[Arm-netbook] GK802 for $70

[Troy Benjegerdes]

> > Btw, is that only me who thinks that dpkg is bad choice of a package
> > manager for embedded system?
> 
> ...yes? :)

Yes, dpkg is a 'bad' package manager. However, what you'll find if you 
actually try to come anywhere close to the features and robustnes that
dpkg (and the debian system has) , is that you'll find out that absolutely
everything else is several orders of magnitude WORSE than dpkg.
 
> > On my x86/SATA harddrive installing a 1+Mb
> > package means horrible disk thrashing and of course throttling/locking
> > up any other activity in the system. What to expect on low-performance
> > embedded system? 
> 
> 4-core ARMv7 is not exactly low performance already, and please for the love
> of god stop using that word ("embedded"), it's typically an excuse for all
> sorts of crap and lack of functionality. This "embedded" device is more
> powerful than desktop computers from let's say 10 years ago. And guess what,
> Debian existed and worked more than fine for people on those computers back
> then.

I started working with Debian and installers on a 100mhz dual-processor 
PowerPC 604 with 128MB of memory.

You whipper-snappers with your multi-core 1ghz SOCs with 8GB of NAND flash
have it easy. You can even compile the kernel in less than an hour.

Embedded generally means a computer embedded into something else. And part
of that means you either don't ever do 'software updates', or if you do, 
they will happen very infrequently, and you want things to keep working.

The ONLY system I've every had good luck with starting a software update
and then expecting it to actually still work afterwards are systems that
I've run Debian *stable* (not testing, backports, or any new fancy stuff,
and for sure nothing I manually compiled), and if I exclusively run packages
**including the kernel** from the stable archive, then there's at least a
50% chance it will still work after the update.

Everything other than Debian is pretty much a 'reinstall it or throw it 
away' kind of 'update' process, which isn't really an update at all.

Where this whole mess currently explodes is every 'embedded' system board
vendor thinks they have some unique 'value propositin' by wiring up the 
interrupt lines differently, or having some silly non-standard boot rom,
which makes it very hard to get a *standard* debian kernel image that 
actually boots on more than one specific hardware revision.

I've come to the conclusion that the only solution to this problem is
to start including the KiCad PCB layouts for the board, and eventually
the HDL code for the chip itself into the debian archive, and thus why
I started the http://q3u.be project. It's probably going to be 2 to 5
years before I get a PCB.