Linaro 11.06 Release Brings Unity 3D Port To ARM

An anonymous reader writes "For a long time what x86 users took for granted was just 'the future' for ARM devices. Now that time is over. Linaro — a non-profit engineering organization funded by ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments — released a first port of Ubuntu Unity 3D experience and Compiz. If you have a pandaboard, go ahead, download, install the Linaro 11.06 LEB/Ubuntu images and try it out! It's just a few minutes away."

Comments

Different than Debian how?

[0100010001010011]

I've been running Debian on my SheevaPlug and DockStars since they showed up at my door step. I haven't run into many (if any) applications that weren't compiled for ARM but were for i386 or amd_64.

Sure enough, there's Compbiz.

It's bare bones, it's not always pretty, but apt has never failed me. It just works. Sid is almost always more up to date than the latest 'stable' release. They don't hard lock any packages to any release (unlike Ubuntu where if you don't want to go past 10.04, you're either stuck with back ports, adding in additional PPAs or dealing with bugs).
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Debian / Ubuntu reminds me of a joke an old Rugby player told me. A young bull and an old bull are sitting up on a hill over looking a valley of sweet cows. The young bull gets excited and says, "Lets run down there and fuck one of those cows!". The old bull quiets him down and says, "Lets walk down there and fuck all of those cows."

Re:Different than Debian how?

[Tubal-Cain]

What are you talking about? Seriously, you make no sense. First og all, what does apt have to do with this? Apt works the same way on Debian and Ubuntu, on ARM and Intel. So why would you want to mention that?

He probably meant Debian's package QA/

Then you go on to say that you can always install any package on Debian without considering dependencies.

I don't see where he says anything like that.

That's obviously bullshit. You can use apt pinning in Debian, just as you can in Ubuntu.

He's talking about the releases themselves. Ubuntu picks a major release number of Gnome/KDE/Firefox/LibreOffice/etc, and sticks with it through the entire run of that release. Natty has LibreOffice 3.3.x, and won't ever get LibreOffice 3.4.x in the official channels. Debian, if I'm understanding him right, doesn't force itself to stick with an old branch simply because "that's the version it was released with"

But since Ubuntu is supported for much longer periods of time.

Debian 5.0 (Lenny) was released in February of '09, and will be supported for a little over three years (April '12). Ubuntu supports its regular releases for about a year and a half, desktop LTS for three years, and server LTS for 5 years.

And I really didn't get your joke. You mean Debian is stupid because Ubuntu gets all the cows? I don't agree. Debian is nice. Ubuntu is _really_ nice on ARM. Let's just hope Debian can catch up in that field.

The young bull would reach the cows first, but he'll be too worn out for anything but one quickie. The old bull paces himself, and so has a better experience when he gets there.

Ubuntu is the young bull: it tries so hard to keep pace with the new shiny, but the pressure to release quickly doesn't leave much time for working out the bugs. For days (or even weeks) after every Ubuntu release, it seems like every other Ubuntu-related comment is about how $NEW_VERSION broke something that worked just fine in $OLD_VERSION.
Debian isn't in a rush; it'll upgrade when it is ready, and will be more stable when it does. I was getting pretty antsy about how long sid stayed on KDE 4.4, but it finally moved to 4.6 a few weeks ago. My DE got entirely overhauled, and when it was over...it Just Worked(tm). There were no unresolved dependencies. Nothing was crashing. Compare with Unity. ;-)

Re:Different than Debian how?

[Guspaz]

Yes, Unity runs on ARM already. But it uses OpenGL. ARM-based stuff like the PandaBoard tends to only support OpenGL ES because nobody licenses the OpenGL drivers from Imagination Technologies (only OpenGL ES drivers). This Linaro announcement is of note because they've ported Unity 3D to OpenGL ES.

I've been playing around with Ubuntu 11.04 on a PandaBoard for the past few days, and while most software works, there's a decent chunk of software that is either missing from the armel repositories, or if it's there, it just doesn't work.

