ARM... Again... Any chance for Puppy on the 25 USD PC?

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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nooby
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#41 Post by nooby »

[quote]Here are some specifications:

* 7-inch (800×480, 16:9) with Resistive Digital Touch Screen
* Screen: 6″ x 3.5″
* Weight: 13oz
* Processor Speed 700MHz
* Operating System Android version 2.1 (Froyo)
* 4 GB Built-in Flash Memory
* Built in 256MB DDR-ll RAM
* Built-in WiFi (802.11 b/g)
* Mini HDMI AV -Out- Jack
* Mini USB to Connect to Computer
* USB Host (Full sized USB Jack)
* Micro SD Card Slot (Support Max. 32GB)
* Built-in Rechargable Battery (up to 6 hours continuous use)
* Built-in Speaker and Microphone
* Supports: Browser, e-Book Reader, e-Mail, Photos, Maps, Video, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Music, Apps, Marketplace, Clock
* 3.5mm Stero Headphone Jack
* 3G Ready (For USB Connection)
* Has a 4 Way Accelerometer

Pros:

* The price is very cheap with great capabilities. I think it’s enough to give you convenient while browsing internet, reading e-book, or just playing music and watching movies.

Cons:

* No Cameras
* No “Multi-Touch
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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Dougal
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#42 Post by Dougal »

qkall wrote:yeah but i read that the second factory shipments were only for orders they couldn't fulfill last time...
You mean the TouchPad? I think it's because they originally hoped to sell a lot, so they had their suppliers make a lot of parts... now the suppliers are stuck with a lot of parts they have nothing to do with, so HP said they'd buy them from them. Note also that HP are not killing WebOS -- they're moving to become more of a SW company (the new CEO is a SW person) -- so this way they actually help spread WebOS... (and the money they lose probably just means paying less taxes)
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Some say your nose
Some say your toes
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8-bit
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#43 Post by 8-bit »

The -25 USD PC is a reality.
It is digital, you wear it on your arm/wrist and it tells time.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Remember how much digital watches cost when they were introduced.

If anything is stopping a 25 USD PC becoming a reality, it is the value suppliers place on the components that go into it and the idea of making a buck.

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Dave_G
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#44 Post by Dave_G »

8-bit,

Although manufactures are always looking to make a quick buck, there
are other economic factors that must be taken into account.
In the case of the ARM CPU, it's slightly different then the case with the x86.
With the x86, Intel not only holds the IP (intellectual property) of the x86,
they also manufacture it.
However the with the ARM, things are slightly different, ARM Holdings plc hold
the IP and license it to manufacturers such as Atmel, Cirrus, Freescale (previously Motorolla),
NXP (previously Philips) and so on.

So these manufactures have to pay royalties to ARM Holdings and also amortize
the tremendous costs of chip design and wafer fabrication.

As we all know, any computer of any description needs RAM.
RAM prices also fluctuate widely depending on supply and demand.
Remember a few years back the cost of DIMMS suddenly shot up?
This was because producers cut back on production during the start
of the recession then when demand exceed supply they got caught with
their pants down and during the "catch up" period costs escalated.

RAM by the way is the most used "peripheral" IC as it's used from everything
from CD/DVD players, to PCs, to Xbox, Playstation, you name it, it uses it.

Make no mistake, prices will come down as more and more manufactures
produce ARM CPUs and thet reach their break even point at the silicon
production foundries.

It's a complicated game this semi-conductor one.

Dave.

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#45 Post by Atle »


Svartalf
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#46 Post by Svartalf »

nooby wrote: 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?
Not really. Code to an earlier version of ARM. Say, ARMv5, for example. As long as you're not trying to do Thumb code, your code will work on pretty much any ARM out there from about the last 4-5 years. Debian's repository has that going on right now.

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#47 Post by Svartalf »

jamesbond wrote:n addition:
- rooting required?
- what to do if bricked?
- JTAG cable ready required?
- serial TTL-converter required?
- soldering skill necessary?
1) No rooting required for R-Pi, Igloo, Gumstix, BeagleBoard, or PandaBoard. All ARMv6 or ARMv7 machines.

2) Really hard to brick these devices. And, in the case of an R-Pi, you yank the SD, re-image, re-insert the SD, and BOOT.

3) No J-TAG required, though serial consoles to help with things ARE there.

4) There's a serial TTL-Converter needed in the case of an R-Pi, but it's a stock thing you can grab from SparkFun and elsewhere- anything you're using for Arduino will work in this case and pretty much all of the solutions are only $15-20US plus what shipping would cost you.

5) There is no soldering skill needed for ANY of the ARM boards I mention...unless you're wanting to add GPIO lines off of it, that sort of thing.

nooby
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#48 Post by nooby »

Svartalf thanks for caring about getting Puppy on an arm cpu.

