Author Topic: 9$ computer  (Read 26124 times)

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Offline hamster_nz

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Re: 9$ computer
« Reply #50 on: June 27, 2015, 09:36:36 pm »
I imagine they will try to port stuff to the "$9" Banana computer too but will they have a big enough support community and easy images to download and run?

The support will be pretty much the same as any other Allwinner board (e.g. CubieBoard, PCduino, BananaPi... ), which is pretty good. On top of that android runs really well.
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Offline janoc

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Re: 9$ computer
« Reply #51 on: June 28, 2015, 07:36:57 pm »
I imagine they will try to port stuff to the "$9" Banana computer too but will they have a big enough support community and easy images to download and run?

The support will be pretty much the same as any other Allwinner board (e.g. CubieBoard, PCduino, BananaPi... ), which is pretty good. On top of that android runs really well.

That something is running the same CPU as some other wildly popular board does not mean that the support will be any good. You wouldn't be able to run PCduino or BananaPi images on this without (significant) modifications, despite the same/compatible CPU.

Someone needs to be actually preparing those SD Card images, maintaining and updating the software on them and actually be hosting the distribution. That is a LOT of work. The worst thing that can happen is that half-broken card image with obsolete software is released and never updated - as is frequently the case. The community can fix that only if there is a sufficient critical mass of users volunteering to do the unpaid work - which isn't that common. Apart from the Raspberry Pi and perhaps the BeagleBones none of these boards has a self-sustaining community behind it - most of the work is up to the company manufacturing the board. And if they do their job poorly, the support will suck.

 

Offline Rasz

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Re: 9$ computer
« Reply #52 on: June 29, 2015, 05:12:19 am »
I imagine they will try to port stuff to the "$9" Banana computer too but will they have a big enough support community and easy images to download and run?

The support will be pretty much the same as any other Allwinner board (e.g. CubieBoard, PCduino, BananaPi... ), which is pretty

pretty shit actually :) allwinner = gpl violations left right and center
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Offline hamster_nz

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Re: 9$ computer
« Reply #53 on: June 29, 2015, 05:46:46 am »
I imagine they will try to port stuff to the "$9" Banana computer too but will they have a big enough support community and easy images to download and run?

The support will be pretty much the same as any other Allwinner board (e.g. CubieBoard, PCduino, BananaPi... ), which is pretty good. On top of that android runs really well.

That something is running the same CPU as some other wildly popular board does not mean that the support will be any good. You wouldn't be able to run PCduino or BananaPi images on this without (significant) modifications, despite the same/compatible CPU.

Someone needs to be actually preparing those SD Card images, maintaining and updating the software on them and actually be hosting the distribution. That is a LOT of work. The worst thing that can happen is that half-broken card image with obsolete software is released and never updated - as is frequently the case. The community can fix that only if there is a sufficient critical mass of users volunteering to do the unpaid work - which isn't that common. Apart from the Raspberry Pi and perhaps the BeagleBones none of these boards has a self-sustaining community behind it - most of the work is up to the company manufacturing the board. And if they do their job poorly, the support will suck.

You must use yours for different things than I do - I always found that the Raspberry Pi's USB, ethernet and audio was a piece of junk - skipping audio, dropping Ethernet packets and latching up, where as my PCduino spent many years as a well behaved web-attached MP3 jukebox without a hitch.

Hi-def video playback on the CubieBoard under Android was pretty good - much better than the Pi+Linux at the same time, and it had a SATA port for storage.

I currently use a CubieBoard running Linux to run some of the USB instruments on my bench - it is the size of a small multimeter and runs on a USB charger, and I don't have to clear a space for the laptop. Having on-board NAND for the OS is a bit of a bonus too. Meanwhile my Raspberry Pi is in a bottom draw somewhere.

These boards also have the benefit that the average community is much more capable - Google usually gives an intelligent answer, not endless newbie posts.
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Offline Howardlong

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Re: 9$ computer
« Reply #54 on: June 29, 2015, 07:39:44 am »
As I understand it, the USB stack on the original RPi was a bit questionable, and the Ethernet comes off that. While there were fixes, the USB was never perfect. When we had difficulty getting one of my products working on it, it turned out there was a limitation on it that limited full speed USB device performance. My understanding is that the USB stack was done in the GPU and so I don't know if it was open source or not.

In the end I released a version of firmware to deliberately restrict the bandwidth required by my device, but of course at the cost of reduced performance.

The new v2 RPi doesn't have this problem.
 

Offline janoc

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Re: 9$ computer
« Reply #55 on: June 29, 2015, 03:19:08 pm »

You must use yours for different things than I do - I always found that the Raspberry Pi's USB, ethernet and audio was a piece of junk - skipping audio, dropping Ethernet packets and latching up, where as my PCduino spent many years as a well behaved web-attached MP3 jukebox without a hitch.
...
These boards also have the benefit that the average community is much more capable - Google usually gives an intelligent answer, not endless newbie posts.

You are missing my point - I was not commenting on the quality of the hw support or the amount of bugs in the sw but on its availability. Big difference. You could have the best board in the world but it is going to be completely useless unless someone is actually publishing updated Linux/Android/whatever distributions for it. Which takes a lot of effort and resources.

Whether or not RasPi has better or worse performance than PCduino or Cubieboard or whatever is a completely different issue.

PS: My RasPi is driving my 3D printer over wifi just fine  :-//

« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 03:21:27 pm by janoc »
 

Offline edy

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Re: 9$ computer
« Reply #56 on: June 30, 2015, 09:31:30 pm »
Just to add to the RaspBerry Pi version 1 usability..... I recently downloaded and wrote SD Card images for both the latest OSMC and OpenElec (both linked from the RaspBerry Pi web site) and they will play movies right off an attached USB stick, no problem. Seems the codec support is good enough to handle most of my media (AVI, MKV, MP4). No skips or frame drops. I played larger 1280p type files too! I expected slow frame rates or problems with seeking through scenes but it forwarded and reversed without any issues.

That *was not* the case originally a few years ago when I first got my RasPi and tried playing their "Big Buck Bunny" video using the mpeg player in the Linux distro at the time. It was choppy, and then I heard they were going to make you pay for codecs because they were not GPL or licensed or something. I was worried I would never be able to play smooth videos on the RasPi. Obviously it was not the hardware.... It was the software. It was not optimized or the drivers were not tweaked properly.

But as you can see, the amount of support for the RasPi community and many talented people were able to customize and create images for everything from a number of Linux, RISC OS and other distributions, several MAME-type SD Cards.... All free and easily available for download and easy to write to an SD Card. Will the $9 computer have the same support? We just don't know. Time will tell.


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