Slashdot Mirror
Installing Linux On ARM-Based Netbooks?
An anonymous reader writes "I am sure that many other Slashdotters have noticed an increase in ARM-based netbooks over the past several months. For example, the Augen E-Go. It is a widely touted theory that it is impossible to install Linux on one of these notebooks, replacing the commonly installed Windows CE operating system. The sub-$100 netbooks carry decent specs, including 533MHz ARM processor; 128MB DDR RAM; and a 2GB Flash drive, as well as most expected netbook components (USB, Wi-Fi, etc.). I find it hard to believe that a computer with these specs is impossible to hack and install Linux to, but Google searches have been largely unsuccessful in finding proper information. Do any Slashdot readers have experience in installing ARM Linux distros to these cheap netbooks like this? If so, what distros do they recommend?"
(In particular, I wonder if anyone can comment on Ubuntu on ARM.)
Debian GNU/Linux on ARM
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Angstrom Linux
Sounds like they are good candidates for Android IMHO.
I use debian on my arm raid box. Not a netbook, but similar specs (except for the keyboard and video, of course).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I don't even get why these arm based machines come with windows ce, that's just setting the user up for disappointment... Sure it looks like windows, but won't run any of the apps people would expect to run on it....
Linux at least doesn't create such a false impression, and has a much wider array of applications readily available for it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
NetBSD runs on my toothbrush. I'm sure it'll run on your thingamabobber.
With Linux on ARM is that ARM devices are substantially less standardized that x86s are when it comes to such niceties as the preboot/early stage of boot process.
Because of the decades-long Wintel monopoly, pretty much any x86 board(with the exception of a few oddball embedded things and OLPCs), boots in almost the same way. Worst case, the ACPI implementation is so shot that you have to boot with -noacpi in order to get the kernel up and running.
ARM devices, though, have had considerable freedom to do their own thing, so long as the vendor provided a BSP that papered over the weirdness enough to run the OS of the customer's choice(historically WinCe/VXworks, more recently this has included Linux). On the plus side, this has meant some fairly interesting capabilities in some of the bootloaders. On the minus side, this has meant a multitude of bootloaders(a few OSS, redboot, u-boot), some fairly common, and some horrid oddball crap that even Google has only heard mentioned a few times.
If you can get the kernel booted, userland is not such a big deal. Debian has had a pretty decent one for a while, and the Ubuntu guys have recently been doing some "suitable for low-rez screens" type polishing. The issue will be figuring out the bootloader. And, of course, there is absolutely no assurance that the drivers for whatever oddball devices are crammed into the cheapo SoiCs in these things exist, or work properly.
If you get to the stage of "what distro do I want", you are ahead of the game.
Sure, Linux runs on lots of CPUs, and would have no problem on ARM, and probably even supports all the devices on the systems in question. The trick is finding a way to install it, and that's where the hacking comes in. How does the system boot? Can you modify the boot image to install Linux? Does the BIOS (or whatever equivalent) insist on only booting digitally-signed boot images like video game consoles do? Those questions may have different answers for each device.
In most cases, I would think it shouldn't be too hard, as they aren't likely to bother with digital signatures, and they probably have some mechanism for installing an upgraded or patched operating system (for bug fixes, if nothing else). Someone has to buy one and figure out how to do it.
Is more a tablet or a cellphone than a netbook, but the N900 runs it, and is ARM based. And probably will be a Meego version for it too soon. Anyway, the N900 have twice that RAM, completes to 1gb counting the swap, and several times that flash on storage, you could feel a bit stretched with it.
There are also several mini linux distributions specially targetted to low ram/hardware (i.e. damn small linux), but not sure if there are ARM ports of them.
I wouldn't bother with ubuntu on that thing, my cell phone has better hardware specs, in every category.
Check out Slackware on ARM
http://www.armedslack.org/
This is is a port of 12.2 packages (slackware is almost complete with 13 rc1).
Yet, that does not actually solve the problem. If you think it does, you don't understand the problem.
These devices only have 128M of RAM. That's not much: you won't be running X terribly well, nevermind a modern desktop. And the available packages for 'lightweight' stuff is woefully unequipped for something like this.
