[Freedombox-discuss] Ubuntu and Freedom Box?

[Hector Oron]

Hello Melvin,

2010/10/15 Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho at gmail.com>:
> What is the future of Ubuntu with embedded devices? Specifically the
> ARM based Guru Plug and the Sheeva Plug?

Sadly Ubuntu-ARM is unable to run on such devices as it is tunned for
softfp and armv7 instruction sets, which means it runs on at least SoC
based on ARM Cortex CPU. Sheeva and Guru Plugs are based arround
kirkwood CPU which based on armv5 instruction set, so those devices
are supported by Debian-ARM which it is tunned with a more
generic/universal setting (soft/armv4t), but Debian-ARM lacks the
optimizations Ubuntu-ARM has to be of good use on later ARM based
devices. There is an effort to provide a new port for Debian, named
`armhf' which could be faster on newer CPU, also incompatible with
Debian (armel) and Ubuntu (armel) as it is optimized for hard floating
point.

> ARM is now a fully supported architecture in Ubuntu. The ARM ecosystem
> is coming together in something called Linaro, and Canonical is very
> much part of that.

ARM is fully supported by Ubuntu is great news, but, Ubuntu is not
universal and it will not be usable on SoC based arround armv5 cores.

> http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/10/mark-shuttleworth-talks-projcet-harmony-unity-and-more/
>
> Good news?

Thanks for the link, I really enjoyed to see Unity and uTouch in
action. But, again, those UI interfaces are not targetting Guru or
Sheeva Plug servers which are screen-less, but mobile phone and tablet
PC markets.

Best regards,
-- 
 Héctor Orón

"Our Sun unleashes tremendous flares expelling hot gas into the Solar
System, which one day will disconnect us."

-- Day DVB-T stop working nicely
Video flare: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100510.html