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Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform
Canonical has
announced
a plan to put Ubuntu onto the ARM architecture.
"ARM and Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced that they will bring the full UbuntuŽ Desktop operating system to the ARMv7 processor architecture to address demand from device manufacturers. The addition of the new operating system will enable new netbooks and hybrid computers, targeting energy-efficient ARMŽ technology-based SoCs, to deliver a rich, always-connected, mobile computing experience, without compromising battery life."
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Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 6:46 UTC (Fri) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
Awesome idea.
I hope this will help Ubuntus resource hunger in general.
But the headline has Canonical and Ubuntu in it so it is reasonable to exspect Jspaleta to come along and write long winded posts about Ubuntu being a money scam from Europe and Mark being the devil himself etc. ;)
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 7:26 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
You were doing so well.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 17:39 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Speak of the devil and he will appear.
Nokia already had a working port of Ubuntu for an ARMv5 and ARMv6 chip.
http://mojo.handhelds.org/distributions
Here's a question for you... why did Nokia need to do that work outside of the existing Ubuntu infrastructure..forcing it to play games with naming?
Why did the official Ubuntu ARM porting require Canonical to 'lead' it?
Isn't Ubuntu a community effort? Isn't there room for other business interest other than Canonical to walk in to the community and lead a port effort that makes since to them? Why does the Ubuntu community need to wait for Canonical to appear on the scene and 'officially 'lead' an ARM porting effort? The effort was already underway inside the Ubuntu community..Mojo is part of the Ubuntu community..even if its not aligned with Canonical's business plans. Ubuntu!=Canonical.
But Canonical's tight centralized control over the Ubuntu brand and its build infrastructure doesn't allow other members... more productive members...to build on the Ubuntu community brand. So Ubuntu community members who are not getting a Canonical paycheck I ask you this. Why isn't Mojo already a part of the Ubuntu family? You want Ubuntu ported to ARM right? They've done it...and it works on existing devices like Nokia's n810. Isn't that what you want to see? Why on earth isn't your project leadership making it easier to support that effort inside the Ubuntu community umbrella?
So Canonical has announced its support for ARMv7... okay. Is it going to also allow the ARMv5 and ARMv6 Ubuntu ports that Mojo has already succeeded at doing to be part of the Ubuntu family? Or is Ubuntu only big enough to support Canonical's current business plans?
I think the Ubuntu community should ask their own leadership the same question that the Mojo developers ask here:
Canonical going to lead the ARMv5 and ARMv6 effort...and if not...will the Ubuntu community be allowed to integrate the Mojo effort in a more official way?
-jef
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 17:52 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
So kragil was right. I had hoped that good taste might prevail this time. Do you not have something constructive to do somewhere? All the sour grapes attitudes I see expressed these days by Fedora guys do nothing to improve Fedora's position or image. And the obvious distro partisanship is reminiscent of the fragmentation of Unix in the 80s.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 18:29 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Are you saying that the Mojo effort shouldn't be rolled into the Ubuntu community umbrella?
Nokia is on record about the benefits of porting the existing Ubuntu software repository onto ARM instead of making their own distribution..again.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7548149165.html
Why on earth isn't the Ubuntu community leadership jumping up and down to get Mojo integrated directly into Ubuntu?
How is it sour grapes for me to talk about Canonical's lack of support of Mojo to date? Nokia wants Ubuntu...they are bending over backwards to port Ubuntu to the CPUs in their devices..outside of the Ubuntu release process. Pointing that out doesn't help Fedora in the slightly. It helps Nokia n800 and n810 owners however as it gives them another distribution option.
What would be sour grapes would for me to go over to Mojo and encourage them to take a look at Fedora's open and extendable build infrastructure, the expanded and more liberal Fedora trademark guidelines and to encourage them to support Fedora's ARM porting efforts by getting involved directly in that effort. But I haven't done that. I could though if that is what is expected of me.
Mojo is a port of Ubuntu to ARM...an existing port...to existing devices. It's not a press release about a port which will happen next year. Credit where credit is due...Canonical is really good with press releases.
Why isn't it part of the Ubuntu offerings? Why can't Mojo officially use the Ubuntu brand or infrastructure so these ARM ports can be released syncronized with the other arches? Isn't that a problem the Ubuntu community should want to see solved? Nokia actually contributes to upstream projects. Having them involved in Ubuntu in a more direct fashion would be a win-win-win for everyone..except maybe Canonical's own business interests.
