Raspberry Pi

[curaga]

Heh, the Via APC preorder sold out within a day. Well, at least they're still saying that volume availability is in July, let's see if that slips too like the Pi.

[hiro]

As long as the pi has driven the *ridiculous* price of these boards/small ARM|x86 pc's down then it's done us all a huge favor.

Strange, my first small ARM (a Seagate dockstar) was pretty cheap years ago. Bought it for 20 Euros.
Also I bought a toshiba ac100 for 100 Euros used.
All that the pi people have been doing so far is talking. They certainly didn't produce high enough volumes to bring any prices down.

[spence91]

As long as the pi has driven the *ridiculous* price of these boards/small ARM|x86 pc's down then it's done us all a huge favor.

Strange, my first small ARM (a Seagate dockstar) was pretty cheap years ago. Bought it for 20 Euros.
Also I bought a toshiba ac100 for 100 Euros used.
All that the pi people have been doing so far is talking. They certainly didn't produce high enough volumes to bring any prices down.

You're adept at finding a bargain, but you'll have to admit that the RRP of both those products are nowhere near that of the PI. I'm not familair with the dockstar but a quick Google suggests the RRP is something like £66? And the AC100 was an eye-watering £300 when you could get EEEpc's for less.

Remember also that the PI foundation is a non-profit charitable organisation who's purpose is to provide cheap hardware for educational purposes. They had to get the boards printed in China because it would have sent the price up getting them printed in the UK, which is probably the reason for the delay in shipping. Before the PI it was hard to find something so capable for £20.

Now that it's been released VIA have released a small, cheap and capable board at a similar price and hopefully others will knock down their prices too.

[hiro]

my point is that good will aside there are other things more important for a successful product. they are around, competition stays around and I'm positive we'll get even more useful devices in the future

[spence91]

...So I tried initially just to rip out the kernal from a debian distro that was already available and then roll up the basic utils and then all the scripts from an x86 version of TCL core.gz... err, that didn't work so well.

Has there been any discussion about rolling out a core.gz from scratch? Obviously because it's a different arch I can't just add to core.gz, and the source directories don't have any makefiles or scripts that I can look at.....

[curaga]

From my POV TC is the scripts and the philosophy: less about the exact components. Thus one could have a TC port based on uclibc/toybox, etc.

[thane]

A person at my office just got a Raspberry Pi. It'll be interesting to see what he does with it, but as far as I know it won't involve TCL.

[stunix*com]

well, things with the pi are really speeding up, Ive just taken delivery of my second stu-rl.eu/pi01, just as they lift the 1 per applicant restriction.  The pi is a natural platform for TC and from my in experience, a quick look at the pi bootloader and the usual "arm" compilations, I really don't think it would take much. 

 

[tinypoodle]

Any plans for a TC port to Raspberry Pi?

After doing a bit of research and particularly finding this:

Slackware ARM (formally ARMedslack) version 13.37 and later runs on the Raspberry Pi without modification.

conclusion is that maybe "port to Raspberry Pi" could be replaced by "port to ARM"

[hiro]

different ARM versions have different instruction sets... you'd want armv5, armv6, armv7,...

[tinypoodle]

different ARM versions have different instruction sets... you'd want armv5, armv6, armv7,...

Reading up more I come to understand that a separate kernel would be required for each system, but userland could be one (with a minimum arch).

[curaga]

Yes, but the advantages of a higher minimum arch than v6 (of the pi) are big (5-20% IIRC). Add to that how limited the pi is, it doesn't make sense to target anything less than v7 with neon and hard float IMHO.

[roberts]

FWIW, I have received my Pi. I have been preparing a Core root filesystem. I now have micro Core booting "scatter mode" from both Qemu and the actual Pi. Still early stage. Still evaluating...

The Pi seems to be controversial as some love it and some think it is a joke. I will note that it is very underpowered and its price is no bargain once you add the cost of a case and its own power supply. There are now many alternate more powerful low cost systems available. Think Allwinner.

 

[spence91]

I've had mine being a small torrent & rsync server for backups to NFS. Not done anything else in terms of trying to get TCL on it.

Would be keen to test the system if you wanted to make it available :-)

...I have to disagree on the case and power supply - the original packaging can be your case (I've got mine hanging off a hook in a sunglasses cloth carry case) and a power source is going to set you back £2.50 at the most if you don't already have a 5V phone charger already.

[curaga]

I wouldn't trust a generic chinese usb charger to be stable 24/7. CE is just a sticker nowadays.