What the OP really should be looking at is MeeGo/Moblin or Maemo - though with only 128M of RAM, they might be a bit under powered for even that.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Perhaps. But consider that if the user hadn't submitted the story there would have been other effects lost. For instance, by reading this article I found out about the E-Go, which I'd never heard of before. I also found out about Angstrom for the ARM architecture.
If we all kept as quiet as you appear to want then the spread of ideas and information might happen at a much slower pace.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I've already posted in this thread elsewhere, but I just thought I might add: Google is likely part of your problem (inability to find anything useful).
I've noticed lately that Google has become much less of a useful resource when looking up technical information. You're more likely to find a useful link with "stupid" queries, but any level of complexity results in two out of three being only-sorta related. It's a mess, and historically useful search formatting (quoting, -, +, etc.) no longer really help.
I really hope a better alternative comes along soon (or google releases "geek.google.com" or some such thing - with the old indexing). The lack of good search results (nay, worse results) has really made my life more difficult.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Debian with IceWM was perfectly usable on a p200 with 64 megs of RAM back in the late 90's, it should do very well on an arm533 with 128 megs of RAM.
Mod parent up. The biggest limitation is the amount of RAM. Sure, 128MB may be fine for certain limited applications, but it'll be the bottleneck for any decent web browsing or any kind of multitasking. I think 256MB may be the bare minimum for comfortable web browsing, mostly based on the fact that any device I've used with only 128MB seemed to just fall a bit short of being really usable. Perhaps someone with a 192MB device (T-Mobile G1?) can chime in with their experience.
Looking at the specs given by the OP, I am wondering why you would go to the trouble of installing Linux on one of these machines (other than geek cred) when you could just get a MIPS based netbook with similar specs that comes with Linux, e.g. the CnMbook. I got one for £90 last year, it's slow as hell but does the job for basic web access etc when I don't want to carry around a full sized laptop.
I might add that putting a full-featured Linux distro (e.g. replacing the basic Linux install it ships with with Debian or the like) on the CnMbook doesn't seem too plausible at the moment, there's just too much tweaking necessary, and this is a machine that ships with a Linux variant installed. Trying to put Linux on one of the ARM machines mentioned by the OP when it isn't even supported by the manufacturer seems like more pain than it's worth to me...
https://alephnull.uk/
Or OpenBSD.
Plenty useable.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
If it's a bottleneck on Puppy or basic Debian, it's going to be a bottleneck on MSWinxxx.
The RAM is not the problem. The problem is the wetware of engineers who deliberately throw up roadblocks to using a decent OS.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
You can do this with Debian. You do a minimal install, and then add the packages you need after that. It's more difficult than a default desktop installation because you need to know what is required rather than have Debian make the choices for you, but it is very possible.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
The Simpad is an ARM-based tablet computer made by Siemens some years back. It came with WIN CE but people have created a Linux distro called OESF that runs on it and it will run many Sharp Zaurus applications unmodified even though it has a much larger screen than a PDA.
I would expect that people would have to do some boot loader hacking similar to what was done with Simpad, but if you could get that Simpad distro booted on one of these netbooks then you will be past the biggest hurdle in making Ubuntu Netbook remix run on them.
I used to run a minimal Debian install with OpenBox + fbpanel for the desktop. By not running non-essential services and careful software selection, total memory usage after booting into a GUI was only 20 MB.
"Should" work?
Yeah, I've got a MobilePro 780 - it has 32MB RAM; I've got X running on it with ion3 under NetBSD. NetBSD 2.0. It barely runs - and this is an old TinyX (nanox? I can't recall) X server.
I had a P133 with 16MB of RAM, too. That ran icewm well.
The problem is that this isn't 1997, and X implementations are significantly bloated these days compared to back then. There have been a lot of changes - many have which have been acceptable improvements (memory use for performance improvements, support, etc.). Even the 'tiny' X implementations have this problem.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
semi-intelleigent sounding stuff that presumes INTEL has already won.
Shoot. Why not just give in to the BORG entirely?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I'm a Debian guy, but I should note: you can do this on RedHat/CentOS, too - though the 'minimal install' has grown substantially in recent years.
