torios team mailing list archive

[Paul Sutton <zleap@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In terms of hardware,  there are projects such as
https://www.freegeek.org/ which aim to use older hardware,  even my
Netbook is 64bit it has 2gb ram, the others I rescued from the same
batch all have 1gb ram.

There is https://hackclub.com/ which supports students with tinkering
and learning that way.

There is another project, which I can't remember the name of, that is
recycling old computers. But that seems to be a sort of kids club so
they learn how to fix up and install Linux.

I know about far too many projects and can never remember what they are
all called,  but this is really where the whole community does need to
work closer together, so they can cross promote each other in some way.

I think, if we are going to reach out to projects such as puppy Linux,
we should all reach out to these hardware and software projects and
figure out what the target architecture is.

Raspberry Pi is now 64bit with 8gb ram,  the processor can support up to
16,  so there may be a 16gb raspberry Pi at some point (not sure).

I can see it just getting harder to support i386 / 32 bit architecture
with anything going forward.

Ideally we can collaborate with other projects so that small developer
teams get more support and help from each other.

If there is a desire to use Cryptdrive then I can setup a team and start
adding some of the ideas presented here to that, so for example

Hardware ia64 arm
related projects e.g puppy
related libraries e.g those mentioned below

otherwise we will have 100s of e-mails each with little bits of info and
it will take hours to find what that oddly named library was called or
weather we agreed to contact x project or not, and the outcome of doing so.

I am not proposing we stop using e-mail this would be to help us keep
track of everything.

Paul

On 21/07/2020 16:34, ml@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> On Tue, July 21, 2020 7:24 am, Israel Dahl wrote:
>> My main question is going to be, what architectures?
>>
>>
>> Mobile is the newest low-spec ubiquitous computer everyone uses.  How do
>> we support cheap computing easiest?  Mobile, is pretty much the only answer
>> to that.  And most mobile OS are not focused on low-spec.
> 
> Also, most mobile solutions (such as Android) are for arm processors not
> x86.  That would mean two copies of everything to support both platforms. 
> Even in the mobile market, they're switching to 64 bit.  Google is pushing
> to drop support for 32 bit and is no longer creating llvm cross-compilers
> 32 bit for Linux systems that build Android tools.  So, it'll be just as
> hard to support low end arm systems as is it is to support low end x86
> systems.
> 
> I could see us trying to leverage the Android-x86 project or libhybris and
> use some of the Android apps that will run on x86 machines.  That would
> give us access to more apps/applications.  I don't think dropping support
> for x86 and moving to arm is the best solution for supporting older
> machines at this point in time.  Supporting both platforms is going to
> complicate things a great deal as well.
> 
> We can either support old computers well or low resource mobile devices
> and devices like Raspberry Pi well.  It would be very hard to split
> resources and support both.  They have different needs and constraints.
> 
>> What about compiling a mobile OS using musl (postmarketOS for example),
>> or perhaps figuring out a way to get a really low-spec WM that works with
>> Weston working as a good phone/tablet/laptop/desktop UI?
> 
> So that would probably be WIO at this point ( https://wio-project.org/ )
> as far as the windowing goes.
> 
> This project is already doing what you've mentioned minus the mobile support:
> https://github.com/tpimh/nenuzhnix
> They're using musl and Wayland.  I mentioned WIO and they're looking into
> that as well.
> 
> I'm guessing postmarketOS isn't going to be a good project to try to get
> involved with because I haven't had any luck contacting the developers
> about it.  I have e-mailed the developer of nenuzhnix before.  I think
> he'd be welcome to sharing resources.
> 
> There are also some Puppy Linux distro developers that are working with
> musl.  I think they're concentrating on trying to get tinyxlib working
> instead of Wayland though.
> 
> Do we want to go with Wayland or do we want to go with a tiny X server
> (like TinyCore Linux and a few of the Puppy spins)?  I was looking at some
> of the tiny X ports and xserver-xsdl (used by Android apps).  There's an
> interesting port of K-Drive (part of Xorg) that works on top of SDL.  If
> we could build that successfully, SDL2 works with KMS and it could handle
> low level functionality like keyboard/mouse/video support.  Then we
> wouldn't have to worry about maintaining that part of things with Xorg
> once X Server development stops.  As mentioned, the other way to go is
> Wayland and a project like WIO.  Most popular GUI frameworks will have
> support for X11 or Wayland at least for now.  One last option is nano-x
> instead of X or Wayland.  It'll be interesting to see what happens with
> BSD systems and what they choose since they can't adopt Wayland as easily
> as a Linux system.
> 
> I guess I've raised more questions than answers.  What does everyone else
> think?  What's our target audience?  Which processors (x86, arm, 64 bit,
> 32 bit, etc.) do we want to support?  Which processors do we have access
> to (old computers, old laptops, old Android tablets, Raspberry Pis, etc.)?
>  What do we want our desktop environment to look like (Wayland, Xorg,
> KDrive, nano-x, framebuffer, maybe something like Jide had, something else
> altogether)?
> 
> 

-- 
Paul Sutton
https://personaljournal.ca/paulsutton/
gnupg : 7D6D B682 F351 8D08 1893  1E16 F086 5537 D066 302D

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