- arm-netbook - Mailman test

Development environment for the A20 card
by David Boddie 27 Jul '16

27 Jul '16

Sorry if this has come up before and I missed it. Is there a recommended software development environment for the A20 card that people can use to experiment with in place of the real thing? I'm thinking of something as basic as a set of configuration options for qemu. I know the Cubieboard or Cubietruck has been mentioned before in the context of whether software will be portable to the card. I just wondered if there's any more concrete information about using virtual environments for those systems in the context of the A20 card. David

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Ethernet with pass-through card
by Stephen Paul Weber 27 Jul '16

27 Jul '16

Does the EOMA spec have ethernet? I forget. Neither housing lists USB ethernet as a thing it has, which seems odd if not (especially for the desktop housing)‎. Having an ethernet port in the bargain would make the pass-through card pretty exciting. ‎ Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

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The Dark Side of EOMA68
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 27 Jul '16

27 Jul '16

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k1NacHnvUc :) --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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What I have done so far
by Wolfgang Romey (hier) 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hallo, I followed the development of the EOMA68 Laptop for a long time and waited eagerly for the crowfunding-campaign. After the start of the campaign I regularly postet news on diaspora* and gnusocial and on the fsfe-de e-mail list and will do so until the end of the campaign. I hope it helps. I wonder, why so few people of the free software movement support your campaign. I thouhgt, free hardware in combination with free software was one of the top whishes of the free software community. Cheers Wolfgang -- Wolfgang Romey Krokusstraße 37 47249 Duisburg geraspora: https://pod.geraspora.de/people/9002a1416a4e4a9d loadaverage: https://loadaverage.org/hier tox: wolfgang_romey(a)toxme.se Bitte Anhänge nur in freien Formaten. Die Nachricht ist signiert, der öffentliche Schlüssel wird auf Anfrage zugeleitet.

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making money with EOMA68 cards
by Nick Hardiman 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

I’ve been checking up on EOMA68 articles the last few days. Somewhere along the way - perhaps in a podcast - I believe Luke said you can make money from hardware. How would that work? Perhaps something along these lines? If a home tinkerer wants to experiment, or an artist wants to explore this new medium, or a business student want a first mover’s advantage, they do something like this. * Come up with the idea for a gizmo. I see someone’s already compiled a list of ideas at http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/. * Order a card via https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop * Buy an idiots guide to soldering and a bag of parts. * Spend a few months burning holes in tables and building prototypes. * Take delivery of the new card, plug it in and make sure everything works. * Sell the new gizmo online. The EOMA68 standard creates a demand for new products. Unplugging the computer card from your house, plugging it into your car, unplugging it at work and plugging it into something else, means there must be the things to plug it into. The hard work has already been done. The hardware exists courtesy of the mobile phone industry, the software exists courtesy of decades of free software, and the compute package will exist courtesy of Luke and co.

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"Good enough" computing and the upgrade treadmill
by Matt Campbell 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hello: I read the white paper referenced on the Crowd Supply campaign page [1], and I was particularly interested in the section on "good enough" computing. The following paragraphs describe some problems that, as far as I recall, aren't addressed in the rest of the paper: > Now, in 2015, "good enough computing" has been cross-examined, and found wanting - perhaps not for the right reasons though. The key problem of having a three to five year old computer is not so much that it can't do the job it was designed to do: if the computer was not connected to the Internet it could continue to be used for its designated tasks until it suffered major component failure (possibly in 8 to even 15 years time). > The problem is that the kinds of web sites that most people visit and want to use are being designed with modern computers in mind. Even some recent smartphones are more powerful than high-end desktop computers of a decade ago. The latest version of Google Maps, for example, when using the "Street View", overwhelms a recent version of Firefox running on a computer with 8 Gigabytes of memory and a Dual-Core Dual-Hyper-threaded 2.4 Ghz processor, causing it to reach 100% CPU and lock up the entire machine. > But that's not so much the real problem: the real problem is the inter-dependent nature of Software Development. Upgrading even just one application often brings in a set of dependencies that can result in the entire operating system needing an upgrade. And the longer the duration since a software upgrade, the less likely it is that one single application may be upgraded without huge impact and inconvenience. With no knowledge (or convenience) on how to upgrade software or hardware, most people pick the simplest solution... This "upgrade treadmill" has bothered me for a while. Yes, with modular hardware like the EOMA68 cards and housings, the environmental impact is lessened because we only have to discard computer cards, not whole laptops. But unless we can stop the upgrade treadmill, we'll still have to discard our old computer cards when they would otherwise still be functional. I remember the laptop I used throughout my university education, from 1999 to 2003. It had a 366 MHz mobile Pentium processor and 64 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 192 MB when I had to work on a fairly memory-hungry Java application under Windows). In its original configuration in 1999, that laptop was perfectly comfortable for everything I wanted to do, at least under Linux: Web browsing, email, word processing (including StarOffice), software development, and listening to music. Now I don't know if X would run at all in 64 MB of RAM. As another illustration of how much waste the upgrade treadmill causes, here's a paraphrased bit of dialogue from the 2012 novel _Off to Be the Wizard_ by Scott Meyer. One character, a time traveler from 1984 whose last computer was a Commodore 64, asks, "What on earth can a person do with 4 gigabytes of RAM?". The other character, from 2012, replies, "Upgrade it immediately." Maybe that was supposed to be funny; the whole book is pretty light-hearted. But to me it's just sad. So what can we do about this? The only idea I've got is that I and other software developers should do all of our work on the most underpowered computer that will let us get buy, rather than the nicest one we can afford. Then maybe, out of necessity, we won't be so wasteful. But then maybe we won't be as productive either, particularly if not being wasteful means we have to write everything in C or C++. And of course, it won't do any good if I'm the only one who chooses to make those sacrifices. At least with free software, there's always the possibility to fork projects that succumb to the upgrade treadmill. For example, the MATE desktop environment is a fork of GNOME 2, and one of its explicit goals is to run well on non-compositing graphics hardware. I imagine MATE will run quite well on something like the A20 card. But still, we can't live in a forked, time-warped world. We have to interact with mainstream websites, which means using a mainstream browser or at least one of the major rendering engines. In this regard in particular, I wonder if the upgrade treadmill has already left the A20 behind, particularly since we can't use full GPU acceleration. I can certainly understand why the JZ4775 wasn't chosen, though it checks all the other boxes for ethical computing. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Sorry if this is too much of a rant or off-topic here. FWIW, I just backed the campaign by ordering an A20 card. Matt [1]: http://rhombus-tech.net/whitepapers/ecocomputing_07sep2015/

