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from the good-things-come-in-little-packages dept.
makezine.com has an article on a new $9 SBC.
An Oakland, CA based team of artists and engineers have built $9 Single Board Computer (SBC) called Chip. Chip runs Debian Linux as its operating system and includes a 1Ghz quad core R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage as well as 8 GPIO ports, onboard wifi, bluetooth, battery controller and other goodies.
While the Chip is capable enough to manage office and other general purpose computing, it's mainly intended as a project board. The team has some optional extras, including Pocket Chip, a portable, handheld enclosure with an LCD screen, full QWERTY keyboard, and internal battery. With this combination, the Pocket Chip is a fully functioning $50 computer.
If you’re wondering how Chip could be this inexpensive, you can thank cheap Chinese tablets. The System-on-Chip used in the development board is based on an A13 processor by Allwinner, a Shenzhen-based semiconductor company. As recently as 2013, Allwinner was the second largest tablet manufacturer in the world, and the A13 was the most successful processor in Allwinner’s lineup.
Could this be a Raspberry Pi killer?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @06:55PM
Don't bother with anything that runs Debian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @08:48PM
Or you could just run sudo apt-get install sysvinit-core if you would rather use sysv init.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @09:20PM
This is a Debian fork. I doubt it will be able to support a separate init system. I honestly don't understand why everyone and their mother chooses to use debian on their custom ARM device. Wouldn't a gentoo fork work better since most of the things you need would be able to be recompiled on the fly for the device? Send it out with precompiled pacakges, then the rest could be compiled on later. Bam so much easier, and no systemd if you don't want it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @10:39PM
Name recognition perhaps.
It's the oldest extant distro. [unnes.ac.id]
Everybody thinks: beaucoup pre-compiled packages (without thinking "for x86")
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @01:13AM
Might want to look down and a little to the left on your image, and then apologize to the 10 Slackware users out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @06:03PM
Yes. I did see that when I got the image but I forgot to adjust my statement to say "second-oldest".
Good catch.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Friday May 08 2015, @11:24PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pav on Saturday May 09 2015, @03:38AM
The current spin of Raspberian is Wheezy (which is non-systemd). Why should you care? For one, if your Raspberry Pi software starts relying on added systemd functionality it will be a lot less portable... much more difficulty experimenting with FreeBSD, Hurd, whatever... I don't have much experience with systemd (besides a bunch of stuff breaking when the switchover occurred in Debian Testing. After fiddling and realising it was more trouble than it was worth for me at that time I reverted and haven't used it since). Almost everyone in #devuan seems to have a story or three about systemd breaking something, and then the problem not being considered a bug and marked !wontfix... even the developer of sysvinit (both the upstream project and the DEB package) who initially went out of his way to make it easy for systemd to slot in as optional in Debian Wheezy - that was not reciprocated. There are a lot of nervous sysadmins out there with server farms... their "eggs" jittering precariously on their racks. Redhat want first mover advantage and are technically and politically brutalising the rest of the Linux world to get it... and of course they would - they are legally required to because they're a company. Things probably won't be much worse or better for you on your Pi, but personally I'd like to see Devuan succeed, and a fallback and perhaps some alternatives surface just in case Redhat really starts making everyones lives miserable because of their gatekeeping of so much of the Linux kernel through systemd.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday May 09 2015, @05:27AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 09 2015, @07:41AM
So how good does BSD work on Raspberry-Pi and "Next Thing Co $9 computer" ?