code
must do is load microcode into the Videocore from the SD card.
Liz@RPi says they have plans to release a board under a different
brand which keeps a non-changeable version of the GPU microcode in a
serial ROM in order to meet the FSF approval criteria. I look forward
to it.
That is a really good news :D Thanks for the information.
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