Canonical Ltd., commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, says it’s porting Ubuntu to the ARM RISC processor architecture. Ubuntu on ARM will target netbooks and other emerging device categories requiring a “rich, always-connected, mobile computing experience, without compromising battery life.” The ARM version of Ubuntu, due next April, initially will support the ARMv7 RISC architecture, including SoCs (system-on-chip processors) based on ARM Ltd’s Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 cores.
Perhaps this stuff will finally breath some life into my basically useless Neo Freerunner.
Shouldn’t be so freaking hard:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnFreeRunner
http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
more likely, this could have interesting effects on the use of ARM in things like netbooks.
and it could also mean that one can run full blown ubuntu on the pandora!
Heh, RTFA, they are targeting the ARM Cortex based SoCs, so that excludes the ARM9 that’s in the FreeRunner
I need moral (and other) support to beat them at it
It’s not much of a port, is it?
Everything in Debian can be compiled for ARM, and all the Ubuntu-specific parts of the system are written in Python anyway and will “just run” on ARM.
I am, however, concerned that Canonical is stretching itself thinly. The market for ARM-based netbooks is roughly zero, because they can’t run Windows and they can’t run proprietary Linux programs like Flash Player and Google Earth. I thought Canonical was in bed with Intel anyway on the handheld front?
My Nokia 770 runs Maemo Mapper, which is a *wonderful* mapping package supporting Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Virtual Earth amongst others.
Dunno if a modern Ubuntu would ever be able to boot on a 64MB device, though. 🙁
I might as well add that Google Maps for PalmOS 2.0.2.0 works just fine in the Garnet VM on the 770, and seems to be able to link via wifi just fine.
It’s only real advantage is the ability to interact with the GVM address book — and maybe also the traffic overlay. Otherwise, Maemo Mapper kicks its butt three ways from Sunday (higher res, more maps, etc). 🙂
Edited 2008-11-14 19:39 UTC
I would like to see what they come up with. Hopefully some cool stuff.
And yet again, the world is ignorant.. I thought the Linux kernel already supported ARM?
So.. what exactly are they porting? bash shell scripts? I’m fairly certain those will run unmodified.
Linux users are silly.. the all share the same kernel, and a slightly modified user land, when someone changes one line of shell code they announce it to the world and demand a royal leg hump.
🙂
Edited 2008-11-15 11:42 UTC