[colug-432] Fwd: Re: Debian on Pi

[Rick Troth]

I'd like to hear more about this.

Sounds like supporting "hard float" was/is way more complicated with ARM
than the hard/soft float support back in the pre-Pentium days.  I still
have a 486 "SX" which requires math emulation.  But on INTeL x86 series HW,
that's a boolean flag when building the kernel.  No need to re-compile the
apps.  (Unless I have missed something profound.)


-- R; <><




On May 5, 2013 12:11 PM, <lhowell at speakeasy.net> wrote:
>
>
> >The primary difference between the Raspbian and Debian images is that
> Raspbian is hard-float and Debian is soft-float.  Debian will work fine,
> but at the cost of a performance hit.  The Pi ARM11 hardware does well for
> what it is, but needs all the help from the OS it can get so I'd choose HF.
>  I followed the creation of Raspbian vian discussions on the debian-arm
> mailing list, which was a six month effort as the Debian "wheezy" source
> for 35000+ packages was rebuilt for the ARM11 v6 ABI instead of the normal
> ARM9 v7 ABI.  Much of the time was spent fixing hard-float issues.  The
> Cambridge team was very time constrained and chose the more expedient path
> of building with soft-float.
> >My wife gave me two Pi's for Christmas.  One is my media server running
> the Pi version of openELEC (openelec.tv) and I used to other one to pass
> the Kalamazoo winter evenings experimenting with different OS images.  If
> you want a minimal headless OS I suggest looking at
> http://www.pi-point.co.uk/raspbian-minimal/ which is the standard
> Raspbian HF image with about 75% of the packages stripped.  You can start
> small and add whatever you like from the Raspbian repo.
> >SD cards are a sticky issue, and a discussion for another time.  The Pi
> demands quality cards.  I've had good luck with SanDisk Mobile microSDHC
> 4GB cards (4.99 at MC).  I don't worry too much about the class rating.
>  That rating criteria is for handling relatively large files on cameras,
> not the much smaller files on an embedded device like the Pi.
> >
> >Larry
> >
> >
>
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