I really wish the 'minimal install' would not include such 'necessities' like snmpd and a mail daemon. I neither need nor want those security-issue packages on many installs (or want an alternative) and they're not appreciated. (BSDs are particularly prone to this nonsense. Sendmail and bind? Seriously? Can I get the machine pre-rooted?)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Maybe if you used a browser that just renders HTML instead of running a Javascript interpreter (mega bloat), 15 addons, and an XUL based UI then you wouldn't have trouble rendering a web page with 128MB of memory.. browsers worked fine back when 64MB was decent. Install uzbl or netsurf or something.
It comes from the "ZOMG, you want to run Linux, therefore you want to run a server/are a sysadmin/are a programmer" mindset. Of course, if they didn't include Apache, sendmail, bind, etc by default, you'd have all those programmers/sysadmins saying how Distro-foo is dumbed down for the masses.
This is a very generic model; do you have any idea who manufactured the board inside? It appears most other WinCE laptops out here are based on that exact same board - the shell/color differs but the ports are placed exactly at the same place!
If one of them runs Linux that would likely be a good starting point, then you need to figure out a way to write the flash memory.
Take it from someone who admins RedHat/Centos boxes for a living, install debian instead.
The first time I installed linux in my life, it was a 8mb 486 66MHz ( I even managed to install it in a 4mb 386 sx 25MHz - but no X as it got a CGA card) However, it took forever to run mozilla... or it was the 14,400 bps modem? =)
-- --
You're on the wrong site. Go back to digg or where ever you should be.
Well, then you'll be stuck on static pages, and will be impossible to render and navigate through "modern" pages.
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Perhaps. But consider that if the user hadn't submitted the story there would have been other effects lost. For instance, by reading this article I found out about the E-Go, which I'd never heard of before. I also found out about Angstrom for the ARM architecture.
If we all kept as quiet as you appear to want then the spread of ideas and information might happen at a much slower pace.
I am the AC who wrote that post that you replied to.
Thank you for taking the time to say that. Sometimes people say things that makes me reconsider my position and you Sir did me that favor today. I was hasty and didn't think about what you might call the positive externalities. Still, I think having independence and being able to find your own answers is a very important skill. It is something that separates the helpless and needlessly dependent sheep from those who have some guts and are willing to put effort into a thing before it crosses their minds to seek help. I'd rather the Ask Slashdot be more like "I did research on this topic and I found solutions X, Y, and Z but all of them involve various trade-offs. What would you the community do if faced with the same situation?"
I think that's reasonable and it shows that the inquirer is serious enough to have at least tried. Maybe they found the answers and maybe they didn't but either way it gets the community involved in a more meaningful discussion, rather than so many one-liner posts containing a link or saying obvious things like "full-blown X with a desktop environment requires more memory than that device has."
Thank you again though for providing me with real, non-inflammatory constructive feedback. It makes quite a difference. Perhaps I am too disenchanted with the sheeple who are so convinced of their own helplessness and so convinced of their inability to educate themselves using the finest information network that has ever appeared in all of history (the Internet) that these things might as well be true even though they are false. I don't know which is more worthy of blame, the public schools that teach (train) them to be this way or the people themselves for failing to question it and failing to push their own boundaries and see for themselves how real they are. Still, I should be more constructive about how I point this out and you did well by making that clear.
I have installed Linux on an HP iPAQ hx4700 PDA (624MHz XScale PXA270, 64Mb RAM, 128Mb flash, 480x640 screen). As others have pointed out the main problems are finding (1) a boot loader and (2) drivers for your device. In the case of the hx4700 these problems were already solved for Familiar Linux (familiar.handhelds.org); SDG Systems produced a boot loader and others produced the kernel patches and drivers. A more generic boot loader is HaRET (Handheld Reverse Engineering Tool), a Linux bootloader which works from the Windows CE environment. I haven't used it myself because I wiped WinCE off my iPAQ years ago. Drivers and platforms for ARM devices are being developed for the Linux kernel all the time; check out the source code under ./arch/arm. But you may not find exactly the right combination for your device. Being a kernel hacker helps!
As for a Linux distro, I first used Familiar Linux. But that is no longer actively developed. So I switched to Angstrom Linux (www.angstrom-distribution.org). But that doesn't offer the latest version of the Mozilla Fennec browser. And in both cases I found the desktop environment (e.g. GPE) to be too resource hungry.