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Re: [Arm-netbook] What I have done so far
by David Boddie 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 12:30:26 +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote: > But in the end, for the campaign to be successful, it also needs to > provide products that people want to pledge for (if nothing else, to > meet the minimum quantity to fabricate the chips that Luke keeps > mentioning), so everybody needs some kind of hook to engage with the > project. It also serves to gauge interest in future products, once the > campaign ends. It's the way things work these days. Nobody will pledge money to support a standard on its own. As you say, you need a hook, and in this case it's a set of devices that aim to prove the concept. > - Close family are still well served by the options already available > around the home, e.g. Thinkpads a decade old (still from IBM). Thinking about this: I wonder if it would be possible to reuse existing laptop housings by somehow reusing their PCMCIA card slots to house EOMA68 CPU cards. Maybe this has already been discussed somewhere. David

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freedombox on eoma68?
by Wolfgang Romey (hier) 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hello Luke, would it be possible, to run freedombox https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual) on the EOMA68-Card? They are getting nearer to the version 1.0. As it is installable with debian, maybe it is possible. Maybe it could give the project a litle boost, if you could offer a card with freedombox preinstalled. Wolfgang -- Wolfgang Romey Krokusstraße 37 47249 Duisburg geraspora: https://pod.geraspora.de/people/9002a1416a4e4a9d loadaverage: https://loadaverage.org/hier tox: wolfgang_romey(a)toxme.se Bitte Anhänge nur in freien Formaten. Die Nachricht ist signiert, der öffentliche Schlüssel wird auf Anfrage zugeleitet.

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Published the news of the pass-through card
by Wolfgang Romey (hier) 26 Jul '16

26 Jul '16

Hallo Luke, you see it in the Email, which I sent to fsfe-de, and can find under https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/5066579 https://loadaverage.org/notice/8328773 Wolfgang -- Wolfgang Romey Krokusstraße 37 47249 Duisburg geraspora: https://pod.geraspora.de/people/9002a1416a4e4a9d loadaverage: https://loadaverage.org/hier tox: wolfgang_romey(a)toxme.se Bitte Anhänge nur in freien Formaten. Die Nachricht ist signiert, der öffentliche Schlüssel wird auf Anfrage zugeleitet.

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First push to EOMA-68 firmware :)
by Albert ARIBAUD 24 Jul '16

24 Jul '16

Hi all, Just did a quick "git push" to test that I can actually push onto the EOMA-68 EC firmware repo. Changes are trivial: on branch master, I just did some cleanup of main.c; more to come soon. Also, I created a new branch, "aaribaud/nucleo-f072rb", for stuff which allow/help developing the EC firmware on the NUCLEO dev board. That branch is intended to stay rebased on top of "master". Luke: right now I intend to keep on pushing onto master; but maybe you prefer that I push onto a dev branch (e.g. "aaribaud/master"), and from time to time you or I do a merge into master? Amicalement, -- Albert.

