(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Sorry my poor English makes me come through as more critical than what I really am.

Trust me on this. I am as eager as you are to get Puppy or something that works as we are used to as puppy works and I do want it on all these cheap and also expensive versions of ARM surf pads whatever name to give them.

But although I can be wrong and I do hope that I am wrong but I have seen no evidence that I am wrong.

Puppy forum simply have no Dev that seems interested to spend all that time and effort needed for that to get done.

So what can we do. I am not good at suggesting work arounds.

1. Debian seems to be a good choice. Them already have experience of ARM for their OS. So that is one route.

2. The "Hackers" or what name to give them. Those that "root" Smartphones. Them know a lot about how to make ROM versions that works a bit like Puppy in that them allow that one have Admin access to things that the Devs of that OS did not want people to have.

so them are in some way almost there? are them not?

And the industry do seem to tolerate them too. Some are against it but some realize it is almost impossible to stop?

So these guys has the knowledge that our Devs lack.

Now I ran out of imagination. Now it is your turn

so trust me I may sound as a Nasty Nay sayer but I am all for what you want too but one ahve to see reality as it is?

I agree. I t might not be the thing to go further than checking out the respond.

And its seems possible and impossible.

I am not sure what to say now either:-)

Slackware ARM to help Puppy ARM

Puppy is light and efficient, just like ARM.
I expect to be running Puppy on an ARM device next year.
The year after that I expect to be running Android Apps in Puppy

However that is an expectation, not a given . . .
I think I would prefer a complete tablet to a miniature motherboard . . .
The motherboard might be the start . . .

There is a process of development . . .

When the motherboards are out, buy two and send one to your favourite puppy developer. How can they resist . . .

Meanwhile in 2011 at IFA in Germany, Apple suppresses Samsung
- (free advertising anyone)

But the tablet market has changed in recent months," especially in Asia where Apple is less dominant, Pallenberg told AFP, pointing out that a Chinese model is available there for only 70 euros ($100)

Here is a message for our Chinese capitalist comrades
Make phone - bigger - call it tablet - sell cheap.

hi all

It would be nice to see a puppy arm but I can see at least 1 problem everybody would have to have similar/the same hardware to dev/test/use it on. The rate of change in these devices and their affordability/availability worldwide would make this nigh on impossible at the moment. I think it would be wise to wait for the industry standard to emerge first, remember betamax.

hope this helps
don

I fear a port to ARM will not be so easy.

On the x86, Intel has kept code compatibility from the 8088 all the way
up to the latest generation CPUs.
I fear that this will not be the case with the ARM.
Already there are several ARMs, the 9, the 10 etc etc and almost all
semiconductor manufactures are making an ARM processor of some description and I'll bet they are not all compatible.

The other reason for the success of the x86 is that IBM created a standard
for the motherboard based on the x86 and this was pretty much kept.
By this I mean that no matter what mobo you have (even today), all the
resources external to the cpu are compatible and indeed all in the right place
as far as physical addresses, interrupts, data buses go.

I can't see all those far eastern manufactures all trying to make things
next to nothing bothering to keep compatibility when it might cost an extra
buck or two.

So until the ARM market becomes more mature, it would be a pure waste
of time to try and have a serious go at porting anything to ARM.
Yes sure there have been some projects but what boards do they support and how widely available are they and for how long before things change again?

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see more Linux ports to ARM but I suspect
this is still somewhat down the road.

We ran Sun java based windowing systems
http://www.tmxxine.com/p3/p6.html

We were sweeter than sugar
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2746872300.html

We have had two hardware manufacturers that provided Puppy built in, that I remember .
One was a thin client. It was small. It was nice. Barry was sent one. It was a bit too expensive.

At the right price, everyone might be tempted . . .
and Puppy can recommend/support/optimise a specific hardware platform.

Give us the Dog and we will provide the Woof

There are so many aspects to this that I don't even know where to begin.
Let me just put one aspect - a $25 device will perform just like how much $25 is worth. Decoding 1080p? Of course not. Serving files over Gbps LAN? Of course not. Playing youtube? Of course not.
Can ARM devices do all that? Of course. But not at $25 price point. And not when running on AA battery either.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=152

What you’re seeing in the video is the Raspberry Pi running h.264 video at 1080p. (We didn’t have the audio hooked up so we could talk to people while it was running.) At the point this video was taken, this demo had been running for about 8 hours. I was busily getting attendees to feel the SoC, to emphasise the fact that it only draws 1W, staying surprisingly cool.

http://www.arm.com/products/processors/ ... ctures.php

ARM uses the Universal Assembly Language to provide a canonical form for all ARM and Thumb instructions. This allows the user to write assembly code which can be assembled for either instruction set.

i obviously have some reading to do... but i'm confused i kinda thought the purpose of t2 and/or woof was to get rid of these compatibility issues?

qkall wrote:i obviously have some reading to do... but i'm confused i kinda thought the purpose of t2 and/or woof was to get rid of these compatibility issues?

But was not that still within x86 or what it is named. Intel CPU that was the one that puppy always have worked on. While ARM is a totally other beast.