So I have now rolled my own distro from the latest software sources. In particular I am using a window manager called PAWM (Puto Amo Window Manager), which is small and perfect for a device without a keyboard, and fennec-2.0a1pre built from bleeding edge sources. Yes, they do actually work in 64Mb of RAM! It does take some effort to port, configure, debug and fix the software, but it's fun to do.
While(unless your time is worth about $.30 an hour) these make lousy primary machines(and, unfortunately, due to the fact that many of them are cheap junk, they don't have compensating advantages like 15 hour battery lives, or ultralight weight), that doesn't mean they are without use.
~$80-$100 for a complete embedded system, with LCD and inputs, and a reasonable set of peripherals opens up all sorts of interesting projects, if you can get your OS of choice on there.
MeeGo & Qt (on which MeeGo UI is being built upon) to the rescue, eventually? Qt Embedded can run without X, via QWS. Maybe there won't be much of a problem with having a MeeGo variant which gets rid of X (hence also compatibility with Moblin / non-Qt software...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
You can wait for MeeGo (Nokia's Maemo + Intel's Moblin) which is expected to get released (for the end user) in the coming quarter. It will run on both ARM and PC.
How different then, would doing this kind of thing be from installing Linux on a PocketPC/Windows CE device such as an iPaq? Yes, that is possible, but it is far from straightforward. I imagine the device is significantly different from a standard PC and more like a PocketPC-based ARM handheld or smartphone, and one ought to be considering it as such. I assume that such a device will not have some Palladium-like trusted computing system similar to what one sees in some gaming consoles which prevents one from easily changing the OS arbitrarily, but even so, getting everything to work is likely to be a major chore.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Older versions of Debian are still available.
At least, they SHOULD be.
SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD.
There, I said it.
I have a Sharp Zaurus and it is ARM. I think there is an open source version of it also: www.openzaurus.org
I've got SeaMonkey running just fine (if a bit slowly) on almost anything besides Flash content. This is on PuppyLinux 4.0, on a Pentium 1 with 64 Mib of RAM (2 used up by integrated graphics.) Although this is an older version of SeaMonkey from before it used XUL.
What I want to know is where one actually picks up these "sub $100" netbooks, because every time I try to find one to actually purchase it is "coming soon" or delayed. Hell I wouldn't give a shit what OS it runs if you can pick one up for $100 or less and it has Wifi.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And all those 486s controlling Shuttles or...Airbuses should just dissapear!
One that hath name thou can not otter
The problem with portable computing devices -- at least the ones that aren't tied to an expensive cell plan -- is that they are such narrow margin markets that few manufacturers are interested in them. Let's say that you want a lightweight, long battery life, portable computer with a full-sized keyboard to do actual work on: word processor, spreadsheet, or for the more technically inclined, a text editor and a copy of gcc, and you don't give a shit about watching video or browsing Flash-heavy sites.
Good luck with that.
It's not that there's any technical barrier involved here. You could do all of that just fine on a 90MHz Pentium fifteen years ago, or even a 50MHz 80486 twenty years ago. Odds are that the processor and memory in a third-rate cell phone could blow those specs away. Add a real screen and a keyboard, and you've got a device that could retail under $100. Of course, that means that it would probably wholesale for around $40, and the manufacturer's profit would likely be a couple of bucks, but only for the month or two it would take every factory in Taiwan to rush out clones. And that's provided it wasn't stillborn because every clueless tech "journalist" started bitching about how you couldn't watch video or play the latest games on it. Frankly, you can't really blame the manufacturers for not wanting to jump on that wagon.
So instead, we get the overpriced toys of the netbook world which, while capable computing platforms in the abstract, are so crippled by their toy keyboards that they're basically DVD viewers with built-in web browsers. It's like the final, terrifying revenge of WebTV.
I suspect that if you want something else, you're going to have to find an otherwise suitable netbook and substantially modify the hardware yourself. Personally, I've been giving serious thought to stuffing the guts of a netbook inside of a vintage IBM Model M keyboard and building a custom cover for it.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
is because ARM systems so far are embedded systems.
PCs are easy because their behavior is very simple and effectively, hasn't changed much since the beginning. But ARMs are a dime a dozen and used in various things from lightweight controllers to cellphones. Your PC might very well have several ARM processors inside it.
