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Canonical Helps Launch A Snap Store For The Orange Pi Community (ubuntu.com)
"Developers can distribute their applications packaged as snaps to Orange Pi owners," explains a new blog post from Canonical, bragging that "hackers and tinkerers can install complex IoT and server projects in seconds." An anonymous reader quotes Ubuntu's Insights blog:
Orange Pi maker Shenzhen Xunlong Software Co. Ltd is launching an app store in partnership with Canonical to foster an active community of developers and users. Through this app store, developers gain a simple mechanism to share their applications, projects and scripts between themselves and with the wider Orange Pi community...
With snaps developers can distribute their application in a secure, confined package bundled with all its dependencies, so users can install applications that could take half an hour to install in just a few seconds. The Orange Pi App Store uses the whitelabel app store offering from Canonical, which lets them distribute applications to the Orange Pi community under its own brand. The store is a place for developers to share their Orange Pi specific applications. It also benefits from the wealth of applications available in the Ubuntu snap store, also available through the store.
Are there any Slashdot readers who are actually using snaps? Or -- for that matter -- are there any Slashdot readers developing with the Orange Pi?
With snaps developers can distribute their application in a secure, confined package bundled with all its dependencies, so users can install applications that could take half an hour to install in just a few seconds. The Orange Pi App Store uses the whitelabel app store offering from Canonical, which lets them distribute applications to the Orange Pi community under its own brand. The store is a place for developers to share their Orange Pi specific applications. It also benefits from the wealth of applications available in the Ubuntu snap store, also available through the store.
Are there any Slashdot readers who are actually using snaps? Or -- for that matter -- are there any Slashdot readers developing with the Orange Pi?
Orange Pi maker Shenzhen Xunlong Software Co. Ltd
Why is Slashdot becoming a shillfest of Chinese crapware?
Done many things with the Orange Pis. If you use Armbian or buildroot they are nice devices. Do not use the official OS images, they have serious problems (some are so bad that simply nothing happens when you try to boot).
Editors: Edit, FFS !
I recently picked up an Orange Pi Zero due mainly to price and availability, just to tinker with. After some initial struggles I got Armbian running on it and some other basic software - the Java Dev Kit and Tomcat to be specific, although once you have some sort of Linux box (Windows also available) you can obviously set it up in whatever way you like.
While competing mainly with the Raspberry Pi "ecosystem", the Orange Pi "ecosystem" lacks a lot in terms of support (official and community). Official support is all but nonexisting - needs a lot of googling and trial&error to find the right pin outs, ampere requirements, where to find (working) OS and other packages, etc. etc. etc. (in unambiguous, complete and standard English). In short, not really hitting the mark for a cheap system where a complete noob can learn about computers and programming easily. At least Raspberry has some momentum behind it in that regard.
Both the Raspberry and Orange Pi user communities have a lot of potential to spew ill-informed "help" by users with more enthusiasm than knowledge - the RPi community being so much larger.
Can't really comment on the quality of the hardware. My sample size of one, with only anecdotal testing, seems to run along fine - so far. I'm still in two minds if I would continue with the Orange Pi if I wanted to develop some more serious (semi-commercial) IoT device on it.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
To declare interest, I'm a big Raspberry Pi fan and user.
However, I see this as another attempt to build a walled garden (small wall, admittedly) by creating 'snaps'. I'm not sure how these will differ from Debian packages, for example and Debian packaging is arguably more 'universal'. I currently use Ubuntu Mate on Pi3 and it's pretty good. But, unhappily, I'm now going to start watching Canonical for signs that it wishes to be the Microsoft of Linux.
For complex, autonomous applications (as opposed to apps, whatever they are, only joking before someone tells me) easier just to supply a complete image, anyway, like some of the media centre offerings.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Can't really comment on the quality of the hardware
I have a few of these (just purchased a couple of OPi-lite) and they seem to be just as good, hardware-wise, as the Raspberry. I also have a few NanoPi Neo's and the same applies to them.
If either of these two suppliers had software and the support for it, that matched the build quality of their hardware, they would be right up there with the RPi in terms of adoption, popularity and units sold. That is the RPi's only real advantage: its community of volunteers and the ecosystem those volunteers have built around the hardware.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
There is almost no documentation available that details the workings of the Orange Pi. This device cannot be compared to Raspberry Pi in any way, save for the name.
The official Orange Pi - images are total fucking crapshoot, being so bad they make even your mum's cameltoe look appealing in comparison! It's not the availability of apps that is the problem, it's the support for the boards and all of their features, including Mali-drivers, or the closed, undocumented WiFi-chips, and so on that is the problem! Xunlong ain't doing shit to help get drivers mainlined in the kernel, they just produce a shitty image that barely boots and then hope the community will do all the hard work for them.
So, what's the point with these "snaps?" How do they make the situation any better? Oh, they don't? Weeellll...
