Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

I've installed Ubuntu armel, and now I'm installing the Ubuntu versions of OpenOffice.org and Firefox. Details at 11...or whenever the 780+MB finish downloading and installing ;)

EDIT: repository at ports.ubuntu.com

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Wait a sec, do you mean I can install the armel build of Ubuntu on my n810 right now?

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Of course, i have been playing with it 3 weeks already!

Gnome is very slow, when booting directly in the ubuntu... There are still many packages missing and we have to wait a long time before they finish armv6 (the release now it for armv5)

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Hm. That's surprising. The Ubuntu OpenOffice doesn't seem any faster than in Debian, even though it is supposedly targeting the Arm v5 instruction set (as opposed to Debian targeting the v4 instruction set). Guess the optimizations are either not being used or they aren't that significant.

The OpenOffice splash screen and the Matchbox Keyboard are different looking, however.

A couple of screen shots:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3001/...e53a2277_o.png

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3042/...24d584c9_o.png

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

AFAIK, the gcc optimizations for armv4t vs armv5te vs armv6 are not all that big of a performance gain. Apparently the big speedup to be had (at the cost of larger binaries) is enabling VFP support. [1] And, IIRC, this isn't done yet.

-John

[1] http://syslog.movial.fi/archives/46-...ot-to-VFP.html

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Just FYI, lxde and MID packages are now available.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

so can we or can we not install ubuntu on the n810?

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

We can! :)

There is also a really great project going on that will make us able to use maemo packages on it! (I know that's not the point :D)
http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer_Blueprint_New
http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer_Blueprint

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

armv5te, armv6 or armv7 are most useful when having hand crafted optimizations for these instruction sets. The difference can be very significant, especially for multimedia. But the compiler itself is very dumb and can't generate fast code (at least this is true for gcc).

Some part of this speedup apparently comes from just not using thumb, the other part comes from using vfp. There is no penalty for switching arm/thumb modes, this is done at function call or return boundaries (you can call thumb functions from normal arm code, and arm code can be called from thumb). This switching does not have any overhead at all when compared to normal arm->arm functions calls.

Re: Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM
 

Would there be any interest in Easy Ubuntu? I notice that the version of OpenJava 6 is more advanced than in Debian, and there's some interesting new packages in Ubuntu like Prism that aren't in Debian. It wouldn't be very difficult for me to pop an optimized rootfs into an image file and put it on my server...

EDIT: And this stuff too...

EDIT2: Hey, I bumped into an old friend while over there. Also, I wonder if this would work on our desktop?

Has anyone gotten the full Ubuntu Mobile desktop working on a tablet via this distribution? Is it much heavier than LXDE?