As a result, every ARM system is different - the memory map is different, the interrupt controller is different between SoC vendors, peripherals are located at different spots, etc. The only real constant is that ARMs boot at 0x0, but many SoCs have boot ROMs that are mapped at that area, which load a bootloader off storage at some arbitrary memory location and jumps there. End result, on ARM, you need to build a kernel/bootloader that's specific to your hardware.
On a PC, it's pretty much a monoculture and you know where things are in physical memory space. Things are located at well known addresses. On a PC, then, it's effectively the same architecture. That's why there's so many OSes available because the basic kernel needs are all the same across every PC, ranging from low power embedded systems to super 128-core behemoths - you know where RAM starts, how the BIOS will load you and where, how the interrupt controller, timer hardware, etc., work, and how to talk to more advanced peripherals via interfaces like ACPI. Hell, about the biggest change in PCs is the slow move to EFI based firmware, but they implement a BIOS compatibility module for backwards compatibility.
Try writing a program where you don't know where you're going to be located in memory, hardware you don't know where it might be located, interrupt controllers that can change wildly, etc without requiring reconfiguration and recompilation, and it's impossible. That's the current state of ARM systems...
I like your explicit definition of what you'd like to see Ask Slashdot be more like.
And wow, a civil exchange on Slashdot. I think I feel a little dizzy. :-)
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
"should" is a weasel-word having no place in specs...
Evidently you've not read too many specifications, then, because it is absolutely nothing of the sort.
I think you'll find many, many specs not only use "should", "may", and other such words, they actually go to some lengths to provide precise (and useful) definitions for them before doing so.
(For those of you playing along at home: I've noticed that use of the term "weasel-word" is usually a cover for "I can't be arsed to do my homework, so I'll just parrot something I read on Wikipedia".)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If you need ultra-lightweight browsing and just can't stomach Lynx (or elinks), I've had success with Dillo. It supports basic HTML (text and images) and CSS1. If you can't get it in your distro's package manager, Dillo is easy to compile and doesn't require anything special. (simple ./configure && make && make install should do the trick)
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
The issue ( Icould be full of it so feel free to correct me) is that the glibc libraries that link the code are becoming more and more bloated as the developers have more ram. The same application compiled today would take many times more ram than it would be with old libc gcc 2.95. This is why the tiny nanox is very bloated when the binary is compiled with gcc 4.x.
Isn't a lite version of glibc for the XO laptop available? Maybe some netbook distros should be compiled agaisnt those libraries instead to reduce bloat.
http://saveie6.com/
***Well, then you'll be stuck on static pages, and will be impossible to render and navigate through "modern" pages.***
And that would be bad -- why? Speaking for myself, I'm a bit hazy why resource hungry modern web pages that more often than not don't render correctly in any browser are desirable.
BTW, I'm posting this using the OffByOne browser in Windows 98 running under QEMU using 128mb of RAM. I imagine it would run just as well in 64mb -- maybe less. Might work in Windows 95. Maybe I'll try that some day.
One of my fantasies is that the entire damn web will collapse under the burden of nutty design and sloppy implementation that is being piled on it (plus tthe failure to address security in any meaningful way). Probably won't happen ... but surely I can dream.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
My experience has been with a 300MHz ARM with 128MB ram. The hardest part was actually finding the real manufacturer of my device. It's a no name device I bought off eBay dirt cheap. The manufacturer released an Android OS image for the device so I could use that kernel image. Installed Android to the internal flash, and have Debian booting straight from an SD card. It doesn't load Debian from Android it loads straight into Debian when the SD card is in. There are some scripts that need to be in place but they can be copied and modified from the Android install image. You have to be picky with your choice of applications but you can have a very functional device for when you are on the go. I actually run the XFCE desktop environment. It is by no means the most lightweight but it still performs well. These devices can't compete with the power of a notebook, but they can still be very useful. I use mine for the net (Links 2 graphical mode or Midori browser), email (Claws Mail) and for coding on the go, although compile time is a drag :). It runs Abiword and Gnumeric surprisingly well. You just have to remember that these devices aren't notebooks. Although with the right choice of apps they can be quite quick and responsive.