-jef
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 13:33 UTC (Sat) by mdz@debian.org (subscriber, #14112) [Link]
(speaking informally on behalf of Canonical)
If you were to take a closer look at the handhelds.org port, you'd see that your question doesn't make sense. What Canonical is doing (creating an official, repeatable, source-level port of Ubuntu to ARM) is substantially different from what has been done at handhelds.org (recompiling Ubuntu source packages with minimal changes).
It doesn't make any more sense to "roll Mojo into Ubuntu" than it does to "roll CentOS into RHEL".
We're pleased that the Mojo project exists, and has helped to promote the use of Ubuntu in embedded environments. An official Ubuntu port should only make their work much, much easier, and bring more people into the Ubuntu ARM community.
You can read about what handhelds.org did here: http://mojo.handhelds.org/overview
You can read their announcement of support for Canonical's work here: http://mojo.handhelds.org/node/68
...and you can spare us all this drivel.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 21:28 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Let me put a finer point on it because I may be confused. The press release mentions only ARMv7.. but a blog post on planet ubuntu mentions that to get to ARMv7 a bootstrap ARMv5 environment may be required.
ref: http://idlethread.blogspot.com/2008/11/ubuntu-on-arm_14.html
Is Canonical committing to opening up official Ubuntu ports for ARMv5 and ARMv6 that can use the existing Ubuntu branding, and shared release cycle?
Or is this just an ARMv7 offering?
If Canonical isn't committing to offering ARMv5 and ARMv6 ports under the Ubuntu community brand... why not?
If Canonical isn't committing to offering ARMv5 and ARMv6 ports under the Ubuntu community brand... can you (informally on behalf of Canonical) outline the steps that interested Ubuntu community people would need to take in order to make ARMv5 and ARMv6 ports official Ubuntu offerings which get access to the trademarks and the cna participate in the release cycle and community qa initatives ?
-jef
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 23:30 UTC (Sat) by mdz@debian.org (subscriber, #14112) [Link]
As Amit explained in the blog post you've referred to, the port currently in progress does in fact target ARMv5 as a baseline and selectively optimize for ARMv7.
The steps to use the official bits on ARMv5 or ARMv6 should be, well, none at all. Much of the initial development work has been done on ARMv5 devices because they're plentiful, and I expect that much of the ARM community will be testing Ubuntu on ARMv5 devices until ARMv7 devices become more widely available.
I can't comment on any future plans.
If you have further questions, you're welcome to ask them (politely) on the ubuntu-mobile mailing list.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 23:50 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
testing Ubuntu on ARMv5...does that mean there will be an ARMv5 Ubuntu "release"? You didn't actually say, and I'm not going to assume "testing" means "release". It could mean a PPA for all I know. If there is going to be an ARMv5 release... just throw out another press release.. or and addendum...or an announcement on a mailinglist anywhere that can be referenced for n810 owners who aspire to run Ubuntu.
Failing that is there going to be something for ARMv5/ARMv6 like the non-supported community powerpc/sparc ports already open inside Ubuntu?
ref: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/intrepid/release/
-jef"always polite"spaleta
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 20, 2008 8:30 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (guest, #2750) [Link]
"on the ubuntu-mobile mailing list." See https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-mobile
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 18:31 UTC (Fri) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
As others have pointed out multiple times, you are trolling again jef. If you put 1/2 of the effort into fixing bugs in fedora or open source projects that you do on trolling Ubuntu/Canonical the world would be a better place.
Read that last sentence a few times before typing another biased comment. We don't hate on fedora because they like to break Nvidia with bleeding edge X releases do we? Nope. So grow up and get some work done that helps everyone.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 1:03 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
You are spreading misinformation now.
Fedora does not "like to break Nvidia drivers". That's a silly statement. When latest Xorg releases change the ABI, Fedora developers cannot fix the Nvidia proprietary driver to match the ABI change like they can and do for many of the other open source drivers including the open source Nvidia nv driver. Nvidia has a policy of waiting for a major distribution to include a new Xorg release in a distribution first before they update their proprietary drivers to match.
So either Fedora can wait for other distributions to include the latest Xorg release and get the blame for "breaking Nvidia drivers" or Fedora can go ahead and include it for the benefit of everyone. I think, the choice Fedora has made benefits everybody and there is no reason to hate them for it.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 16:12 UTC (Sat) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]
This pair of comments has been on LWN before, didn't it? (or maybe this is the strongest deja-vu I ever had).
