Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

EOMA-68 Based KDE Vivaldi Tablet Engineering Boards Ship

Posted by Unknown on from the better-living-through-modular-hardware dept.

sfcrazy writes "Aaron Seigo, a lead KDE developer, says that the ambitious KDE tablet Vivaldi is shipping to the team for quality testing. Seigo writes on his Google+ page, 'A great start to the week with a warm, sunny, quiet Monday. Well, almost quiet. The first Vivaldi tablets, new dual-core engineering boards and the custom EOMA68 developer workbenches we commissioned have all been shipped out. Don't get too excited: the tablets are pre-certification (EC/FCC) and are on their way to us so we can verify the Q/A targets we set out. Still ...'" It looks like long-time reader lkcl's EOMA-68 initiative is working out; in related news the first batch of Allwinner A10 EOMA-68 cards is shipping to the "...20 Free Software developers brave enough to take one of these at this very early phase." Update: 07/23 17:16 GMT by U L : Correction from lkcl: the first batch of EOMA-68 cards are actually using the Allwinner A20, a bit of an upgrade from the original design.

1 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Looks interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I would certainly like a tablet with full Linux support, especially with KDE Plasma. Never heard of the "EOMA-68" standard before, but it looks intriguing . Not sure why they specced 10Mbit ethernet support as mandatory minimum for the CPU card. 10Mbit networks must be very rare these days, and the cheap misers who still operates them are unlikely to purchase a tablet. Am I missing something?

    Well, the big philosophical idea is that ANY EOMA-68 CPU card slots in ANY EOMA-68 machine (note that EOMA is not entirely, or even primarily about tablets -- that's just the first hardware product using it), and works. That's why Luke (aka lkcl) is quite adamant there are no "optional" features in the spec -- the only exception is for interfaces (e.g. USB, 10/100/1000-BASE-T) that can fully autonegotiate in both directions, so that there's neither a slow-machine/fast-cpu-card, nor slow-cpu-card/fast-machine case where it becomes incompatible. So you can have 10-only (not likely, but hey, we'll allow it), 10/100 (likely on low-spec SoCs, or when an SoC has no ethernet, so we fulfill the ethernet requirement with a USB-NIC), or 10/100/1000 (high-spec SoCs).

    As for specific machines that would be apt to need 10Mbit, and fail with a 100/1000 only CPU card -- think of a router for a domestic DSL connection (or a "plug-computer" like pogoplug serving this role. Most DSL modems over a certain age are strictly 10Mbit.... if the standard doesn't require every CPU cards to be able to negotiate down, you'll either need to:
    [A] supply your own 10Mbit NIC (hanging off the USB interface like the Raspberry Pi)
    [B] supply your own 10/100 autonegotiating switch
    (either of those drives up BOM substantially) or
    [C] break compatibility by making it work with only those EOMA-68 CPU cards that happen to support 10Mbit
    (which inevitably frustrates users who try to swap a seemingly-compatible CPU card in, and find it mysteriously stops working...)
    None of those is really winning, agreed? So we either split the standard for plug-computers and everything else (meaning when you upgrade your netbook or tablet, you can no longer slot the old one in a cheap plug-computer to run as e.g. "home server and router"), or we require 10 Mbit as the minimum -- which isn't really hard to meet, anyway...