Debian ARM success story: Debian desktop on a TS-7300
Hi all,
I wanted to post an ARM success story here, in case
anyone searches this list seeking a particular, current, viable
example of a Debian-compatible ARM machine on the market right now
that might actually interest home users. Here is a summary of my
experiences so far:
I've set up a minimalistic Debian desktop on an ARM-based
TS-7300 (made by Technologic Systems). It has onboard VGA video and
can do 640x480. I bought one with 64 MB RAM, which is unfortunately
not expandable. I use icewm for the window manager. I can run any of
firefox, thunderbird, GAIM, abiword, gnumeric, etc. and still have a
good 10-20 MB RAM left to spare. IMHO, this is pretty decent for a
computer about the size of a mousepad. I can recommend this as being a
decent ARM desktop if you are looking for something tiny, lightweight,
solid state, and dead silent, for relatively cheap. I spent about $360
CDN total: $280 grand total for a TS-7300, then another $80 for a 2 GB
SD card. Ecologically-minded folks living "off the grid" using small
solar panels will love this computer, as it only takes 5V of power.
I also wrote a blog entry about why I settled on this particular computer:
http://ca.blog.360.yahoo.com/dustinharriman?p=7
Basically, I feel it's really important that there is a viable,
alternative architecture for home users besides i386, now that Apple
has abandoned the ppc archtiecture. As ppc disappears, there needs to
continue to be a diversity of architectures (and no, amd64 and ia64
don't count as "diverse" IMHO). Why? I think it is this diversity that will
ultimately "save" home users from the clutches of DRM and NGSCB.
More info on the specs of this board are here:
http://www.embeddedarm.com/epc/ts7300-spec-h.htm
Plus, here are a couple of photos and a desktop screenshot:
http://ca.photos.yahoo.com/ph/dustinharriman/slideshow?.dir=/af59scd&.src=""
Dig the cheesy cardboard case I made out of a PCI card box. It has penguins on it. :D
It
was strightforward to image a pre-installed Debian Sarge (as set up and
distributed by Technologic Systems) onto a 2 GB SD card I bought,
following these instructions:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ts-7000/message/3211
Plus,
there was one little tweak (thanks David Wagner) that made the disk
access noticably faster, basically I changed the "sync" option in
/etc/fstab to "async", for the line pertaining to the "/" filesystem
(then rebooted).
I'll vouch that Technologic Systems offers awesome technical support as
well, I've phoned them a couple of times to ask very, very technical
questions and they put me right through to one of the engineers who is
actually involved in designing the boards (Jesse Off in my case, who
also posts frequently on the active ts-7000 mailing list on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ts-7000/). I was blown away when he knew
the immediate answer to everything I could throw at him, and then
some. You could ask him any theoretical question about the hardware's
capabilities and he had a well-formed opinion every time.
BTW,
I do not work for Technological Systems in any way. I'm just a random,
happy customer who wanted a solid-state Debian machine, and dabble in
the ARM architecure (as i386 is so "been there, done that").
One minus: even though the TS-7300 has a "Maverickcrunch" FPU,
in practice it doesn't get used by Debian because maverick support is
not compiled into the stock arm Debian packages yet. This means the
odds of getting any multimedia goodness (like sound), which requires
FPU, are bad.
Cheers,
Dustin Harriman
My Blog: http://ca.blog.360.yahoo.com/dustinharriman
RSS Feed:
http://ca.blog.360.yahoo.com/rss-RkGSoVA1brWtXrVH9Gr5CzgVujwwGg--?cq=1
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