But by far the bigger limitation is the complete lack of accelerated 2D support for the PowerVR SGX. The xorg drivers (either omapfb or the pvr drivers) do everything entirely in software. Take FCEUX as an example, since it seems to be the only emulator in the repositories that works (SNES9X runs but won't actually emulate anything). It uses SDL for video output, the only SDL video driver usable is x11, and that means that all your scaling is done in software. Any scaling whatsoever results in choppy uneven framerates, and even unscaled isn't quite perfect.

There's also near-zero hardware accelerated 3D support, because most Linux software uses OpenGL, and the only drivers Imagination Technologies seems to have licensed to anybody are for OpenGL ES.

If only we had either proper OpenGL drivers, or a system-wide OpenGL to OpenGL ES wrapper, then a lot of software would work *MUCH* better. FCEUX, for example, does support OpenGL for hardware scaling...

Ok, I'm old.

[synthesizerpatel]

Back in the day we had reasonably boring X11 interfaces - to date myself I used twm and was pretty happy with it.

Now-a-days the 'future' of both the KDE and Gnome window managers just gives me a headache. Having shit move
all over the screen is annoying, it does not improve my productivity - it reduces the interaction with the computer to
a video game with the goal of 'get your work done!'.

When you're designing UIs, less is more.

* Less movement
* Less jittering icons
* Less mouse-focus auto-magnification
* Less screen flipping and transformation effects
* Less ribbons
* Less blurred and translucent backgrounds

These do look cool but they're not enhancing my 'experience' and they're certainly not helping me get any work done or make a phone call faster.

So quit wasting time with this stuff and go make touch interfaces with some audio feedback so blind people aren't left out on this next generation of handheld technology. Thanks.

Re:Ok, I'm old.

[gl4ss]

visual transitions add delay. it used to be that those were used to fooling the user that the computer was faster than it was, by it doing some shit during the transition, but nowadays even games get loading screens added just for show, not because the delay in loading would be so long as to warrant loading the loading screen. if programs become beggars for your attention for their own benefit, who the fuck has won? does it matter from annoyance standpoint at all how smooth the spamversiment built into the app is about going to their homepage so they could get some nice stats for pumping money? let me tell you what people care on their linux arm ports: DO THE FUCKING 3D ACCEL DRIVERS WORK FOR X? because if they do, of course you can get compiz to work and everything else to work - and if they don't, it's the same state of arm linux as it was a decade ago.

and if program design is dictated by the need to have fancy transitions(it's decided the transitions are there before anything else is) then it's going to be a disaster. now few people might notice but the actual output product from peoples pc use has not changed in the past 14 years or so, text, pictures, publishing, web sites.. the actual work has not changed to anything but the tools have been under constant change, how much usability does that benefit? what's even more problematic that some things have been just right since windows 3.1/ os/2 warp/ x in 1996 - after that it's just a matter of taste and making the tech cheaper. just even calling something a ribbon is a sign of late time fail of thinking of the computer as a magical device, it's not. drag out menus are sometimes ok, sometimes shit, it all depends on how the actual long term work flow with the program would go.

linux on arm could be the same as linux on pc and you could start pumping out arm desktops right away only if you had the fucking drivers - blame chip manufacturers who prefer to target random device manufacturers because it's easier to lie to them than when doing sales that would end up on their own on customer hands(what lies? well, doing in sw what you have in the brochure said you're doing in hw).

and one thing about transitions. you don't need a popup popping up transition IF it's only a few ms it takes for the thing to pop up after the user does whatever causes it to come up, because if it's fast enough your brain catches that it was a direct result of your click that caused the change on the screen even if you weren't focused on that part of the screen, but if it takes too long you lose the cause and effect relationship between the two. the funny thing with this is that if you add mandatory 0.5s fade in or whatever, it makes things worse and seem un-perky(for the lack of a better word).

Re:Damn

[lolcutusofbong]

That's because in the Ubuntu mindset, Compiz = Compositing. Now that several window managers have their own compositing (GNOME 3's WM, Unity, KWin) it can cause collisions. The same thing happens when you try to fullscreen a KVM or QEMU virtual machine with a compositor running.