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Neil Williams wrote: > On Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:41:25 +0000 > Rob Beard <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >> On 10/01/2009 18:52, Brown Richard wrote: >> >>> Hi >>> >>> Some friends have been given a couple of lovely pink Elonex Netbooks. >>> >>> >>> No I don't know much about this product. >>> > > It is a MIPS architecture but not directly compatible with the current > Debian MIPS port (or the mipsel port). There are maybe 30 variants of > MIPS. > > >>> The os doesn't seem to play >>> youtube (something teenage girls want) and of course msn. Would you >>> suggest loading xubuntu or something different or is it possible to >>> get flash playing etc. >>> > > No. You can recompile gnash to work on the device once you have a > working free software OS on the machine or a cross-building toolchain > for that variant of MIPS on a faster machine but Flash is proprietary > and there is no possible way of compiling it for this or any platform > not supported by those with access to the source code. As ever, > access to the source code is everything. You have it with Gnash, you do > not with Flash. If you happen to use an architecture that Adobe can't > be bothered to support, tough. > > There is absolutely no prospect of getting any flavour of Ubuntu on it, > nor Fedora. The only distro with much chance is probably Debian but > even that isn't straightforward. With suitable changes, it is > apparently possible to get Debian onto the machine, albeit with a few > rebuilds of critical packages. It is not a trivial task - at the time I > had expected a group of maybe four or five Debian Developers to need > maybe a year to get it working properly. With recent improvements > within Emdebian, that time could be reduced but only at the expense of > removing the "simple" tasks and leaving only the complex tasks. > > >> Sadly they don't appear to have x86 compatible CPUs, they use some sort >> of RISC arcitecture instead (which I believe is MIPS based): >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elonex_ONEt >> > > It's not at all sad, x86 is a horrible architecture - it comes fully > loaded with a nightmare of legacy code like the need for BIOS and > memory management workarounds. Sensible architectures don't have a need > for black magic like that. IMHO, it would have been far better if Apple > had been willing and able to continue development of the powerpc > architecture instead of going backwards to the x86 but money talks, > at least for hardware. > > >> You may be able to get the MIPS version of Debian running on it, >> > > No. I did ask the Elonex people about obtaining precisely this machine > so that some work could be done on it to derive the particular kernel > configuration and toolchain tweaks to build a free OS for the machine. > Linux does run on the machine but only using their own configurations > which are not being released at the moment. > I'm a little confused. They have taken a GPLed bit of software, made changes to it (presumably - if not, then what have they done to get Linux working on it when the Debian lot would struggle for a year?), are releasing those changes to the public (by way of having it on the device) but are not releasing the source-code? Surely that's a violation of the GPL? Grant. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html