Toby Corkindale writes:
And then, having an hour or two to spend babysitting the Debian installer! Man, the Raspberry Pi is NOT a high performance device!
dpkg is a pathological I/O workload. Suggest you do the install in a chroot via debootstrap, then copy the resulting filesystem to your SD card or whatever in one hit. You might also consider setting unsafe-io in dpkg.cfg (once you understand the implications, of course). You can also gain a small saving by having dpkg skip documentation and localization when extracting packages: printf 'path-exclude %s\n' >>/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg \ /usr/share/{doc,info,locale,man,omf,gnome/help}
I can see why Ubuntu spurned supporting it, and targeted the next ARM level as minimum spec.
[Some background for the lurkers...] r-pi and one other (pre-dove marvell?) are ARMv6. AFAIK, *ALL* other kit still being produced is ARMv7. r-pi is the only thing keeping ARMv6 interest alive. Ubuntu armel targets ARMv7 and does not require an FPU. Ubuntu armhf targets ARMv7 and requires an FPU ("hard float"). Debian armel targets ARMv4t and does not require an FPU. Debian armhf targets ARMv7 and requires an FPU. Debian arm64 targets ARMv8 (64-bit). Raspbian armhf is Debian 7 recompiled for ARMv6 w/FPU. Currently Ubuntu armhf and Debian armel are officially supported. In their next release, Ubuntu drop armel and Debian support armhf. IMO r-pi is appropriate for the niche market where an arduino isn't enough, and a beefier armv7 system is too expensive. I recommend buying ARMv7 -- which board depends on your application, e.g. historically Marvell Dove is the only one with a SATA controller that wasn't daisy chained off the USB controller, so it was the obvious choice for a NAS. Ref. http://wiki.debian.org/ArmPorts https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM especially, these sections are useful background http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort#Performance_improvements_and_benchma... http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort#NEON http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort#Hardware