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I think the great advantage the Raspberry Pi has over the Mk802 and other Allwinner A10 based devices right now is the community resources. Let's say I wanted

by sciurus 14y ago

I think the great advantage the Raspberry Pi has over the Mk802 and other Allwinner A10 based devices right now is the community resources. Let's say I wanted to install Debian on the Raspberry Pi. I can go to http://www.raspbian.org/ http://www.raspbian.org/ and find a healthy project and well-organized documentation. What if I wanted to install it on the MK802? After a lot of googling and skimming results, I'd probably end up at http://linux-sunxi.org/Debian http://linux-sunxi.org/Debian if I wanted to build the bootloader, kernel, and root filesystem myself or http://forum.doozan.com/list.php?6 http://forum.doozan.com/list.php?6 if I trusted somebody else's work. The experience is very different. This is why I'm hoping http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod succeeds. I think what they plan to do is exactly what the A10 platform needs to succeeed with hobbyists- Maintain a community forum and wiki Provide source for everything we create and share it on Github. Provide a package repository for the PengPods. Provide prebuilt images, with updates as available. Provide tools, scripts and guides as we go.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
The Allwinner A10 is being outpaced by its competition for the same price. It's too weak and anyone watching this space knows how far to bet on Allwinner for anything.
neverm0re 14y ago
Community resources? The Raspberry Pi has almost zero hardware documentation, a closed black box controlled by a massive binary blob and an absolutely despotic PR disaster named Liz Upton who actively insults and derides developers and others in the RPi community. Here's a fun excerpt from http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 : Liz: ... keep trying to rustle up some outrage if it gives you a kick; I’d recommend finding something else to do soon, though. We don’t want you developing an ulcer. Developer: Am I allowed to be outraged by the fact that it’s not really open, since I see no mention of actual documentation for the hardware? Or by this: http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ ? Can I get outraged by that? Liz: Well you /could/, but you wouldn’t half look silly. Nice going, Liz. That's right, anyone who actually wants to make full utilization of the hardware they paid for is 'silly' and we're only rustling up outrage for 'kicks' when you post a press release announcing how open source you really aren't. Here, have a nine page thread of people complaining they were banned under weak, insane excuses like 'concern trolling' because they dared to mention things like 'your supplier isn't sending me anything' and 'My SD card gets corrupted when I unplug the device sometimes': https://www.element14.com/community/thread/20081 https://www.element14.com/community/thread/20081 It's got massive hype since it's a $35 Beagleboard, but otherwise it's bringing nothing new to the table that hasn't been done by others and increasingly done better by other devices. The remainder of the situation seems to be a collection of people more interested in their awards, hype and press releases than their actual users and developers on their forums. Frankly, there's quite a few ARM SoC boards out there with GPIO pins and all the bells and whistles of the Pi, many of them have even beefier hardware. None of them have this horrible baggage and all of them will run the same software for the most part. So that's great that many people are going to target this device, but it's hardly an 'exclusive port' to the RPi. The real bet to back is Linux on ARM. Personally, this board gets me much more hot than the RPi and prices are only going to come down on similar future boards: http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- iuguy 14y ago
  Hmmmm... That's a bit shady, especially charging for MPEG-2 support and other codecs. Not quite sure what they're getting at there.
  - neverm0re 14y ago
    It's pretty simple. The RPi is an advertising campaign for Broadcom's VideoCore IV processor, which is part of why the RPi is so cheap. Broadcom is uncomfortable with the reality that software is eating hardware, so they've decided to artificially bolster the value of their hardware by selling it back to you incrementally with their own buggy software. Until they lose interest in maintaining it, of course.
  - noob1 14y ago
    So paying for a mpeg-2 licenses is shady? wtf?
  - jws 14y ago
    Why shouldn't the people tha want to use the MPEG-2 patents pay the license fees? I don't play MPEG-2 on any of my RPis and am fine not paying them for those those that want to use that format.
    - neverm0re 14y ago
      Except that totally overlooks the fact there are parts of the world where they could implement their own MPEG-2 decoder legally as they do not have software patents. Instead, because of this blob system without documentation they're forced to pay for it. How is this in any way not contrary to goals of education?
      - jws 14y ago
        "Perfect" will be great. Here in 2012 we don't have good performing GPUs with open documentation available for integration. This is what we can have now. It sucks a bit. I don't see it changing anytime soon. That's most of the reason I supported Parallela. That promises to be open, it probably won't be as much power as a nice GPU, but I want to compute with that hardware, and more problems will fit better. Plus I won't get trapped in some flawed API that has weird black boxes bugs and unpredictable performance issues.
mongol 14y ago
I agree with this. Raspberry Pi has a community momentum. Looking at every aspect of its hardware, it might not be the best, but it has the momentum to overcome it.

