On 18/04/12 11:34, Mark Rogers wrote:
One thing I am quickly realising is just how little I know about ARM, and I'm struggling to find a decent introduction.
Found this:
http://blogs.arm.com/software-enablement/605-arm-fundamentals-introduction-t... .. which was very useful.
It looks like my two boards (the Mini6410 off eBay and the Raspberry PI) both use the same CPU spec (ARM1176JZF-S, ARMv6), but with different GPU. For my intended apps video performance isn't an issue although I would at least like to be able to get something onto the screen!
Fedora and Debian, amongst others, seem to support ARMv6, although some distros (Ubuntu in particular) seem to have jumped to ARMv7 as a minimum spec. Although Ubuntu seem unmoved by the calls for them to support the R.Pi, it does look like the existence of the Pi will cause support for ARMv6 to improve in general rather than die out as would be expected of such an old architecture, and indeed I would be surprised if there isn't a community supported Ubuntu variant in due course (although how well it would support the GPU on my Mini6410 is another matter). Personally I'm used to Ubuntu's way of doing things but I can cope with RPM if needed so both Fedora and Debian are options (Fedora currently looks better prepared for the R.Pi).
Am I being naive to assume that regardless of GPU, basic (VGA) graphics should be supported without any difficulty?
To what extent should I look at Android, given it's strong support for ARM? If I have an Android install, how easy is it to add a LAMP stack to it?