Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

New features which should be implemented in Porteus; suggestions are welcome. All questions or problems with testing releases (alpha, beta, or rc) should go in their relevant thread here, rather than the Bug Reports section.
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Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#1 by miguipda » 25 Feb 2013, 18:49

Hi,

as I am looking for a board allowing to use some GPIO projects (home automation, ...) I discovered that Cubieboard has better specifications thant the Raspberry Pi (1 Gb of RAM, possible to connect an external SATA HardDrive, ...) :
http://cubieboard.org/
Here are described the specifications and some videos to see :
https://www.miniand.com/products/Cubieb ... er%20Board

It cost 49 USD (only for the board) or 65 USD with cables and a simple case (http://cubieboard.org/2012/09/10/a-simple-case/).

Even if it has been develop for Raspberry Pi we could also install any linux distribution on this Cubieboard by using the berryboot multiboot program :
http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot

For this reason could somebody develop an ARM version to add (http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/b ... o_the_menu) on this berryboot (test it on your Raspberry Pi) and tell us if it works great. Then we could buy some of those Cubieboard (sometimes difficult to buy due to its success).

I have many project need then when we know what we can do with the GPIO on a Raspberry Pi, I am sure we could appreciate it more with the Cubieboard :
http://learn.adafruit.com/category/raspberry-pi

Then with pleasure to read that Porteus has a ARM .img available to be added to the berryboot...

Have a nice day,

Miguipda ;-)

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Re: Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#2 by Ahau » 25 Feb 2013, 20:38

Hi miguipda,

Thanks for the info! that does look like an interesting board!

I am presently gearing up to work on Porteus-ARM once again. I believe I will be able to produce a functional userland that will run on the Raspberry Pi, Cubiboard, and other ARM devices (ARMv5te -- default for slackwarearm). I may also recompile for ARMv7 architecture, depending on what kind of performance gains this has on cortex-9 devices.

That said, every different board needs its own kernel, so while I can get Porteus-ARM installed on my Acer Iconia A500 tablet (in fact, it already is), the best I can do for other hardware is to patch and compile the kernel sources (likely from the vendor unless all of the hardware has code in the mainline linux or linaro kernels) and ship it off to the users, for them to attempt installation. There's a small number of boards that I can emulate in Qemu, so I could do a little more there on those. So what we'd need is an army of folks with their own ARM hardware, either willing to custom patch, compile and install their own kernels or willing to continually try precompiled binaries from me, telling me what happens, and waiting for me to reconfigure and get it right (I had to build the versatile express kernel about 10 times before I got the right sources, config, and toolchain put together so this would be a lengthy process).

I hope that helps answer your post, and let us know if you wind up picking up a cubieboard :)
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Re: Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#3 by Hugh Johnson » 26 Feb 2013, 02:31

Ahau wrote:So what we'd need is an army of folks with their own ARM hardware, either willing to custom patch, compile and install their own kernels or willing to continually try precompiled binaries from me, telling me what happens, and waiting for me to reconfigure and get it right (I had to build the versatile express kernel about 10 times before I got the right sources, config, and toolchain put together so this would be a lengthy process).
I could possibly help with this. I'm only one folk, but I do have a small army of arm boards.

2x raspberry pi's (1x the older 256MB, 1 the newer 512MB)
3x beaglebone (1x a3, 2x a6)
1x beagleboard (cx3 I think)
1x Samsung Chromebook (Maybe 2x but I believe one has an atom processor).
3x various generic android tablets
4-8x Various other's that I'd have to run to the office to name.
Not to mention a plethora of android phones.

Most are running custom versions of Angstrom or Android, but I have or can get all the sources.

Let me know if you'd like some testing or whatever. I'd love to see a stable porteus going on arm.

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Re: Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#4 by Ahau » 26 Feb 2013, 03:37

Hugh, I'm green with envy :)

I'll work on getting the userland ready but it may take a while given how slow things go on ARM (and for me as I work through all the issues!). I'm going to install slackwarearm inside qemu tomorrow, emulating a versatile express (1ghz, 1gb RAM, cortex 9). Then I'll patch aufs into my kernel (linux-linaro 3.8) and then I'll have a development platform to compile the extra packages I'll need for Porteus...then I can prep modules and modify the initrd...I'll start a new thread for all that I suppose.

Anyway, if you don't have a particular preference, I think I'd want to see it running on the Pi first, since those are so widely known.

Thanks for chiming in!
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Re: Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#5 by Hugh Johnson » 26 Feb 2013, 04:05

At work we do a lot of hardware evaluations so they aren't technically mine but we can do anything we want with them now.

I'm totally game to do the Pi first, if your game for the beaglebone second :)

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Re: Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#6 by Ahau » 26 Feb 2013, 21:27

absolutely :) the beaglebone looks pretty sweet! I've got slackwarearm installed in my qemu image (the default slackware xfce theming looks pretty bad inside porteus xfce!) and I'm prepped to start compiling the packages I'll need for 001-core.xzm this afternoon.
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Re: Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#7 by Hugh Johnson » 27 Feb 2013, 17:33

After discussion with the guys at work I've slimmed my list down to:

1x Raspberry pi ( Model B 512MB version - http://adafruit.com/products/998 )
1x BeagleBone ( black version )
1x ODROID-X ( http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/ ... 3999328931 )
1x CuBox ( http://solid-run.com/cubox )
1x Samsung Chrome Book ( I don't really care about this but it's popular and could be fun and we got one. https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/d ... html#ss-cb )

Pretty much the consensus I got was these are the boards we have that would be powerful enough to make running Porteus worthwhile. I tried to order that cubieboard (since that's what this thread was about anyway) but it's sold out everywhere.

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Re: Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#8 by Ahau » 04 Mar 2013, 22:46

Hugh -- that list looks good, and getting started it should present enough challenges to keep me busy for a while :)

As of today, I have a Qemu install (versatile express) that boots into Porteus userland, including the base, xorg, devel, and xfce modules. It's missing a bunch of apps and I have it held together with spit and scotch tape, but it boots into the GUI and is about ready to start doing some work natively on my tablet (~6-8 times faster compiling on my tablet than in Qemu). Once I wrap some duct tape around it and get a kernel prepped for the Raspberry Pi, I'll upload it and create some threads specifically for the project. I'm planning on using Ponce's raspi kernel: http://ponce.cc/slackware/slackwarearm- ... as-3.2.27/

BTW -- how easy is it to add cheatcodes through uboot? My tablet has a locked bootloader so I've never used it. From what I read, it's kind of a pain (have to setenv everything over again), which would make it less than fun to change cheatcodes between reboots. I have a little workaround that cheats at entering cheatcodes, so if uboot is as much of a pain as it sounds like, I'll implement that for the raspi initrd.

Thanks again!
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Re: Cubieboard better than Raspberry Pi (ARM Porteus needed)

Post#9 by Ahau » 14 Mar 2013, 21:17

Porteus-ARM is up and running for the Raspberry Pi. see here: http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=2012

Thanks!
Please take a look at our online documentation, here. Suggestions are welcome!

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