arm-netbook July 2016

arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk

27 participants
64 discussions

Done my duty :-)
by Wolfgang Romey (hier) 27 Jul '16

27 Jul '16

I have done my duty again and published about the latest update: https://loadaverage.org/notice/8335967 https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/5071077 Wolfgang -- Wolfgang Romey Krokusstraße 37 47249 Duisburg geraspora: https://pod.geraspora.de/people/9002a1416a4e4a9d loadaverage: https://loadaverage.org/hier tox: wolfgang_romey(a)toxme.se Bitte Anhänge nur in freien Formaten. Die Nachricht ist signiert, der öffentliche Schlüssel wird auf Anfrage zugeleitet.

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Development environment for the A20 card
by David Boddie 27 Jul '16

27 Jul '16

Sorry if this has come up before and I missed it. Is there a recommended software development environment for the A20 card that people can use to experiment with in place of the real thing? I'm thinking of something as basic as a set of configuration options for qemu. I know the Cubieboard or Cubietruck has been mentioned before in the context of whether software will be portable to the card. I just wondered if there's any more concrete information about using virtual environments for those systems in the context of the A20 card. David

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Ethernet with pass-through card
by Stephen Paul Weber 27 Jul '16

27 Jul '16

Does the EOMA spec have ethernet? I forget. Neither housing lists USB ethernet as a thing it has, which seems odd if not (especially for the desktop housing)‎. Having an ethernet port in the bargain would make the pass-through card pretty exciting. ‎ Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

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The Dark Side of EOMA68
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 27 Jul '16

27 Jul '16

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k1NacHnvUc :) --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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What I have done so far
by Wolfgang Romey (hier) 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hallo, I followed the development of the EOMA68 Laptop for a long time and waited eagerly for the crowfunding-campaign. After the start of the campaign I regularly postet news on diaspora* and gnusocial and on the fsfe-de e-mail list and will do so until the end of the campaign. I hope it helps. I wonder, why so few people of the free software movement support your campaign. I thouhgt, free hardware in combination with free software was one of the top whishes of the free software community. Cheers Wolfgang -- Wolfgang Romey Krokusstraße 37 47249 Duisburg geraspora: https://pod.geraspora.de/people/9002a1416a4e4a9d loadaverage: https://loadaverage.org/hier tox: wolfgang_romey(a)toxme.se Bitte Anhänge nur in freien Formaten. Die Nachricht ist signiert, der öffentliche Schlüssel wird auf Anfrage zugeleitet.

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making money with EOMA68 cards
by Nick Hardiman 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

I’ve been checking up on EOMA68 articles the last few days. Somewhere along the way - perhaps in a podcast - I believe Luke said you can make money from hardware. How would that work? Perhaps something along these lines? If a home tinkerer wants to experiment, or an artist wants to explore this new medium, or a business student want a first mover’s advantage, they do something like this. * Come up with the idea for a gizmo. I see someone’s already compiled a list of ideas at http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/. * Order a card via https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop * Buy an idiots guide to soldering and a bag of parts. * Spend a few months burning holes in tables and building prototypes. * Take delivery of the new card, plug it in and make sure everything works. * Sell the new gizmo online. The EOMA68 standard creates a demand for new products. Unplugging the computer card from your house, plugging it into your car, unplugging it at work and plugging it into something else, means there must be the things to plug it into. The hard work has already been done. The hardware exists courtesy of the mobile phone industry, the software exists courtesy of decades of free software, and the compute package will exist courtesy of Luke and co.

