[Arm-netbook] Intro & questions

[Jock Tanner]

Hello and good TotD, dear listers!

Let me introduce myself a bit. I'm a sysadmin & computer enthusiast
from Khabarovsk, Russia.

For a long time I had a itching idea to fiddle with something non-x86.
Recently I bought a Mele 2000 from Tom Cubie (thank you again, Tom).
Reading rhombus-tech site and this list's archives gave some results:
now I have a working system running armel Debian port, with most
drivers in place: USB, wired & wireless (ath9k_htc) network, display
framebuffer, NAND, HID. This far I haven't try SATA and sound, though
they seem ready to go.

Still I have some questions.

1. X11 with fbdev driver is stable but quite slow. Is there an
accelerated driver binary I can download?

2. Surprisingly I can not get a console output on framebuffer, while
fbdev is working fine. I lost a couple of days resolving this matter,
mainly because I whanted to push first things first, and also because
I thought that both console and fbdev uses the same mechanism to
access the framebuffer, so if console is broken, fbdev should be
broken too. Apparently I was wrong. But is there any clarification on
this matter? Hope of fixing?

3. As I can understand, Debian armel is targeted on ARM6 cores with no
FPU/SIMD. A10's architecture is way more advanced, since it has VFPv3
and NEON instruction subsets. What is the easiest way to get an
optimized set of binaries? Maybe you can suggest another linux
distribution or repository? Or should I just fetch sources of some
critical binaries and cross-compile it? E. g. fbdev server will
probably move windows faster if compiled with NEON support.

Then let me say I'm very happy to join this community, thanks and good
luck to all of you developers, testers, and users.

Hoping for answers,
Tanner

P. S. Sorry for my english 's being far from perfect.