I’m somewhat surprised at how many people are getting upset about the RaspberryPi. They are grumbling about how it is a weak, underpowered device with the only plus point being the exceptionally low price. People, this device was devised and built for a specific task – getting children coding and learning about computers in general!! The price point is crucial, one could give it to a 4yr old (or 40yr old) and not worry too much if it accidentally gets juice poured on it or covered in chocolate spread.
I’m here in the belly of the Geeko at SUSE’s offices in Nuremberg, due to the fact that the new openSUSE Board had their Face to Face meeting yesterday (whole different topic needing its own post ;-) ). As I was coming here I thought it would be prudent to try and get the various people dealing with and interested in the ARM port around a table at some point to discus the status of things.
It’s been almost a month since the last ARM porting update so here’s a little christmas present to you all.
Dirk Müller sent out a status update to the mailing list, but I thought it would be a good idea post here for you scoundrels that aren’t subscribed :-)
Thanks to some great work by loads of people including (but not limited to) Alex Graf, Adrian Schröter, Dirk Müller, Marcus Schäfer, Joop Boonen openSUSE’s ARM port has come along nicely.
I am very pleased to announce that ARM Holdings has joined our current sponsors, by providing a pile of Texas instruments OMAP4430 powered Pandaboards and some Samsung Exynos4210 powered Origen boards! Many thanks to the fine folks in Cambridge for their most generous donation.
In addition to that, thanks to the community’s donations, we have also obtained an ST-Ericsson Nova A9500 powered Snowball board. Huge thanks to everyone that has made this happen.
Sorry that no news has been dished out with regards to the openSUSE ARM porting effort, but that’s mostly because things have been busy (honest!)
For starters we have now successfully built around 3500 packages out of a total of about 4700 for the full openSUSE ditribution. So we are well on our way. It hasn’t been easy going though, and we still have lots of hurdles, hoops and obstacles to overcome.
The big update is that a couple of kind companies have stepped up and sponsored some hardware for the effort to get openSUSE on ARM. Huge thank you to:
They have kindly sponsored and shipped several EfikaMX devices. Thanks to Peter Czanik for organising this on our behalf.
Ti in association with the PandaBoard community have kindly sponsored and are shipping several PandaBoards.
Thank you, this is a huge help.
As I mentioned before, we have an initial target platform identified for testing the work of all those involved in the openSUSE ARM port. The problem is we need to obtain the hardware.
I am in discussions trying to get some corporate sponsorship of hardware, but we can not rely soley on those kind companies that would like to see us succeed. We as a community need to help ourselves succeed, as such I’ve set up a campaign on Pledgie to enable us the community to contribute to the effort for obtaining hardware.
I just sent this into the -arm mailing list.
This is a hot topic, and one that seems to generate the most noise.
I’ve had a discussion with several people about target hardware, and I’ve also looked at what our peers are doing and saying. At the same time I’ve been trying to see what options we have for getting some sponsorship for hardware.
There were three devices in the running, all are classed as development boards – so no case or external prettyness (beauty comes from within anyway):