elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

["Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey guys,

Just a heads-up regarding ARM support in Luna: our stable PPA got armhf
enablement recently and everything (except Pantheon Greeter, see
https://bugs.launchpad.net/pantheon-greeter/+bug/1214833) should run fine
on ARM, at least in theory. You'd need decent GPU drivers though, because
Gala requires hardware acceleration, and software rendering on ARM is in a
pitiful state.

However, our OS-specific patches repository did not get ARM enablement, and
it's unlikely to get it anytime soon because we patched some really
heavyweight things like Qt, which take way more time to build than
Canonical's armhf enablement conditions require. This means we can't make
OS images for ARM, but you can still install the apps on an existing Ubuntu
installation. You'll miss out on the leaner and faster core, which is a
pity (and doubly so on a resource-constrained system), but at least there's
a chance of finding an OS image that works for your ARM hardware in case of
Ubuntu and almost no chance for any other distro.

Enthusiasts can still build ARM images by themselves if they have the
hardware to run the build process or if they know their way around QEMU
chroots (along the lines of https://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatChroot and
https://wiki.debian.org/QemuUserEmulation but for Ubuntu). They'd have to
use something like apt-build to update to later versions of our patched
packages, but such updates will probably be rare and all in all it should
work.

-- 
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff
OS architect @ elementary