This amounts to building the Great Wall of China around Linux. Canonical ought to be ashamed of itself for hopping in bed with what is essentially a closed-source implementation of Linux. There is little or no documentation or support for the hardware, and even the "official" distribution packages only barely work.
Used to think Canonical was the one positive Linux had going for it. A well known corporation that could extend Linux onto several platforms. Now I see the company is just out for itself and creating several opportunities to advance its own interests. Much like Google has, I don't like open source being used as a means to create a walled garden. Google did it with Android and more specifically Chrome OS and Canonical has certainly taken Ubuntu on a path that mirrors a proprietary OS in many ways. Orange Pi is just another flavor of this.
Its not a walled garden - its a way to give your custom ARM board a custom app store. Custom ARM boards have a lot of hardware dependencies, and to compile for every option with enough RAM and flash/SSD disk space is time consuming on the board itself and you may easily fail. Instead, if it is pre-compiled for your board, and lets assume the board is a weeny camera IoT device, then you can just download from the snap store ready to run apps. Ubuntu hosts snap stores and you can create your own store there, or you can host your own, the hosting software is free.
Potentially every little $5 ARM board capable of running Linux will now be able to have their own app store thanks to snap, and not just your smartphones and their appstores like google play, which are hugely popular.
I have two OrangePiLite's, have tried many distros, including the ones on the OrangePi website. The only built in network connection is the wifi, and it works on precisely zero of the distros I tried.
A distro where the wifi actually works, and where dragged windows don't sporadically vanish would be welcome.
John_Chalisque
I recently purchased a few rpi 3 for myself and a couple friends and before we bought them we looked at the banana/orange pi and odroid they had a little better specs but the rpi community is what sold us.
I'm glad we chose the rpi because each problem we ran into and there were a couple all it took was quick look on the rpi forum and I was able to find the fix immediately.
I started using an Orange Pi Plus 2 for a project I was working on several months ago and have been using it as main computer ever since. In fact, I'm writing this post right now using it :).
It's not quite as fast as a laptop, but for my purposes (text editing in vim, schematic layout with Kicad, 2D CAD drawing with librecad, controlling a server with ssh, and looking up documentation on the internet with Firefox running Ublock Origin) it works quite well.
The big advantage of single-board computers like the OPi+2 is the GPIO pins. It makes programming microcontrollers and serial communication easy.
I originally tried doing all this using a Raspberry Pi 3, but found the OPi+2 to be much more useable and faster. The OPi+2 has twice as much RAM compared to the RPi3 and 16 Gb of eMMC storage.
I'm using Armbian for my OS. It's is a much better distribution than the RPi3's Raspbian, IMHO--more secure, less buggy, and more polished.
I haven't had that much difficulty getting things to work. The Armbian site is really well documented, and the forums there have answered every question I've had. Documenation and forums on the Orange Pi site is not nearly as good.
I think the next board I'll try will be the OrangePi+2E. It has one less USB port, but the three remaining ports are directly connected to the processor (not through a bus) for faster throughput. It's slightly smaller in size and cost less, too.
Does every snap package load only its own libraries increasing ram usage? And then multiple versions of libraries you can't individually update may have flaws and exploits that you have to rely on someone to update the snap package every time one of the components is updated?
Twinstiq, game news
...Can we please not use Linux and IoT in the same sentence. Linux is a wonderful OS. Most IoT devices are a world apart from what Linux needs to live. Most IoT devices are limited to 8k or 16k. That was not a typo - EIGHT KILOBYTES! Even if these little devices have an ARM M0/3, they do not have a memory manager. Many IoT devices have real time requirements and as blazing fast as Linux may be, it was just not architected to meet hard real requirements. Real world, mass produced product are under such extreme cost and/or battery constraints that pennies matter when selling at Home Depot or Target against $13 alternatives. Real world product have to live with one little processor to run the entire RF stack (BLE, etc) AND run the application, all of this in say 8k. Sure, there are exceptions such as smart phones, but how many millions of people are going to pay $800 for a thermostat (a few nest customers excepted).
/Rant Mode off
There is certainly a place for tiny Linux based computers in IoT home projects and as mini PCs and servers, as Orange Pi's home pages suggest. They are an amazing amount of technology for the money, just not scaleable.
They're faster than comparable Raspberry Pi units since they don't put all their peripherals through a slow, shared USB 2.0 bus. There's also more variety in the different boards, some of which have working WiFi/BlueTooth and on-board flash memory. There are several tiny versions of the board, too, including a SODIMM one with peripheral board and very tiny versions with ethernet and I/O ports on it.
There are already two 64-bit boards that actually run in 64-bit, unlike the Raspberry Pi 3.
Unfortunately, unless you're using Android, the accelerated graphics chipset isn't available in some distributions. The web site http://linux-sunxi.org/ has more information.
The Armbian project at http://www.armbian.com/ is actively developing on these units.
Kriston