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EOMA68 hope conference 2016
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 23 Jul '16

23 Jul '16

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/hope-2016 --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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eoma68 fedora name suggestion
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 22 Jul '16

22 Jul '16

we just had someone suggest "hoedenplank" which in dutch translates to "hat plank" :) love it --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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first post / sharing a thought
by fuumind 22 Jul '16

22 Jul '16

Hi all! My first post to this list. Have enjoyed lurking here for the last couple of weeks. Really hope that this campaign works out! EOMA is a game changer. Been sharing everywhere. Just thought I'd share a thought with you guys. Please bear in mind that I know relatively little about hardware development so don't come down on me to hard with all the arguments about why it would be unrealistic! ;) Would it be possible / feasible to combine something like this (https:/ /www.crowdsupply.com/lime-micro/limesdr) with the EOMA68 standard? Regards! /fuumind

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eoma68 u-boot 2015.07 and mainline kernel 4.7
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 20 Jul '16

20 Jul '16

... is up and running. got it working last night. i still have to flash it onto the NAND or SD card so that it can be properly tested, but i got the OS up over HDMI. l. --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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Porcfest 2016 EOMA68 interview / podcast video up
by lkcl . 20 Jul '16

20 Jul '16

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Media Inquiries] My interview with you guys is up Date: 2016-07-20 12:11 PM To: chris(a)thinkpenguin.com Just thought you would want to know, the video with you guys is up. Feel free to promote or embed the video anywhere you like. https://youtu.be/VS3ynPz3cmc

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paul boddie
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 20 Jul '16

20 Jul '16

paul has been helping out a lot over the years with the eoma68 project, including some sponsorship. however i've learned that he's not been well and is now recovering slowly. i'd like to send him warm wishes to relax, get well and enjoy the campaign as entertainment, and invite people to wish him well and a full recovery. l.

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TODO list EOMA68 campaign
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 19 Jul '16

19 Jul '16

hiya folks ok much as a reminder to myself but also to let people know: * looks like i'm going to hope2016 (http://hope.net) in new york if anyone's in the area and is thinking of attending. * i'm currently building mainline u-boot (working) and mainline sunxi-next to see if it will work. i have a modified dtb from the cubieboard2 which worked previously when i tried a 3.15 nand rc5 fork by bbrezillon, it.. .ah... ended up with corrupted nand at the time (from u-boot. oops). * still TODO is a slashdot article, last one some people didn't like (editors?) and dropped it into binspam.... * the comparisons laptop update i added both sets of suggested mods (thanks to you both for the prompting). we do have one more consideration here, someone has pointed out that they're really not happy at the potential "personal criticism" of the vera apparatus arm64 team... there isn't any (there's not a single personal pronoun in the entire section). the update is there to show the effectiveness of the ethics, approach and implied (or explicitly-stated) committment to "open-ness"... and their wiki is shut off, there's no mailing list... i don't know what to do here because if i can't reach the team i can't offer them an opportunity to say something... suggestions welcome. * i'm thinking of putting the "pass through" card on the campaign, approximate pledge amount $40 (because in low-volume expected it'll be about a $20 BOM), that would turn the laptop housing into a battery-operated screen, keyboard and trackpad for any smartphone, USB-HDMI-dongle-PC, laptop or desktop PC. thoughts appreciated on that one. ok enough, feedback appreciated. l. --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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u-boot and extlinux.conf directives
by Nick Hardiman 19 Jul '16

19 Jul '16

Will the u-boot on the computer card be happy with these syslinux config directives? My u-boot skipped some of these with messages like: Ignoring unknown command: ui Ignoring unknown command: totaltimeout This is probably my fault - I was thrashing around in the dark. But I thought I’d check. Thanks, Nick extlinux.conf, copied from a Fedora 24 ARM image --- # extlinux.conf generated by appliance-creator ui menu.c32 menu autoboot Welcome to Fedora-Server-armhfp-24_Alpha-7. Automatic boot in # second{,s}. Press a key for options. menu title Fedora-Server-armhfp-24_Alpha-7 Boot Options. menu hidden timeout 20 totaltimeout 600 label Fedora-Server-armhfp-24_Alpha-7 (4.5.0-0.rc7.git0.2.fc24.armv7hl) kernel /vmlinuz-4.5.0-0.rc7.git0.2.fc24.armv7hl append ro root=UUID=8b0923ec-95c2-433a-b5e6-ee182429a320 fdtdir /dtb-4.5.0-0.rc7.git0.2.fc24.armv7hl/ initrd /initramfs-4.5.0-0.rc7.git0.2.fc24.armv7hl.img — links --- syslinux config directives http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Config Fedora changes https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/u-boot_syslinux ARM image https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/24/Server/armhfp/ima…

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crowdfunding page is live
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 19 Jul '16

