[ubuntu-uk] Raspberry Pi

[Bruno Girin]

On 29/02/12 20:45, Steve Pearce wrote:
> <snip>

> Unity is such a fresh and exciting environment to study and use. I 
> imagine kids would get excited about it on looks alone. It's so much 
> classier than what they're used to seeing on their smartboards.

Totally agree!

>
> Imagine if Unity could be optimized to run well on the such low-end 
> hardware. Or if that's not realistic then consider a new window 
> manager that takes all of the design principles of the Unity desktop 
> but strips out a lot of the integration so as to improve performance. 
> It would be king!

Unity 2D should run on low spec hardware. It runs fine on my old Celeron 
based laptop so should be OK on the Pi :-)

Unity 3D is probably more of a challenge because it relies on hardware 
acceleration. The Broadcom chip on board has a decent GPU but the API is 
proprietary. However, I'm sure that with support from the Raspberry Pi 
foundation, who have been designing the Pi with Broadcom and have a 
licensing agreement with them, it would be possible.

>
> Unfortunately porting platforms to different architectures and 
> developing window managers is way out of my range of understanding 
> currently, but it's something I'm keen to learn about :-)

It all depends on the language you're using. If you're using an 
interpreted language, there's no difference (well, not too much). The 
complexity comes when using a compiled language as you need to cross 
compile. And of course, you need to test in an emulator or on the device 
rather than direct on your dev box. See this blog post for an idea of 
what is involved:
http://balau82.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/using-ubuntu-arm-cross-compiler-for-bare-metal-programming/

Cheers,

Bruno