[Arm-netbook] GK802 for $70

[Angus Gratton]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 02:30:19AM +0600, Roman Mamedov wrote:
> With the Russian post being extremely slow these days, I just received my
> GK802 a couple of days ago (almost 2 months shipping time). And as if "just in
> time", a Debian installer for GK802 was released [1]. Installed Debian from it
> today with no major problems, however was disappointed to find that the
> included kernel lacks IPv6 support. 

Hi Roman,

(I'm responsible for the Debian installer mentioned above.)

Thanks for the heads-up on IPv6, I just updated the kernel config and
rebuilt the installer images. There's a direct kernel package download
link on the blog post page as well, to perform an update.

I'd missed a few other network features that weren't in the gk802
defconfig too (netfilter/iptables was one), so I enabled those as
well.


I do get the "install vs prepared image" pros and cons. As I said in
the blog post, in my case I really wanted the installer so I could
experiment with putting my rootfs on an encrypted RAID device -
possible with debootstrap but not as easy in my experience.

As touched on already, the root of the difference seems to be whether
you're viewing these boards with an embedded mindset or a PC mindset
(as they can easily be both.) An x86 Linux install disk image will
boot on most x86 computers, even different types, but except for in the
VM/cloud realm it's very uncommon for people to encourage PC Linux
installs from precanned images rather than running an installer.

The main downside to the installer IMHO is that it's kind of slow if
you have a lot of packages, minimal installs go pretty quickly but
full desktop installs really drag due to relatively slow I/O on these
things.

- Angus

PS Luke, good luck with the debian-installer from source. I wanted to
do this initially as well, but as I mentioned in my blog post I opted
for an easier hybrid route. FWIW you could probably adapt the makefile
& scripts I have on github to work with an A10, without much
trouble. Similarly if you figure out a fully from-source install
builder, doing things the right way with udebs & debs for everything,
then I might try to adapt that onto GK802.