Re: Good ARM board for Debian?
Jerry Stuckle wrote:
You obviously did not read the ENTIRE thread. This was made very clear
when I started the thread several months ago. And while I never said I
was looking for a personal system, it's also a question I don't ask of
people in mail lists such as this or usenet. It makes no difference to
me whether someone is looking for a personal system or one for a
commercial venture. If I can answer the question, I do.
OH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! Quite frankly, I was inclined to criticise Luke
for coming down heavily on you, but do you honestly expect any of us to
recall the detail of something that you wrote months ago? We've got jobs
to do and lives to live, and if you want somebody to keep a detailed
dossier of your requirements spanning weeks or months then you should be
paying them to do it.
What's more, /this/ thread started in late September. You didn't provide
a summary at the start of what you'd looked at before or why you had
problems with it, and initially you expressed interest in [somebody's]
suggestion of the BeagleBone Black and Cubieboard. Then you started
moving goalposts and raising objections.
Having got that off my chest, I note your
"Dale, I'm glad you've found it interesting. It has been to me, also -
and very educational. Several people have had good suggestions that I
still intend to follow up on, even if they are out of my client's target
price range. They may just have to suck it up."
Unfortunately your conclusion is all too true, and has been since
computers started being manufactured as commodity items: it's very
difficult to guarantee that consecutive batches will be identical, and
it's very difficult to track embedded intellectual property.
What I'd suggest is this, and my apologies if I'm stating the obvious or
summarising somebody else's points. Try to eliminate any board that has
an embedded loader which is only provided to you under license, and then
look at each successive component (i.e. the kernel, system libraries and
so on) and identify those which have license terms incompatible with
your area of application. For each problematic component, try to either
find an alternative or approach the owner to find out whether they can
supply it with an alternative license.
Even if you start off with a fairly cheap board (but not so cheap that
its reliability is compromised), you might find that you need to pay for
at least some of the software. As a particular case, I'm sure that Mitch
Bradley would be happy to port OpenFirmware onto almost anything to
circumvent the loader issue.
Hope that helps in some small way, but I can assure you that you're not
the only one with this type of problem.
Oh, and a belated Happy Midwinter Solstice :-)
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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