Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Feb 2009 18:22 UTC
Chip company ARM is prepping to make its move into the netbook market, and now it has shown off a few prototype designs that really show off the benefits of using the ARM platform: thanks to passive cooling, no fans are required, enabling ARM netbooks to be much thinner and lighter than their Intel counterparts. Thanks to ZDNet, we have a nice video overview of these ARM netbooks - as well as a few very tiny ARM desktop machines.
Thread beginning with comment 350556
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[3]: I'm almost excited
by transputer_guy on Wed 25th Feb 2009 05:17
in reply to "RE[2]: I'm almost excited"
Member since:2005-07-08
<
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-41525-136.html
It is built right in to the wall plug!
>
Or just go to Marvell.com
That link is almost as interesting but for a variety of other uses, embedded controllers and what not. The ARM netbox version shown in the article though is a bigger more capable device. If $200 buys a netbook, I wonder what a netbook without the KB & LCD will cost. Thats something I could slap on the back of any monitor. The Marvell link gives a $50-$100 netbox inside the power brick but probably less capable in some way. It is an ARM chip architecture combined with many other PC components on a single SOC (system on a chip). It even says 512MB of DRAM inside, but I bet that is off chip but packaged as bare dice on femto sized board. It has no video, just 1 Gb network and 1 USB2 port, period.
Question
Does Ubuntu/Linux support any of the USB->VGA adapters out there? And if it does, would that only be for a second head rather than the only head?
RE[4]: I'm almost excited
by lemur2 on Wed 25th Feb 2009 05:28
in reply to "RE[3]: I'm almost excited"
Member since:2007-02-17
Or just go to Marvell.com That link is almost as interesting but for a variety of other uses, embedded controllers and what not. The ARM netbox version shown in the article though is a bigger more capable device. If $200 buys a netbook, I wonder what a netbook without the KB & LCD will cost. Thats something I could slap on the back of any monitor. The Marvell link gives a $50-$100 netbox inside the power brick but probably less capable in some way. It is an ARM chip architecture combined with many other PC components on a single SOC (system on a chip). It even says 512MB of DRAM inside, but I bet that is off chip but packaged as bare dice on femto sized board. It has no video, just 1 Gb network and 1 USB2 port, period. Question Does Ubuntu/Linux support any of the USB->VGA adapters out there? And if it does, would that only be for a second head rather than the only head?
Wouldn't it be better to just run VNC on the server brick?
VNC implements a "virtual X" service on the embedded device, such that it actually uses the remote client Xorg server to provide the screen, render the graphics and provide the keyboard and mouse. This is all done via the gigabit ethernet interface, rather than the much slower USB interface.
http://www.tightvnc.com/
"TightVNC is a free remote control software package derived from the popular VNC software. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer."
... Of course, being Linux, you could always just use the command line via ssh ... boring, I know, but it does work.
Edited 2009-02-25 05:31 UTC
RE[3]: I'm almost excited
by steve_s on Wed 25th Feb 2009 20:14
in reply to "RE[2]: I'm almost excited"
Member since:2006-01-16
RE[4]: I'm almost excited
by lemur2 on Thu 26th Feb 2009 00:22
in reply to "RE[3]: I'm almost excited"
Member since:2007-02-17
A bit of research and you'll find that wall-plug computer is based on Marvell's Sheeva platform, which is ARM compatible.
I found plenty of references to the Sheeva platform, but none of them mentioned it being ARM compatible. I had thought it might be ARM based rather than x86 ... but nothing in my quick look actually said so.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2007-02-17
Speaking of which ... here is a server machine, that is also an embedded device, that runs Debian:
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-41525-136.html
It is built right in to the wall plug!
I have no idea what architecture it actually is, but I don't think it is x86.
Anyway ... once you have the basic build environment set up, and you can successfully cross-compile the kernel, then given that Debian is all about having the source code available, it means that all 26,000+ Debian packages should be available to your port almost straight away (once the initial work is done).
That type of thing is the whole POINT of having the source code. One can port it.
Incidentally ... Debian's collection of 26,000+ packages is perhaps the biggest SINGLE collection (as in, all in the one place) of source code on the planet, wouldn't it be?
Edited 2009-02-25 04:02 UTC