The problem with changing what an arm device runs is in the bootloader that arm devices run. What most arm devices have is firmware that not only configures the CPU and other devices but loads the OS. Unlike a PC where it loads some code off the first sector of the drive most arm devices actually have the code to load the file system, put a file in memory, and execute it. This is great except there is no standard on how to do this and can be configured from very easy to change(i.e just change the file it loads) to very hard(i.e the firmware checks the file checksum). Your best bet is to do some googling on the device and see who makes the CPU. Then google and CPU and you should find what the standard firmware the manufacture uses. Next you need to hook a serial device(most devices have these just no serial port on the board, you need to sodier it on). Then you can start hacking away. Marvell based devices are great since the OpenRD and Netplug devices have plenty of documentation and they all use the same boot loader and such.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-arm.xml
No only a civil exchange, but part of it was a civil, considered reply from an AC........
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
So here's a little more background for those who haven't followed development of it closely:
MeeGo is the arranged marriage of Intel's Moblin + Nokia's Maemo.
MeeGo is still under heavy development, and although source and builds are available, everything is still experimental.
The steering group is "planning [a] release of MeeGo version 1 in the second quarter of 2010", according to the FAQ. It'll be here soon; don't start making plans to run it as your daily OS until v1.0 is actually released.
To give a taste of how raw development of the OS is right now, even basic tutorials on how to write a "Hello, World" application aren't useful to the community yet as most tutorials depend upon the MeeGo SDK, a component that hasn't yet been released by Intel.
But what you care about most is: "Will it run on my hardware?"
The best place to determine that is on the Devices page on the MeeGo Wiki. If you find that you can run the current development images on a different piece of hardware, please make a note of it on that page.
coding is life
There is nothing inherently difficult about Linux on ARM. I have installed Gentoo on two such systems, a Buffalo Linkstation and a Nokia N800 (though the latter runs Maemo most of the time). These devices were designed for Linux to begin with.
IMHO, it is much better to support manufacturers that support Linux. Even if you get Linux running on one of these WinCE devices, you are supporting a closed monoculture by buying it.
As of netbooks, there are two currently available in online stores that I find particularly interesting: Always Innovating Touchbook (ARM) and Lemote Yeeloong (MIPS). Both of these are intended for open source hackers. The Lemote, in fact, is completely open source down to the firmware level. Both of these are considerably more powerful than the WinCE ARM netbooks.
The last time I mentioned these, some people complained that the Lemote is not actually available anywhere, so here are two places:
http://lemote.kd85.com/
http://www.tekmote.nl/epages/61504599.sf/nl_NL/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61504599/Categories/%22Lemote%20linux%20PC%20and%20Linux%20laptops%22
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Commonly in a PC you have the BIOS which initializes CPU, RAM, and then executes code from a device (usually the bootloader). There is no such thing in ARM, each device has its own custom code to initialize the hardware and load the operating system. Sometimes that code is embedded in ROM memory which makes it harder until someone finds a way to overwrite it (bug or hardware hack). Not impossible, but certainly no quick and easy.
If you plan to install linux on it, try to find an "easily hackable" device, or better: get one that already comes with linux.
At the company I work we have some little arm computers, no netbooks but rather thin clients. They come with windows CE 5 installed, but it is a bitch to get them to run linux. I have not succeeded at all. Partly because I don't know windows CE and I can't seem to get Haret to boot my prepared linux kernel because it won't work properly.
a civil exchange on Slashdot
That's it, then. The world will end tomorrow.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I haven't tried with 128MB, but Etch + E17 runs dandy on a Pentium 2 with 192MB of RAM.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
I find it hard to believe that a computer with these specs is impossible to hack and install Linux to, but Google searches have been largely unsuccessful in finding proper information.
See, he said he searched Google. So instead of falsely accusing him of not looking, why not ridicule his total lack of Google-fu instead?
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
At the Ubuntu Developer Summit last November, one of the Ubuntu ARM guys did a plenary presentation where the machine hooked to the projector was an ARM machine running Ubuntu. I also saw Jonathan Riddell looking for a USB mouse so he could install Kubuntu on an ARM machine he'd been handed.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
Every few years, there are efforts to remove X, to address a perception that X is a source of bloat. GTK has a few framebuffer backends, for example.
They ultimately fail for a few reasons.