Anyway, I guess this is true, someone has to break things first.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 7:35 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]
They shoulda fix their existing bugs before seeking new ones.
features vs bugs Posted Nov 17, 2008 11:59 UTC (Mon) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]
Maybe we should aim for zero bugs, but most people (including you, given that you're using a web browser) prefer to have software that mostly works than to stick to bug-free software.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 7:41 UTC (Fri) by yarikoptic (subscriber, #36795) [Link]
yeay -- finally they will sync ARM(EL) architectures from Debian as well! Probably they need to wait a bit so that fresh packages which came out of "Debian on Freerunner" project (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnFreeRunner) mature a bit ;-)
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 9:57 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (guest, #2750) [Link]
Debian's ARM port and the FreeRunner devices are ARMv4, Ubuntu is targetting ARMv7, so there's a bit of difference. I think it's nice that Debian stays as the "universal" operating system and Ubuntu targets some specific sector, as before.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 16:10 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well I suppose that means the vast majority of Ubuntu's porting effort will be to take deb-src files and change the make flags from '-march=armv4' to '-march=armv7'.
Not that I know a whole lot about ARM...
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 17, 2008 8:19 UTC (Mon) by Ze (guest, #54182) [Link]
I've had experience with ARM in the past (Cirrus Logic EP9315) , It's an ARMv4T instruction set and unfortunately the support for them was pretty poor. If it'd been an ARMv5 chip support was much easier. Debian supported that as well as build root and open embedded from memory.
We ended up going x86 (currently 500mhz Geode). We weren't impressed with cirrus logics embedded linux offering (or their support and porting efforts). Whilst the x86 is an ugly instruction set , the support out there x86 for is beautiful from a developers standpoint. When it comes to linux, most of the code is developed and tested on x86 and it gets far more visibility than other architectures. I can develop on my laptop , test on it and be pretty confident I've got most of the basic bugs out , and then test on the embedded device and find the remainder. If the architectures were different then I'd feel much less confident.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 8:55 UTC (Fri) by rbertran (guest, #41295) [Link]
What about PPC based devices? ...
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 9:02 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
There used to be a PPC port... Now you'll need to look for Yellow Dog Linux (http://us.fixstars.com/products/ydl/) if you need one.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 9:34 UTC (Fri) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
You can get daily snapshot install media for PowerPC here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/daily/current/
There is both Mac/PPC and PlayStation 3 ISO images. Note that these are not live CD installers like the main releases, but instead are debian-installer based.
These ports don't have the same level of support as the main release architectures.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 11:56 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (guest, #2750) [Link]
More proper link to give is the release directory http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/8.10/release/. The dailies will eventually start to be again dailies from the development tree, but the release stays.
The release if of course an unofficial port, but there are people fixing stuff there and hoping for semi-good releases. For example the PS3 port saw a lot of fixing this time around, and 8.10 is now the first release for PS3 after a special 7.10 remix version.
As for PowerPC, I'd personally go for Debian, though.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 16:12 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I used Debian PPC for a few years as my main system. Worked very well. As I understand it Fedora had good PPC support, also. Although of course the vast majority of RPMs were x86-only while Debian made sure to have pretty much all of it's deb files available on all the platforms it supported.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 17:05 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
On my Fedora development box mere seconds ago:
repoquery --repoid=rawhide-ppc --qf "%{NAME}" -a --archlist=ppc,ppc32,ppc64,noarch|sort -u|wc -l
repoquery --repoid=rawhide --qf "%{NAME}" -a --archlist=i386,i586,i686,noarch|sort -u|wc -l
I do the sort -u to drop duplicates which maybe compiled for specific arch targets like kernels and a few library packages.
Yes there is a difference between 11411 and 11201. And indeed 11411 is a bigger number than 11201. But I have a hard time getting my head around the idea that 11411 is vastly larger than 11201.
-jef
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 18:27 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Fedora depends a lot more on 3rd party repositories to provide software then Debian does. I know that Fedora does a good job providing packages for the architectures that it supports, but third party repos generally only support packages on platforms that are immediately avialable to the individual that has setup the repo.
To get a rought idea of the difference synaptic says that there are 25556 packages avialable for my system. Numbers are not directly comparible, unfortunately.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 19:26 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Oh so your complaint was about 3rd party repositories not support ppc equitably. Oh sorry. Here are those numbers for rpmfusion
repoquery --repoid=rpmfusion-free-rawhide-ppc --qf "%{NAME}" -a --archlist=ppc,ppc32,ppc64,noarch|sort -u|wc -l
repoquery --repoid=rpmfusion-free-rawhide --qf "%{NAME}" -a --archlist=i386,i586,i686|sort -u|wc -l
Again I'm really not seeing a vast superior number. There is a difference yes.. but its not a "vast majority". And even then the difference in numbers has to be examined on a case by case basis. Somethings make sense as being missing on one arch compared to another:
Though I would enjoy seeing a comparison of the number of binary packages in ppc versus x86 in any Deb branch. Care to provide those numbers?