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"Good enough" computing and the upgrade treadmill
by Matt Campbell 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hello: I read the white paper referenced on the Crowd Supply campaign page [1], and I was particularly interested in the section on "good enough" computing. The following paragraphs describe some problems that, as far as I recall, aren't addressed in the rest of the paper: > Now, in 2015, "good enough computing" has been cross-examined, and found wanting - perhaps not for the right reasons though. The key problem of having a three to five year old computer is not so much that it can't do the job it was designed to do: if the computer was not connected to the Internet it could continue to be used for its designated tasks until it suffered major component failure (possibly in 8 to even 15 years time). > The problem is that the kinds of web sites that most people visit and want to use are being designed with modern computers in mind. Even some recent smartphones are more powerful than high-end desktop computers of a decade ago. The latest version of Google Maps, for example, when using the "Street View", overwhelms a recent version of Firefox running on a computer with 8 Gigabytes of memory and a Dual-Core Dual-Hyper-threaded 2.4 Ghz processor, causing it to reach 100% CPU and lock up the entire machine. > But that's not so much the real problem: the real problem is the inter-dependent nature of Software Development. Upgrading even just one application often brings in a set of dependencies that can result in the entire operating system needing an upgrade. And the longer the duration since a software upgrade, the less likely it is that one single application may be upgraded without huge impact and inconvenience. With no knowledge (or convenience) on how to upgrade software or hardware, most people pick the simplest solution... This "upgrade treadmill" has bothered me for a while. Yes, with modular hardware like the EOMA68 cards and housings, the environmental impact is lessened because we only have to discard computer cards, not whole laptops. But unless we can stop the upgrade treadmill, we'll still have to discard our old computer cards when they would otherwise still be functional. I remember the laptop I used throughout my university education, from 1999 to 2003. It had a 366 MHz mobile Pentium processor and 64 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 192 MB when I had to work on a fairly memory-hungry Java application under Windows). In its original configuration in 1999, that laptop was perfectly comfortable for everything I wanted to do, at least under Linux: Web browsing, email, word processing (including StarOffice), software development, and listening to music. Now I don't know if X would run at all in 64 MB of RAM. As another illustration of how much waste the upgrade treadmill causes, here's a paraphrased bit of dialogue from the 2012 novel _Off to Be the Wizard_ by Scott Meyer. One character, a time traveler from 1984 whose last computer was a Commodore 64, asks, "What on earth can a person do with 4 gigabytes of RAM?". The other character, from 2012, replies, "Upgrade it immediately." Maybe that was supposed to be funny; the whole book is pretty light-hearted. But to me it's just sad. So what can we do about this? The only idea I've got is that I and other software developers should do all of our work on the most underpowered computer that will let us get buy, rather than the nicest one we can afford. Then maybe, out of necessity, we won't be so wasteful. But then maybe we won't be as productive either, particularly if not being wasteful means we have to write everything in C or C++. And of course, it won't do any good if I'm the only one who chooses to make those sacrifices. At least with free software, there's always the possibility to fork projects that succumb to the upgrade treadmill. For example, the MATE desktop environment is a fork of GNOME 2, and one of its explicit goals is to run well on non-compositing graphics hardware. I imagine MATE will run quite well on something like the A20 card. But still, we can't live in a forked, time-warped world. We have to interact with mainstream websites, which means using a mainstream browser or at least one of the major rendering engines. In this regard in particular, I wonder if the upgrade treadmill has already left the A20 behind, particularly since we can't use full GPU acceleration. I can certainly understand why the JZ4775 wasn't chosen, though it checks all the other boxes for ethical computing. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Sorry if this is too much of a rant or off-topic here. FWIW, I just backed the campaign by ordering an A20 card. Matt [1]: http://rhombus-tech.net/whitepapers/ecocomputing_07sep2015/

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Re: [Arm-netbook] What I have done so far
by David Boddie 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:30:26 +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote: > But in the end, for the campaign to be successful, it also needs to > provide products that people want to pledge for (if nothing else, to > meet the minimum quantity to fabricate the chips that Luke keeps > mentioning), so everybody needs some kind of hook to engage with the > project. It also serves to gauge interest in future products, once the > campaign ends. It's the way things work these days. Nobody will pledge money to support a standard on its own. As you say, you need a hook, and in this case it's a set of devices that aim to prove the concept. > - Close family are still well served by the options already available > around the home, e.g. Thinkpads a decade old (still from IBM). Thinking about this: I wonder if it would be possible to reuse existing laptop housings by somehow reusing their PCMCIA card slots to house EOMA68 CPU cards. Maybe this has already been discussed somewhere. David

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freedombox on eoma68?
by Wolfgang Romey (hier) 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hello Luke, would it be possible, to run freedombox https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual) on the EOMA68-Card? They are getting nearer to the version 1.0. As it is installable with debian, maybe it is possible. Maybe it could give the project a litle boost, if you could offer a card with freedombox preinstalled. Wolfgang -- Wolfgang Romey Krokusstraße 37 47249 Duisburg geraspora: https://pod.geraspora.de/people/9002a1416a4e4a9d loadaverage: https://loadaverage.org/hier tox: wolfgang_romey(a)toxme.se Bitte Anhänge nur in freien Formaten. Die Nachricht ist signiert, der öffentliche Schlüssel wird auf Anfrage zugeleitet.

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Published the news of the pass-through card
by Wolfgang Romey (hier) 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hallo Luke, you see it in the Email, which I sent to fsfe-de, and can find under https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/5066579 https://loadaverage.org/notice/8328773 Wolfgang -- Wolfgang Romey Krokusstraße 37 47249 Duisburg geraspora: https://pod.geraspora.de/people/9002a1416a4e4a9d loadaverage: https://loadaverage.org/hier tox: wolfgang_romey(a)toxme.se Bitte Anhänge nur in freien Formaten. Die Nachricht ist signiert, der öffentliche Schlüssel wird auf Anfrage zugeleitet.

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arm-netbook July 2016