The primary reason is that the non-X version of the toolkit will not be commonly used, and fall out of date quickly.
The secondary reason is that removing X requires reinvention of things like window management, key focus and direction, direct graphics/opengl access.
I assume that a solution like the Wayland display server will have more success.
I can't be 100% sure what you've got because I can't find much info about it on the internet, but odds are good that is just a re-stickering of a very prevalent ARM netbook that's doing the rounds.
If so, a developer community can be found below, and there is a full replacement Linux distro available (no promises that it'll work, YMMV etc.).
http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/
I don't know where you got the mod points from, but others without as many real-world sock-puppets have pointed out where you are either lying or fooling yourself.
Look at all the resources intel has to waste keeping x86 afloat. Engineering resources, marketing resources, arm twisting, kickbacks and bribes, ...
Imagine what we could have, if the resources intel is putting into keep x86 afloat were put into ARM. Or, shoot, PPC. Sparc, ColdFire. MIPS. The other Moore's FORTH CPU.
No, you can't imagine it because you're afraid it would offend your gods.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
the glibc libraries that link the code are becoming more and more bloated as the developers have more ram. The same application compiled today would take many times more ram than it would be with old libc gcc 2.95.
More and more cooks' thumbs in the kettle. Which was supposed to be a good thing. Unfortunately everybody needs to leave their mark.
Do a base install of NetBSD. Snip back services by editing /etc/rc.conf. Then install the limited packages that you need.
It galls me how much crap gets dragged in without the user having any choice in most linux-based OSes. It's gotten so even Slackware is a big mess.
- Create ARM VM (Qemu does this)
- Create development image/environment (Qemu can do ARM)
- Build an ARM image
- Test in emulator/simulator
- Install with one of several methods - the Debian Installer works on ARM, for example.
- Test, log notes for yourself, and repeat the build process
----
http://cross-lfs.org/view/clfs-embedded/arm/introduction/how.html>
"The CLFS system will be built by using a previously installed Linux distribution (such as Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, SUSE, or Ubuntu). This existing Linux system (the host) will be used as a starting point to provide necessary programs, including a compiler, linker, and shell, to build the new system. Select the "development" option during the distribution installation to be able to access these tools."
---
Debian Live - ARM
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Arm
Yes, we always thought X Windows was a bit bloated, back in the late 80s, on a 386/33. I don't remember how much RAM it had (if I still have to files to look that up, they're on a 9-track tape or maybe a 60MB Sun cartridge...) It was a bit faster than running NeWS on a diskless Sun3/50 with 8MB RAM, but NeWS was so much cleaner most of the time that it was the better system.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And you couldn't even turn it off. And Skr1pt K1dd13z no longer remember all the horrible attacks you could use because of it....
I think the original versions of Opera had Javascript as well - the whole thing fit on half a floppy disk.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Somehow, I'm going to have to say "not freaking likely".
I ran (for about a year) debian slink (2.1 iirc) on a P120 with 96MB of RAM and an 800MB disk. It was almost unusable, even with that RAM upgrade (from 32MB).
That was with icewm and whatever the 'lightweight' browser was for the day (circa 2003). "Usable" is not a word I'd use to describe it unless we're talking about single-instance web browsing or IM.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
One of my fantasies is that the entire damn web will collapse under the burden of nutty design and sloppy implementation that is being piled on it (plus tthe failure to address security in any meaningful way). Probably won't happen ... but surely I can dream.
Alas I once had a similar dream for MS Windows, yet still it remains alive to taunt me.
Every few years, there are efforts to remove X, to address a perception that X is a source of bloat. GTK has a few framebuffer backends, for example.
They ultimately fail for a few reasons.
I don't think that the problem is X, it's Parkinson's Law.
X ran perfectly well on a 20MHz machine with 16Mb RAM in 1989. (In fact, it still ran okay on the Sun 3/50 I had on my desk in 1996.) Part of the subsequent bloat has been due to proliferation of graphics hardware, and some of it has been due to the demands of graphics-heavy applications such as video and games. But a lot of it has been because the RAM and CPU cycles were just there to be used.
