6 ms·

The A15 seems to be the same weight as the Macbook air. I always thought about buying an MBA, but I feared the hassle of installing Linux on it. Is the A15 my

by itry 14y ago

The A15 seems to be the same weight as the Macbook air. I always thought about buying an MBA, but I feared the hassle of installing Linux on it. Is the A15 my future development machine? All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue.

crayola 14y ago
I am also starting to consider this for development, but I need more assurance that it is a viable option. Does everything mostly work out of the box, or would there be a lot of tinkering / troubleshooting required, e.g. because of the somewhat non-standard nature of running ubuntu on ARM architecture? What about drivers, e.g. for wifi and trackpad?
- ivany 14y ago
  After running debian on an ARM box for the past ~5 years, my experience has been pretty favorable. If there's a solid community following (which is a good bet with this product given the hype around it) the drivers should be a non-issue. Installation went very smoothly for me. Everything else, if it can get built from source, should be fine. On my box apt-get install "just works" for almost all of the software I use, and maybe 75% of make installs go smoothly with relatively little tinkering required. For getting actually work done, I use an x86 laptop. I wouldn't ever go back to using a netbook or any non-mainstream notebook with iffy linux support. It's just not worth your time to deal with technical issues. Buy the best tools that you can find (best being what works for you).
- mtgx 14y ago
  Ubuntu is probably the most optimized distro for the ARM architecture out there. Canonical is really pushing support for ARM.
gabemart 14y ago
>All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue. Does that really bear out? I like the idea of a low-powered netbook connecting to a high-powered server for development, but in my (very limited) experience it's a pain. I have two machines, and old laptop with an AMD RM-70 and a Thinkpad X41 with a Pentium M 1.6 Ghz. On both machines, using Firefox is a painful experience because the performance is so bad. Using chrome is pretty good. I've been thinking about buying a newer netbook with better battery life, but the performance of newer low-powered mobile CPUs doesn't seem that much greater than the systems I already have.
- itry 14y ago
  > Does that really bear out? Why wouldnt it? Been doing it for years now and cannot think of any other way of development anymore.
  - smackfu 14y ago
    Depends on whether your use of Firefox is for Javascript or server-side scripting. Running heavy non-minified Javascript with caching disabled is much more pleasant on a fast machine.
    - 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
      Run Firefox on the server and export the display over the network to the weedy laptop. Depending on the technology used, exporting sound can be an hour of fiddling about to get it setup first time around.
      - drivebyacct2 14y ago
        I'd rather get hit in the crotch than use Firefox over X forwarding. Slow on top of slow. There is some interesting work with NX and NX-like solutions that make it much more tolerable.
        3amOpsGuy 14y ago
        Haha :) I keep going back to X over SSH. Out of VNC, RDP and NX, VNC is the lame duck. Out of RDP & NX, both require extra software but RDP is more widely re-usable (virtual box, windows etc). The bandwidth requirements aren't the problem with X these days - a 3G connection at under 1Mbps real world is fine for reasonable display sizes, it's the round trip latency is the killer. It's such a chatty protocol, but on a LAN / WiFi it's fine and works out of the box with... scratch that, you need to install XQuartz separately since Mountain Lion. I almost forgot about that.
        14y ago
etherealG 14y ago
I think performance is still an issue. currently there are no gpu accelerated drivers if I understand correctly for non-chromeos linux, so until someone puts the effort into making that work.
- rational_indian 14y ago
  >non-chromeos linux Or you could just use the pre-installed linux kernel underneath a distribution of your choice.

by itry 14y ago

crayola 14y ago

I am also starting to consider this for development, but I need more assurance that it is a viable option. Does everything mostly work out of the box, or would there be a lot of tinkering / troubleshooting required, e.g. because of the somewhat non-standard nature of running ubuntu on ARM architecture? What about drivers, e.g. for wifi and trackpad?

ivany 14y ago
After running debian on an ARM box for the past ~5 years, my experience has been pretty favorable. If there's a solid community following (which is a good bet with this product given the hype around it) the drivers should be a non-issue. Installation went very smoothly for me. Everything else, if it can get built from source, should be fine. On my box apt-get install "just works" for almost all of the software I use, and maybe 75% of make installs go smoothly with relatively little tinkering required. For getting actually work done, I use an x86 laptop. I wouldn't ever go back to using a netbook or any non-mainstream notebook with iffy linux support. It's just not worth your time to deal with technical issues. Buy the best tools that you can find (best being what works for you).
mtgx 14y ago
Ubuntu is probably the most optimized distro for the ARM architecture out there. Canonical is really pushing support for ARM.

gabemart 14y ago

>All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue. Does that really bear out? I like the idea of a low-powered netbook connecting to a high-powered server for development, but in my (very limited) experience it's a pain. I have two machines, and old laptop with an AMD RM-70 and a Thinkpad X41 with a Pentium M 1.6 Ghz. On both machines, using Firefox is a painful experience because the performance is so bad. Using chrome is pretty good. I've been thinking about buying a newer netbook with better battery life, but the performance of newer low-powered mobile CPUs doesn't seem that much greater than the systems I already have.

itry 14y ago
> Does that really bear out? Why wouldnt it? Been doing it for years now and cannot think of any other way of development anymore.
- smackfu 14y ago
  Depends on whether your use of Firefox is for Javascript or server-side scripting. Running heavy non-minified Javascript with caching disabled is much more pleasant on a fast machine.
  - 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
    Run Firefox on the server and export the display over the network to the weedy laptop. Depending on the technology used, exporting sound can be an hour of fiddling about to get it setup first time around.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      I'd rather get hit in the crotch than use Firefox over X forwarding. Slow on top of slow. There is some interesting work with NX and NX-like solutions that make it much more tolerable.
      - 3amOpsGuy 14y ago
        Haha :) I keep going back to X over SSH. Out of VNC, RDP and NX, VNC is the lame duck. Out of RDP & NX, both require extra software but RDP is more widely re-usable (virtual box, windows etc). The bandwidth requirements aren't the problem with X these days - a 3G connection at under 1Mbps real world is fine for reasonable display sizes, it's the round trip latency is the killer. It's such a chatty protocol, but on a LAN / WiFi it's fine and works out of the box with... scratch that, you need to install XQuartz separately since Mountain Lion. I almost forgot about that.
        14y ago

etherealG 14y ago

I think performance is still an issue. currently there are no gpu accelerated drivers if I understand correctly for non-chromeos linux, so until someone puts the effort into making that work.

rational_indian 14y ago
>non-chromeos linux Or you could just use the pre-installed linux kernel underneath a distribution of your choice.