For to get ARM to work you need Debian them have code for some of the ARM. I don't know if them have for every version of ARM.

How many ARM cpus are there ? more than 10 or so and all of them different enough for one Dev to get headache?
And them change them each six months or so don't they?

To quote nooby:

How many ARM cpus are there ? more than 10 or so and all of them different enough for one Dev to get headache?
And them change them each six months or so don't they?

That is not the only problem, who is to say that all other resources such as
VGA, HDMI, RAM, USB, etc etc are all at the same locations on all the boards.

It would be impossible to code anything worthwhile if these along with the actual CPUs are not "standardized".

Dave_G wrote:To quote nooby:

How many ARM cpus are there ? more than 10 or so and all of them different enough for one Dev to get headache?
And them change them each six months or so don't they?

That is not the only problem, who is to say that all other resources such as
VGA, HDMI, RAM, USB, etc etc are all at the same locations on all the boards.

It would be impossible to code anything worthwhile if these along with the actual CPUs are not "standardized".

In addition:
- rooting required?
- what to do if bricked?
- JTAG cable ready required?
- serial TTL-converter required?
- soldering skill necessary?
Not showstoppers but definitely not for the casual hobbyists (which most of puppy Devs are).

And add the fact that while ARM itself is open and well-documented, other hardware resources mentioned by Dave_G above, are usually not (DSP, video, audio, networking, etc). How then could Linux ARM ever work on it? The same reason nvidia/ati proprietary driver works - binary blobs.

Can't this be overcome? Don't we see a lot of "mods" by other people, building custom ROMs and such? Yes, of course - as I said, this isn't a showstopper for a dedicated, motivated hardcore hacker. But if one is hardcore hacker, one doesn't hang around in Puppy forums fixing shell scripts ... (no disrespect intended, I'm one of those shell-script fixers too )
EDIT: typo and grammar

James Bond is right. There are hackers out there that love to do their own ROM that one can download and exchage the custom ROM with.

That way one can get access to the innards and use apps that are made by community of such hackers.

Jailbreaking or what it is named. I admire their skills but not being that savvy I realize that to get a Puppy on a Surf pad tablet type of computer one need to be at least as savvy as them are?

There is standardization within the ARM processor.

In this case ARMv6

Will it run <insert name of program here>?
In general, you need to look to see whether the program you want can be compiled for the ARMv6 architecture. In most cases the answer will be yes. Specific programs are discussed on our forum, so you might want to look there for an answer.

People are talking like an ARM computer has never been built before.

What Linux distros will be supported at launch?
Debian, Fedora and ArchLinux will be supported from the start. We hope to see support from other distros later. We will be selling SD cards with the distros preloaded. (Sept 4 2011 – originally, this FAQ suggested that Ubuntu would be supported. Because of issues with newer releases of Ubuntu and the ARM processor we are using, Ubuntu can’t commit to support Raspberry Pi at the moment.)

Good News ?

Bodhi say them are doing Archos ARM

http://bodhilinux.com/

Bodhi is coming to ARM! Our first alpha release is ready for ArchOS Gen8 tablets. Learn more here

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... pha-1.html
so what does that mean?

Bodhi is a form of Debian. I am in it now on Acer D250 which has an Intel Atom CPU N270

so one can learn about it using a usb with grub2 on it and boot it.

A well known? thing are these "Hackers" or "Jailbreakers" that create their own ROM that them load into the hardware and that way get access to the innards of a computer product that usually are locked to an Operator's way to decide what should be available and when.

The good thing is that you get choice. You have two options instead of one or maybe three or more if many such "Hackers" are at it for that model you bought.

Usually on Mobile Phones but Tablets also have been hacked.

Read more about one of the successful such organization.
http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/the ... ough-guide

For a list of devices officially supported by CyanogenMod, check out the official CyanogenMod page.

Such is the craze for CyanogenMod, that devices that aren’t officially supported, still manage to receive ports of the ROM courtesy of enthusiasts and developers.

CyanogenMod is said to offer the most barebone Android experience coupled with some very powerful tweaks.
This whole package by now is not wholly developed by CyanogenMod developers alone,
but is a collaborative effort between them and independent developers
on sites like XDA-Developers.

An example?

Nook Color rooted

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 0b6#542991

I bought a Nook Color tablet and it only took 30 minutes to Root it with CyanogenMod v7.

By the way... the Nook is awesome for just $250

7 inch multi-touch
ARM 8 Cortex cpu
512MB ram
OpenGL v1.0, 1.1 and v2.0 support
Wifi
Bluetooth
microUSB port
upto 32GB of microSD card supported.



After that it was easy to install Ubuntu 10.10 in a chroot.

But the Nook only has 512MB of ram and I'd really like to get Puppy Linux running on it.

Both Ubuntu & Debian can be installed on ARM based tablets.

Has anyone yet figured out how to put Puppy Linux on a tablet in a chroot?

Also Bodhi Linux which is a Debian derivative? can be used on ARM them claim.

Speaking of ARM devices... for those who missed the $99 HP TouchPad sale, this also seems like a decent device that's really cheap.

yeah but i read that the second factory shipments were only for orders they couldn't fulfill last time...