Now if your argument is that Debian just has a lot more packages for whatever arch you can think of. No argument. The Debian community has been grinding away at this for a long long time. I raise a glass to their continued success at being a stable linux platform and with a breathtakingly wide scope and depth of community involvement. I will sleep soundly knowing that even if every other single linux distribution effort flames out, the Debian community will still be there.
But I really don't think the numbers back up the claim that ppc package collection in than the x86 collection in Fedora..no matter how you want to come at it. And that doesn't come without a cost. We have a dedicated group of ppc contributors who do a really good job of fixing bugs and getting ppc patches submitted to upstream projects so everyone can benefit...including Debian.
We always seem to shake loose fascinating issues when the compiler toolchain revs and we need to do mass rebuilds. When those issues are ppc specific, our ppc contributors are there helping other maintainers who do not have direct access to ppc hardware. I'm pretty sure I've had to rely on them more than once for one of my packages that was not building in ppc during a development phase. Niche arch specific knowledge is hard to come by, Fedora's ppc support is a direct result of the dedication of the ppc knowledgable contributors we have onboard in the community. It's not a business directive to keep supporting ppc or not in Fedora...its a community effort.
-jef
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 20:14 UTC (Fri) by adj (subscriber, #7401) [Link]
> Though I would enjoy seeing a comparison of the number of binary packages in ppc versus x86 in any Deb branch. Care to provide those numbers?
$ for dist in stable testing unstable; do for section in main contrib non-free; do for arch in i386 powerpc; do wget -q -O /tmp/debian-${dist}-${section}-${arch}-Packages.bz2 ftp://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/${dist}/${section}/binary-${arch}/Packages.bz2; echo -e Package count in ${dist} ${section} ${arch}: \\c; bzip2 -dc /tmp/debian-${dist}-${section}-${arch}-Packages.bz2 | grep -c "^Package: "; done; done; done
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 20:37 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Great thanks. I'm not seeing a grossly different trend there versus Fedora. ppc trends a little lower than x86 even for Debian.
Assuming my math is right....the ratio of ppc/x86 binaries is:
x > y : Debian wins, and I'm okay with that.
Saying anything more than that will require some detailed analysis which will get really complicated fast..due to packaging convention differences across the distributions.
It would be interesting to pick apart the differences between i386 and ppc in Debian unstable compared to fedora rawhide..comparing the set of missing packages in ppc. Assuming those distribution branches share a reasonably common build chain currently, that might help identify obvious distro specific patchset that should be evaluated by upstream and horse-traded across the distribution lines.
-jef
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 14, 2008 21:14 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Like I said before I think Fedora does a good job.
Also I am coming from user experience from a few years ago, so it seems like things have gotten better.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 1:37 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Also, Fedora users don't need to depend on many third party repositories. For users needing patent encumbered non-free software they used to go to Livna. Now they can go to RPMFusion instead which is a merger of many such third party repositories re-using much of the infrastructure bits developed within Fedora. The maintainers are usually involved with Fedora as well so there isn't much of a difference overall including PPC support. The difference from Debian is that such a repository is split away completely and is a independent effort not included or enabled by default, in part due to legal reasons.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 2:43 UTC (Sat) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link]
The thing I have enjoyed most about LWN as a reader is that the posters and their comments have historically been calm and informative, even when disagreeing. Over the past few months that has steadily been eroding. Whether it's because of Fedora/Ubuntu animosity or not, there has been a rise in people being insulting with each other. LWN commenting has descended into the realm of other forums where there are tribes and flame wars about the same things over and over.
People from outside your organisation will not understand it as well. We are intelligent people here, and should face the reality that two intelligent people can look at the same information and come to different, but reasonable, conclusions. There is no need for all that stupid sniping and the little digs that imply people are doing misinformation or trolling, even if you think they might be. Saying so is ignored (at best), or escalates things in a way of no benefit to anyone.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform Posted Nov 15, 2008 3:27 UTC (Sat) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
Yes, LWN has had a good long run of polite posting. Let's hope we keep it up for another ten years.
Regards,
Zooko
P.S. I'm sure I could have done better myself, a few times, and I will try to.
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