I am a pessimist so what I wrote was more what happens if one
buy a Surfing tablet pad cheap variety.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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#49 Post by sickgut »

i presume you cant just put the puppy kernel onto ARM, and having said that, whoever develops a puppy for ARM will end up having to fight tooth and nail to get their OS accepted here unless barry himself does it. There will be so many wining people saying its not a puppy because of this or that.....not least of which is the fact the traditional xvesa or xorg with roxfiler and jwm or openbox is way way way too much to ask of the cpu

but the main problem i see is unrealistic expectations of the performance of the hardware.
Do people actually know how slow and i mean slow, not just slow i mean really really really really really S L O W an ARM cpu is?

have a guess.

now let me tell you. Yes i have a extreemly stripped down bare as bare can be debian running on an ARM device. The OS is smaller than Puppy and it loads to a desktop in....
wait for it ..... w a i t .... for .... it..... 3 or 4 minutes. To run gimp, it takes about a minute to load and then its so slow once your in the application that the system cant keep up when you draw a line... it will pause for about 10 secconds then draw part of your line, pause another 5 secconds then draw the last bit of one line.... to write your name will take you maybe 5 or 6 secconds of moving the mouse but the gimp will need about 35 secconds to render it on screen... to run firefox? about 25 secconds you see the OS draw it on the screen but its not usable for about another 20 secconds.

Multitasking? Compiling?
I have been using the http://dead-souls.net mmorpg text adventure game for years and it compiles in about 45 secconds on my AMD 2800+ cpu with 512mb ram. On an ARM tablet with 256mb ram, this takes well over 45 miutes. And dont think that the ram is the bottle neck, as no more than 90mb was used at any one time.

this kind of slowness restricts everything. sure the raspberry has a usb port, but dont be under the impression you will be able to burn cd's at 40x speed. The hdparm figures for disk read and writes to an SD card where less than 1MB a seccond on my ARM device. Yes we are talking 850kbs a seccond.

The console stuff is fine to like ssh into it or whatever, for a webserver its fine, to run a text game server its ok... just dont expect to use it like you do an actual computer with a desktop OS, there is a reason that ARM cpus power the crappy slow android tablets, its because they are crappy and slow and android is still too much for them to run comfortably in alot of cases, certainly slower than puppy on a old computer. If you put puppy on one of these it will be like 10 times slower than the android OS that is completely optimized for ARM cpus.

just my 2 cents

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#50 Post by darkcity »

sickgut wrote:i presume you cant just put the puppy kernel onto ARM, and having said that, whoever develops a puppy for ARM will end up having to fight tooth and nail to get their OS accepted here unless barry himself does it. There will be so many wining people saying its not a puppy because of this or that.....not least of which is the fact the traditional xvesa or xorg with roxfiler and jwm or openbox is way way way too much to ask of the cpu

but the main problem i see is unrealistic expectations of the performance of the hardware.
Do people actually know how slow and i mean slow, not just slow i mean really really really really really S L O W an ARM cpu is?

have a guess.

now let me tell you. Yes i have a extreemly stripped down bare as bare can be debian running on an ARM device. The OS is smaller than Puppy and it loads to a desktop in....
wait for it ..... w a i t .... for .... it..... 3 or 4 minutes. To run gimp, it takes about a minute to load and then its so slow once your in the application that the system cant keep up when you draw a line... it will pause for about 10 secconds then draw part of your line, pause another 5 secconds then draw the last bit of one line.... to write your name will take you maybe 5 or 6 secconds of moving the mouse but the gimp will need about 35 secconds to render it on screen... to run firefox? about 25 secconds you see the OS draw it on the screen but its not usable for about another 20 secconds.

Multitasking? Compiling?
I have been using the http://dead-souls.net mmorpg text adventure game for years and it compiles in about 45 secconds on my AMD 2800+ cpu with 512mb ram. On an ARM tablet with 256mb ram, this takes well over 45 miutes. And dont think that the ram is the bottle neck, as no more than 90mb was used at any one time.

this kind of slowness restricts everything. sure the raspberry has a usb port, but dont be under the impression you will be able to burn cd's at 40x speed. The hdparm figures for disk read and writes to an SD card where less than 1MB a seccond on my ARM device. Yes we are talking 850kbs a seccond.

The console stuff is fine to like ssh into it or whatever, for a webserver its fine, to run a text game server its ok... just dont expect to use it like you do an actual computer with a desktop OS, there is a reason that ARM cpus power the crappy slow android tablets, its because they are crappy and slow and android is still too much for them to run comfortably in alot of cases, certainly slower than puppy on a old computer. If you put puppy on one of these it will be like 10 times slower than the android OS that is completely optimized for ARM cpus.

just my 2 cents
You seriously under estimate what the ARM processor is capable of. Where is your evidence of the Rasberry Pi's speed?