19 Jul '16

the page is now live, and runs till the 26th august. please do help push that out to as many people as you can, blog about it, etc. we have thinkpenguin writing about it, liliputing is doing an article, i'll create a slashdot article, i'll be in touch with wired later today and so on. https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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12th update
by Xavi Drudis Ferran 18 Jul '16

18 Jul '16

I had missed the laptop comparison in crowdsupply.com. I guess it is too late to change anything, but anyway, just in case someone thinks the links are relevant: On planned obsolescence: " The possibility of a manufacturer actually deciding to SHUT DOWN such laptops is not unthinkable. " Other kind of computers (Revolv home automation) have already been shut down ( I think, all news I have are from one month before the deadline) http://boingboing.net/2016/04/05/google-reaches-into-customers.html Summary: Google (or Alphabet) buys Nest. Nest buys competitor Revolv. They announce they will OTA-brick all of 300$-a-piece Revolv home automation hubs in May 2015. Customers are left to buy something else (if they aren't already fed up). Curious that you left out GTA04, neo900, Pyra. And the refurbished RYF laptops, which are (software) efforts to recycle old standard laptops with libreboot, and so have some FS and eco conciousness to them (by the way the Acer 201P hints that the Rockchip 3288 SOC might be usable in a future CPU card ? https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/c201.html if power allows http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/02/17/power-consumption-of-amlogic-s812-an… - not that Rockchip is a good company, from what I hear about GPL violations - anyway fixing the boot with JZ4775 cpu card maybe is more prioritary than designing new CPU cards). But I learned about a lot of projects I didn't know. Thank you. I also didn't know Tegra laptops were locked down. I though there was The Jetson TK1 board that people used with 100% free software http://embedded-computing.com/news/engineers-just-hours-get-new-nvidia-jets… But then Debian says it needs two blobs (firmware for graphics and USB xHCI, I don't know how usable it is without these) https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/NVIDIA/Jetson-TK1 I hoped some Tegra K1 laptop could be eventually liberated (K1 chromebooks have coreboot, no libreboot yet, and your update hints at they have already been found unliberable because of DRM in the laptops?). Btw, sorry for the trivia and mixing topics, but are there images available of the different colours offered for the EOMA68 laptop housing ?

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simplest internet connection
by Nick Hardiman 18 Jul '16

18 Jul '16

Hi, I saw the 'Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices’ crowd supply page a couple hours ago and have been trawling for more information for the last couple hours. I’ve got a question (apologies if I’ve missed something in front of my face). What is the simplest way to hook up a card like this to the Internet? This seems like an excellent approach to next-generation on-premise computing. But the videos, the mail archive and web pages I’ve viewed are all focussed on tablets and workstations. I’m basically a server-side computing guy, and I’d rather know about ethernet than KVM. Many thanks, Nick

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Linux Link Tech Show, Episode 6 hundred and sixty six... :)
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 18 Jul '16

18 Jul '16

http://tlltsarchive.org/archives/tllts_666-07-13-16.ogg --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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FSFE discussion list message
by Paul Boddie 17 Jul '16

17 Jul '16

Hello again, I've also posted a message to the FSFE discussion list about the campaign: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2016-July/011110.html There have been some discussions on that list about open hardware and the threats posed by proprietary hardware and the surveillance features of various CPU families, notably these threads: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2016-April/010912.html (Featuring an attempt to fund a POWER8-based workstation.) http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2016-June/011100.html (Hopes for "truly free processor architectures", which might not be such a fantasy after all, given improvements in Free Software for programmable logic and synthesis.) I rather hope for a solid discussion of the merits of the campaign, as opposed to people just claiming that it can't be done, won't work, or whatever. Paul

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EOMA-68: eoma68/laptop_15in_pcb2/src/main.c authorship and license
by Albert ARIBAUD 17 Jul '16

17 Jul '16

Hi, While waiting for my AZERTY keyboard, I have started working on the EC firmware and noticed that eoma68/laptop_15in_pcb2/src/main.c does not have an header mentioning license and authorship, and that there is no readme (yet... A README.md is in the works) which would provide overall licensing and authorship information. I'll add the header while I'm at it, but for that, I need to determine the licensing and author(s). Many other files in the same folder are LPGLv3 (because they are copies/derivatives of libopencm3) so I guess main.c should be GPLv3 (rather than LGPLv3 as it is not a library component). As for authorship, git log shows Luke as the sole author, but I cannot check if the file is a derivative of some other source with identified authors which should be mentioned too. For now, I'll go with GPLv3 as the license and Luke as sole author, but anyone feel free to correct me if needed. Amicalement, -- Albert.

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an introduction to eoma68
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 16 Jul '16

16 Jul '16

https://youtu.be/MdLwrTxE6Rw :) --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68

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