<div dir="ltr"><p>I'd like to hear more about this. <br></p><p>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.) <br>
</p><p><br></p><p>-- R; <><<br></p><p><br><br><br></p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On May 5, 2013 12:11 PM, <<a href="mailto:lhowell@speakeasy.net" target="_blank">lhowell@speakeasy.net</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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>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.<br>
>My wife gave me two Pi's for Christmas. One is my media server running the Pi version of openELEC (<a href="http://openelec.tv" target="_blank">openelec.tv</a>) 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 <a href="http://www.pi-point.co.uk/raspbian-minimal/" target="_blank">http://www.pi-point.co.uk/raspbian-minimal/</a> 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.<br>
>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.<br>
><br>
>Larry<br>
><br>
><br>
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