We don't need to get rid of X, but we do need to have a compile flag that will produce version that will run acceptably on a 500MHz machine with 128Mb RAM.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It's a lot more work to find Moorestown product without Windows attached to it in a complete platform. For whatever reason, if Windows will run on the thing no matter how poorly, it's sold with Windows. No thanks. I do have a few of those inexpensive Atom boards. The video on the early ones was pretty hopeless, and they didn't run Vista well. But attach an SSD for the OS and a 2TB HDD for data with Ubuntu it makes a credible media server, guest workstation, thin client and Citrix terminal. Intel is so terrified that these platforms will "cannibalize" their established and more expensive server, desktop and notebook product lines that they cripple them in various ways - limited memory, video resolution, no PCIe. Intel's suffocating the product line their own selves.
Regular Windows doesn't run on ARM, and fewer ARM platforms are shipping with the WinCE version of Windows these days. So we'll get ARM platforms for the most part not because they're better (though all-day battery while playing 1080p is still beyond Moorestown in a practical CE device), but simply because people can get them without Windows attached, and with it Microsoft's control of the software platform, the user interface down to the icons on the desktop, the feature set, the necessary antimalware suite that sucks out any performance and battery life the platform might have.
Moorestown is a cool product and I'll probably get a few platforms of that for various things. For the tablet type devices I think I'll stick with the Android Tegra tablets. Did you know that the manufacturers of Android platforms are allowed to optimize the software and user experience for their platform? Isn't that neat? It can come out of the box ready to use.
Maybe in the next generation the Atom line will be more interesting as the power envelope for the processor and the support chips comes more in line with what ARM can do. For now, not so much. With Windows 7 the product will always be disappointing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And then be surprised that it's difficult to reach the goal. Brilliant!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Some readers may remember that Intel was once an Arm licensee, with the PXA StrongArm range, which they sold off to Marvell, a move many found strange at the time and then soon after came Atom which sort of explained it. In the meantime Intel have struggled to keep up with the march of Arm, nearly every CPU in a handheld device is an Arm processor or derivative.
The problem with the earlier N-series atom motherboards is that not so much the atom itself but the support chip set, a problem played down quite a bit by Intel - whilst the CPU might have been less than 10W the motherboard would eat a lot more. The new N-series are quite a bit better.
Some netbooks used the Z5xx series, and that processor was even more frugal, but the support chipset called US15W aka Poulsbo had some interesting design issues, one being that it didn't have SATA support, only PATA (when it was announced PATA was already well on its way out). Also, the GMA500 video chipset has historically been badly supported by Intel - just google for GMA500 linux.
An arm cortex a8 and its entire chipset eats less power than just an atom, which is why they're used in Palm Pre, Nokia N900, iPhone 3GS, Archos tablet, and other handheld devices.
Intel, recently announced the new Moorland Z6xx processors which in theory will be competitive on power with the Arm Cortex. However, a CPU by itself without chipset support, and good driver software etc, is not enough. Hopefully Intel learned that with the Z5xx, even though they have persistently failed to rectify that despite lots of complaints from the community.
The SoC used is the same as in the GP2X Wiz, only problem is starting the kernel. The rest should be fine.
Bingo. Here's your gold star.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I have recently bought a Netwalker PC-Z1 as a replacement for my Zaurus PDA. Ubuntu Jaunty seems to work well on this device. Here is one review: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/27/sharps-5-inch-pc-z1-netwalker-honors-the-zaurus-legacy/ Unfortunately it is aimed only at the Japanese market & needs to be converted to English.
If your machine can boot from a SD card, you can build a bootable linux system
well under 2GB, including qt and multimedia, using this project:
http://buildroot.uclibc.org/
I have already used it for a mini2440 with 64Mbytes of ram and a Smagung
S3C2440 micrcontroller with a 926T arm core. Buildroot is self contained
and lets you configure everything from the kernel up to the applications
you want in your system. It is conceived precisely for those small systems with
small amounts of ram and a framebuffer instead of a graphics processor.
Usefull for other architectures like mips, powerpc, i386, avr32, etc.
Old comment, sorry, but I know the answer-- SeaMonkey started using XUL and Gecko beginning with SeaMonkey 2.x. It's still somewhat more lightweight than Firefox. Composer etc. are still present.
Well, at least the thing to which I linked to is actually used, apparently; in embedded applications.
One that hath name thou can not otter