Re: Ports helping in World Domination? (was: Re: Canonical and Debian)
On 6/6/05, Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> Quoting Julien BLACHE (jblache@debian.org):
>
> > Eh, to achieve Total World Domination, we need to support every
> > architecture out of there. Looks like a step in the wrong direction ;)
>
> Well, frankly speaking, Julien, last time I checked most of so-called
> third world users mostly just don't care a shit of non i386
> architectures..:-). They just want a functional operating system for
> the only architecture which is really available to them, no matter
> whether we like it or not.
I'm running Linux, and soon Debian, on consumer-market embedded
wireless routers and file servers based on mipsel, arm, and powerpc
(my personal favorite). They aren't graphical desktops, but their low
power consumption and low price point make them excellent candidates
for developing-country infrastructure gear -- not to mention learning
environments for OS developers.
Total World Domination means more than the desktop. Vanilla Debian
isn't that well suited to be the actual embedded release, and of
course buildroot works fine as a cross-compilation environment, but it
can be very handy to test in a chroot. And when you're in a hurry,
sometimes it's easier to use a buildroot environment hosted on the
same arch than it is to fix a configure script that breaks on
cross-compiles.
Cheers,
- Michael
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