On 27 November 2013 17:14, Robin Humble <rjh+luv@cita.utoronto.ca> wrote: [snip]
I digress, but in general if you just want a small linux computer then things like RPi, cubieboard are somewhat easier to get real OS's (fedora, ubuntu, etc.) running on. even then, accelerated graphics remains problematic. I think all small arm thingies still have binary blob graphics, but some have linux/glibc blobs instead of android blobs(?). kernel versions are typically frozen because of these blobs. lima and freedreno etc. are making progress fast though :)
I really like the little ARM single-board computers. I just wish the distros would manage to sort the hardware support out properly, and then continue to support previous versions for just a bit longer. It's your typical case that a new version comes out, and then all the dev focus moves to it and the older version is stuck in time. Usually not too hard to bring it up to date if you know what you're doing, but it's a barrier to adoption for people who just want to have a small, stable platform, rather than spend all their time maintaining the platform. (Most of the distros are really just maintained by one or two people in their spare time. I was one of them, until I ran out of time.) Most of the boards sit a fair bit behind the current ARM tech, sadly. Eg. The common boards are a single or dual core 1GHz ARM A8 or A7. (And the raspberry pi is far behind that in terms of processing power) Meanwhile the ARM cpu in the Nexus 5 phone can get up to 2.3 GHz on four cores! I'd love to have that sitting in a cheap, low-powered server the size of a deck of cards.. (You can get Snapdragon dev kits, but they're expensive and aimed at developing for new devices, not just running as mini computers) TC