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#51 Post by sickgut »

im refering to my ARM device not particularly the raspberry, i have a 600mhz 7" tablet with android and a 1ghz dual core 10" tablet with android, they both perform very very very very poorly....

sure android runs ok even tho its slow but debian with the lightest matchbox desktop is so incredibly slow, and there is no real decernible difference between to 600mhz and the 1ghz

my previous post is accurate with how long it takes stuff to load and work etc i doubt if i suddenly didnt under estimate the cpu then it would all of a sudden run alot faster :)

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#52 Post by darkcity »

thanks for the info, what ARM chips are in the 7" and 10" tablets (as speed isn't just down to MHz)?

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800 mhz

#53 Post by raffy »

I have tested a tablet with Chinese Rockchip ARM processor at 800 mhz running Android 2.1 and I can't complain about the speed.

And FYI, the reported equivalent speed of the Raspberry PI is P-II 300 mhz, which in my view promises a decent speed (as only software bloat can slow it down). Given Puppy's speed tricks, I trust that respectable speed can be delivered by Linux for the Raspberry PI.
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

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Re: 800 mhz

#54 Post by sickgut »

raffy wrote:I have tested a tablet with Chinese Rockchip ARM processor at 800 mhz running Android 2.1 and I can't complain about the speed.

And FYI, the reported equivalent speed of the Raspberry PI is P-II 300 mhz, which in my view promises a decent speed (as only software bloat can slow it down). Given Puppy's speed tricks, I trust that respectable speed can be delivered by Linux for the Raspberry PI.
lol you "tested" it running android right? not linux?
they all run android ok or they wouldnt be released with it, install debian and try to run a GUI xorg desktop and see how long it takes firefox to load then tell report back.

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Re: 800 mhz

#55 Post by JohnMurga »

sickgut wrote:lol you "tested" it running android right? not linux?
they all run android ok or they wouldnt be released with it, install debian and try to run a GUI xorg desktop and see how long it takes firefox to load then tell report back.
There isn't a need to be so ravenously negative.

Specially when you are probably wrong.

You will find that it will probably run a lot faster on plain Linux than Android, as the Android JIT didn't arrive until 2.2.

Furthermore, I had (still have somewhere), a Neo FreeRunner, and most of the ROMs/distros for it where regular Linux+X+GTK, and where OK ...
Firefox was slow, but then again, what's new ?
I think most used Midori at the time.

Anyway, I was also involved in the Android porting to the FreeRunner, and the last version I got to was 2.1, but it was too slow to be usable and a memory hog.

How tweaked the distro is for HW makes difference too, I didn't have good experiences with Debian either, for example.

I cannot comment on what ARM HW you have, and how good or bad it is, but I have both dual and single core Samsung devices and their performance is good.

I suspect that CPU core clock tells a small part of the story, and the chipset makes a big difference.

I am also thinking that if they can just compile Quake III to the Raspberry Pi and achieve this level of performance I think we'll be OK.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=106

The RISC vc CISC argument is an old one, but some of the newer RISC HW is very impressive.
To the point of even being able to Windows 8 one day.

Cheers
John de Murga

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#56 Post by sickgut »

so what your saying is that my figures are wrong for the linux experiments i have done?
i can upload a video if you like. or is that too negative? maybe if i upload the video and comment through the video saying how good it is, this is positive and the figures will magically change? Just because something runs android ok isnt the same as a full linux desktop its like saying my 486 runs windows 95 ok this means it must run windows 7 ok too

have a look on youtube for debian and flytouch, you can see it working if you like

if puppy is ever made for ARM devices it will not be anything like the puppy that is running on your intel hardware. That being the case the OS will be something different and the puppy label attached to it even tho maybe the boot screen has a dog on it and the wall paper be puppy themed, that is about as puppy as it will be. I cant speak for the raspberry as i havent used it im only talking about the android tablet devices

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#57 Post by JohnMurga »

sickgut wrote:so what your saying is that my figures are wrong for the linux experiments i have done?
I have no idea how you conducted your experiments or what the hardware was like, however, I would guess it was not this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MErL7FslBjU

Bare in mind, this is bloaty Ubuntu running at the same time as Android, over VNC.
So that kinda levels out the RAM and Core advantage the HW has over the Raspberry Pi.

Anyway, I assume your dual core 10" device was not a Galaxy Tab as you are in OZ, so that proves the point that all ARM HW is not made equal.
sickgut wrote:i can upload a video if you like. or is that too negative? maybe if i upload the video and comment through the video saying how good it is, this is positive and the figures will magically change? Just because something runs android ok isnt the same as a full linux desktop its like saying my 486 runs windows 95 ok this means it must run windows 7 ok too
I think must be reading the wrong thread ...
Did anyone say that ?
sickgut wrote:if puppy is ever made for ARM devices it will not be anything like the puppy that is running on your intel hardware. That being the case the OS will be something different and the puppy label attached to it even tho maybe the boot screen has a dog on it and the wall paper be puppy themed, that is about as puppy as it will be. I cant speak for the raspberry as i havent used it im only talking about the android tablet devices
I can understand you deciding the exercise is not worth your time.

