[Arm-netbook] Upcoming CPU Card Status?

[Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross]

On 05/12/13 11:44, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Thursday, December 5, 2013 01:17:50 Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross wrote:
>> Hi. Deciding weather to put a order in for a a20+devboard or too wait.
> 
> Ah, waiting. There will always be something better 6 months away. That’s just 
> how it is.
> 
> One small problem with waiting is that if current products don’t sell, there 
> will be no future products. Don’t wait yourself out of a future.

I know and don't want to contubut to that.

>> I prefer the specs of the upcoming cpu cards. I need all the ram I can
>> get 
> 
> Can you offer firmer guidelines? (I’d love an 8GB system, but .. yeah, probably 
> not happening ;)

2gb is better than 1 and is the same as my netbook. With my web browsing
habits I have a problem of hitting 2*% swap and my system becomes a
craw. My swap is also encrypted to protect my encrypted home key.

> We’ve already been running  Plasma Desktop with full compositing on the 1GB 
> A20 boards and it works fine, so while more RAM would be nice, it’s not a 
> requirement for running even a full feature desktop env.
> 
>> preferably but I also would like 3D/GPU for gnome-shell providing
> 
> Out of curiosity: how well does GNOME Shell run on openGL ES (1.1 or 2.0)? I 
> know it has support for OpenGL ES via Clutter, but I have yet to see any 
> successful bring-ups of it on ARM hardware (which may mean I just missed 
> them). I do know that LLVM was broken this year on ARM and nobody seemed keen 
> to fix it, which may be problematic.

Don't know.

>> there's free drivers and firmware other wise I'd compromise for the most
>> free cpu card.
> 
> It is unlikely for the foreseeable future that there will be a Free openGL 
> stack for any competent mobile GPUs. This is one of those situations where a 
> little pragmatism will get us further than puritanism: if we shun systems 
> because they don’t have a Free openGL stack, even though the rest of the 
> software is Free, we will continue to be ignored by the companies that make 
> these systems. The server world was able to resolve these exact same kinds of 
> issues through pragmatic work-with-you-towards-freedom approaches.

I know but I was thinking if the next one is the iMX6 with better(?)
working graphics then I might well wait for that.


>> So rough err ETA of the up coming cpu cards and I assume that very nice
>> devboard from make-play-live will be possible to get without the a20
>> card in 2014?
> 
> Yes, we will eventually be offering the feature board separately; right now it 
> doesn’t make any sense to do so, since ~nobody has an EOMA68 CPU card, without 
> which the Improv’s feature card isn’t useful ;)
> 
> That said, it’s a $75 decision, not a $500 one. You can get additional CPU 
> cards when they come out and get stuck in right away with the A20 until then.

yes but still. I guess I could sell it and get a new one when it comes
out. So I guess I just get on with ordering one.