[ubuntu-uk] Ubuntu Plans

[Colin Law]

On 7 March 2012 13:49, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 March 2012 13:38, Alan Pope <alan.pope at canonical.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 07/03/12 13:33, Colin Law wrote:
>>> Out of interest, in what way is it not open?
>>
>> It needs a binary blob for the GPU and to boot apparently. They also
>> "only" licensed the h.264 and one other codec bundle from broadcom for
>> that blob. So only certain video files will play back accelerated. So
>> it wouldn't do for a FreeView set top box, but would be good for
>> playing back pre-recorded/downloaded h.264 encoded video.
>
> Broadcom bought up the rump of what was Acorn Computers. Acorn
> designed and developed the ARM chip.
>
> (Interestingly, after Acorn was split up and sold off, the rump
> renamed itself "Element 14". This is now a trading name for Farnell,
> one of the distribution partners for Rpi.)
>
> Broadcom still employs Sophie Wilson, who (back when she was called
> Roger) designed the ARM chip, BBC BASIC and much of the BBC Micro.
>
> Rpi is basically a Broadcom GPU and video-decoder chip with a small,
> basic ARM CPU added in one corner. It's a very proprietary device and
> so are the Linux drivers.
>
> Something nobody is giving any attention to is that Linux is not the
> only OS for Rpi. It will also come with Acorn RISC OS, meaning a full
> networked multitasking Internet-capable GUI OS, complete with
> optimised BBC BASIC interpreter with ARM assembler, GUI editor and so
> on.

Wow! Chuckie Egg!  Best video game ever.

>
> Whereas it's a very low-spec system for Linux, it's a high-end one for
> RISC OS. For beginners, RISC OS may be a much more appealing prospect.

Not that low for Linux, I have linux on a machine with 12MB (12
Megabytes) of RAM and an SD card, operating as a 1-wire server for my
weather station.  It is a Linksys WRT54G router running OpenWRT.
Running top via ssh I see it is using about half the RAM, including
1.3MB for top.

Colin