by sciurus 14y ago

drivebyacct2 14y ago

The Allwinner A10 is being outpaced by its competition for the same price. It's too weak and anyone watching this space knows how far to bet on Allwinner for anything.

neverm0re 14y ago

Community resources? The Raspberry Pi has almost zero hardware documentation, a closed black box controlled by a massive binary blob and an absolutely despotic PR disaster named Liz Upton who actively insults and derides developers and others in the RPi community. Here's a fun excerpt from http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 : Liz: ... keep trying to rustle up some outrage if it gives you a kick; I’d recommend finding something else to do soon, though. We don’t want you developing an ulcer. Developer: Am I allowed to be outraged by the fact that it’s not really open, since I see no mention of actual documentation for the hardware? Or by this: http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ ? Can I get outraged by that? Liz: Well you /could/, but you wouldn’t half look silly. Nice going, Liz. That's right, anyone who actually wants to make full utilization of the hardware they paid for is 'silly' and we're only rustling up outrage for 'kicks' when you post a press release announcing how open source you really aren't. Here, have a nine page thread of people complaining they were banned under weak, insane excuses like 'concern trolling' because they dared to mention things like 'your supplier isn't sending me anything' and 'My SD card gets corrupted when I unplug the device sometimes': https://www.element14.com/community/thread/20081 https://www.element14.com/community/thread/20081 It's got massive hype since it's a $35 Beagleboard, but otherwise it's bringing nothing new to the table that hasn't been done by others and increasingly done better by other devices. The remainder of the situation seems to be a collection of people more interested in their awards, hype and press releases than their actual users and developers on their forums. Frankly, there's quite a few ARM SoC boards out there with GPIO pins and all the bells and whistles of the Pi, many of them have even beefier hardware. None of them have this horrible baggage and all of them will run the same software for the most part. So that's great that many people are going to target this device, but it's hardly an 'exclusive port' to the RPi. The real bet to back is Linux on ARM. Personally, this board gets me much more hot than the RPi and prices are only going to come down on similar future boards: http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

iuguy 14y ago
Hmmmm... That's a bit shady, especially charging for MPEG-2 support and other codecs. Not quite sure what they're getting at there.
- neverm0re 14y ago
  It's pretty simple. The RPi is an advertising campaign for Broadcom's VideoCore IV processor, which is part of why the RPi is so cheap. Broadcom is uncomfortable with the reality that software is eating hardware, so they've decided to artificially bolster the value of their hardware by selling it back to you incrementally with their own buggy software. Until they lose interest in maintaining it, of course.
- noob1 14y ago
  So paying for a mpeg-2 licenses is shady? wtf?
- jws 14y ago
  Why shouldn't the people tha want to use the MPEG-2 patents pay the license fees? I don't play MPEG-2 on any of my RPis and am fine not paying them for those those that want to use that format.
  - neverm0re 14y ago
    Except that totally overlooks the fact there are parts of the world where they could implement their own MPEG-2 decoder legally as they do not have software patents. Instead, because of this blob system without documentation they're forced to pay for it. How is this in any way not contrary to goals of education?
    - jws 14y ago
      "Perfect" will be great. Here in 2012 we don't have good performing GPUs with open documentation available for integration. This is what we can have now. It sucks a bit. I don't see it changing anytime soon. That's most of the reason I supported Parallela. That promises to be open, it probably won't be as much power as a nice GPU, but I want to compute with that hardware, and more problems will fit better. Plus I won't get trapped in some flawed API that has weird black boxes bugs and unpredictable performance issues.

mongol 14y ago

I agree with this. Raspberry Pi has a community momentum. Looking at every aspect of its hardware, it might not be the best, but it has the momentum to overcome it.