However, I think it'll work quite well and be pretty similar.

And I was looking for talented devs to help.

I guess you won't be one of them :-(

Cheers
John de Murga

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#58 Post by sickgut »

the video you linked to is of the most high end arm device you can get, the guy actually says that firefox is too slow, also did you notice just how long it takes to simply open a terminal? on any pc capable of running puppy it is instant, imagine your system being so slow that it takes 5 secconds to open a terminal, then imagine what that means for your other applications.... now try multitasking with your web browser running 5 windows, playing an mp3, chatting on facebook and downloading something in the background.....
then try opening a pdf file.... your system will completely stop. there is a reason android doesnt let you easily do more than 1 thing at once without alot of messing around, its because the devices simply cant do it. The device in the clip was a high end dual core system... this is best case scenareo as for as the hardware goes... sure you can sli m down the OS... just dont expect to be able to use it like a home computer

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#59 Post by JohnMurga »

sickgut wrote:There is a reason android doesnt let you easily do more than 1 thing at once without alot of messing around, its because the devices simply cant do it. The device in the clip was a high end dual core system... this is best case scenareo as for as the hardware goes... sure you can sli m down the OS... just dont expect to be able to use it like a home computer
Again, I obviously watched a different video to you.

And all things considered it was a fraction of what we want to achieve.

Android on that video is :

+ Running all the Ubuntu crap.
+ Running all the Android crap.
+ Running VNC.
+ And then running what he was demoing.

You really are a broken record, and I do have to wonder why.

In my house we have a Nexus One and two galaxies, and they all multi-task pretty well ... But I guess we didn't buy the cheapest HW we could.

Either way, this'll give you an idea of exactly how much those "high end" CPUs cost :
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11 ... gra_2.html

Not quite the same as a x86 CPU ...
But we'll be fine running something like Puppy on the RaspberryPi.

And if we are not, I am sure you'll be the first to say that you told me so.

Obviously you are very unhappy about your ARM based HW.

I happens to everyone.

I am sorry.

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John de Murga

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#60 Post by sickgut »

re: making a puppy for android slates.

im a broken record because ive allready done this, ive spent the time to make an OS that is actually smaller than Puppy and run it on an ARM device and a bunch of people are telling me that im wrong when im reporting on the performance. And the people telling me have not even made the OS yet and they are telling me how wrong I am, well if you dont want to listen to someone who has already made what you intend to make and has already tested it inside and out then there really is no point at all me saying anything.

if this OS actually was usable then i would have released it months ago and the only reason it isnt usable is because its so slow, and if released as a puppy it would give puppy a very bad name.

Before there is a slew of remarks about how crap my skills must be to make an OS that is so slow, please know that for a long time i have been setting up debian linux to be similar in speed and size to puppy. I am using debian because i know more about that than i do Puppy. My Pussy linux which is a debian that tried to work in the same way and contain the same apps as Puppy has been a success and it is actually faster than Puppy if you load from a live cdrom and compare the 2 OSes. The same things I used to attain this kind of speed i have used in my debian ARM experiments., i am not a newbie at this.

i havent made an OS for the raspberry, only for my android tablets and i can only comment on those. One of them is the superpad 2 or flytouch 3 with 1ghz cpu.and 512mb ram. you commented that you dont buy the absolute cheapest hardware, but this is a thread about running linux on a 25 USD computer, that is a buget ARM device it isnt a $300 or whatever galaxy slate.

from what i understand the raspberry has a decent gpu and this can run games, thats fine. Other games devices have an ARM cpu such as the nintendo ds. Its a different story when you use the same systems to run linux. The raspberry has a ARM cpu that i s said to be similar in performance to a PII300, well the playstation 2 also has a CPU that is similar in performance to that, and running linux on it is a terrible experience.

Altho good performance can be achieved from the ARM cpu such as what we see in gaming devices, it is only attained via the absolute optimization of everything. The game itself always talks to the cpu at the most low basic level. As soon as you put layers and layers between the running program and the CPU via the use of a multitasking OS like linux, you loose performance immediately and drastically. Android is optimized for the ARM, but even if you compile a normal linux like debian or whatever maybe puppy, yeah sure it works on the ARM but it isnt optimized for it in the same way that Android is.

if you built puppy with an android kernel, then yeah maybe you could get around some of the performance issues. I think your best bet is customize your android to be more like puppy or wait till there is a new linux kernel that performs well on ARM devices.

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