[Arm-netbook] Good netbook based on Cortex-A9

[Gordan Bobic]

On 07/31/2012 04:36 PM, Roman Mamedov wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:28:36 +0100
> Gordan Bobic<gordan at bobich.net>  wrote:
>
>> Not really. GPU is the only thing that hasn't got full open source
>> support. But if you are happy with the open source simple frame buffer
>> support for graphics, it's fine. As I said, the only thing that requires
>> any proprietary drivers is the accelerated GPU. And there are reasons to
>> use the simple frame buffer even if the nvidia drivers worked properly
>> (extra 62MB of RAM).
>
> But can you watch videos with just the framebuffer driver? Let's say at least
> SD ones at 720x576, in a simple codec like Divx/Xvid.

I haven't tried. It just isn't what I tend to use my laptops for. And 
with only 8GB of internal memory, taking large videos along isn't really 
practical.

> And can you watch
> YouTube?

Youtube without flash is going to be difficult regardless of the driver 
you might use. While libflash.so for ARM does exist, it isn't easily 
available.

> AFAIK all of this is not going to work well with no Xv support, which you don't
> get with fbdev.

If that really is a major use-case for you, you might want to look at 
the latest binary drivers. It is plausible Nvidia might have fixed the 
bitmap font corruption problem in the last few months (it looked like a 
bona fide memory stomp somewhere in the driver's memory map).

Gordan