[ARMedslack] Slackware ARM on Raspberry Pi

[dowelld at netscape.net]

On May 2, 2013 13:27 "Thorsten Mühlfelder" <thenktor at salixos.org> wrote:

rich at rpi-17:~$ uname -a
Linux rpi-17 3.6.11+ #408 PREEMPT Wed Apr 10 20:33:39 BST 2013 armv6l 
ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l) BCM2708 GNU/Linux

also see http://imageshack.us/a/img849/863/screenshot0316201309191.png

Looks nice, but it is damn slow when used as desktop, isn't it?

That's a moot point. The Raspberry pi was never intended to be a desktop machine it is a toy computer for children to learn programming and electronic interfacing on. It also depends on what you mean by desktop, if you mean desktop environment, the there are many to chose from. I would not recommend running KDE on a Raspberry pi but xfce is pretty nippy once it has loaded (on start up things like gpg-agent run in the background soaking up 100 cpu., This can be turned off if you wish). Speed is also affected by the raspberry pi's use of SD card storage, you may find you have periods of high iowait caused by kswapd and mmcd, This can be addressed by turning off journaling and access time writes to SDcard etc.
All in all the Raspberry pi is a neat bit of 'off the shelf' kit that has great potential for use in not only in education but also home automation and building cool gadgets like media centers, wifi internet radios etc, etc.



_______________________________________________
ARMedslack mailing list
ARMedslack at lists.armedslack.org
http://lists.armedslack.org/mailman/listinfo/armedslack

I'm using it as an headless appliance to provide remote support to customers, so I'm not using it in any kind of desktop role.
For what I'm using it as it's a great little cheap box, doing sterling work as a protocol bridge.
Our customers love that it basically extends our support structure right inside of their infrastructure, making passing stuff to us as easy as anything they do on their own systems.

Looking at it from the declared aims of the foundation, I'm not sure their project is ontrack to deliver anything like what they set about it delivering. Which is why I stopped bothering to contribute to their site.
It seems to have been taken over by hobbyists who all know how to make it be a media server, or a home automation device.
The community has become filled with those people who have already done the work for the targeted audience.

But then I think people are inherently lazy, if a pre-existing solution exists, which does what that person wants, then they'll use that solution rather than go and write one themselves.
FOSS pretty much proves that beyond any doubt. Slackware undoubtedly proves it beyond any doubt, many slackers could build from scratch but we all like what Pat (@ team (not excluding any of the rest of you Stuart)) did, so we don't bother doing it ourselves.

I can't help feeling the hobbyist community which has grown up around the Pi has pretty much ruled out kids bothering to learn with it, they'll just use the hobbyists stuff on their Pis.
Now if the hobbyist community had been about "here's how you could make it into a ..." instead of "here's an image which makes it a ..." then they might have had something.

If you can accept (and work around) its limitations (like 22 hours for a full build on a single Pi (distcc is a wonderful bit of kit :-) ), then it's a very capable little box, well worth the money.

Thanks
Dave

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.armedslack.org/pipermail/armedslack/attachments/20130502/4c0e8ffc/attachment.html>