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On 19/01/12 20:46, bad apple wrote:
On 19/01/12 19:00, Gordon Henderson wrote:My experience over the years is that most people can not, and do not want to do a Windows/Linux/OSX install from scratch. They just don't care. They want to turn a computer on and have it "just work".Well, sure, but I thought we were talking in the context of installs on a Raspberry Pi board - if you're buying one for yourself, you better know how to be able to install linux yourself because you are REALLY not the target audience otherwise. Of course for the main intended audience (kids in school) then having a preinstalled SD card available would be really handy otherwise the poor kids will spend more time trying to figure out installation instead of actually learning programming or whatever on them. But even then, their teacher bloody better well know how to prep an image and have it ready to deploy or they are one seriously poor IT teacher.
I think that might describe maybe 50% of IT teachers out there these days. From the people I've spoken to involved in schools, the IT teacher seems to be the one who knows how to use MS Office. Luckily for some schools the IT Teachers are a bit more clued up.
And to respond to Gordon, yeah, the bootloader is cooked into the SoC firmware blob unfortunately
I wonder if in future revisions of the hardware, or even clones of the hardware if it would be possible to work around this, maybe with a different SOC?
I guess time will tell.
So that's fine then. Do you have a link to somewhere that gives details on the boot?Just search through the forums as above, there's plenty of stuff there already. Annoyingly, things aren't quite as clean as just do PXE and walk away, again thanks to the stupid Broadcom GPU bootloader code. PXE is x86/64 only just for a start and the GPU needs to bootstrap code from an SD card just to initialize itself (duh) but once you're there, it should be easily possible to boot a custom setup and use uboot/nfsroot-enabled-kernel-and-pivot/whatever to get some more flexibility. In my predicted usage model, having to constantly change stuff on the SD card is going to get old real quick - I'll be setting it to netboot ASAP and will then be feeding it multiple images/distros/experiments from a server. Being spoilt with ZFS+iSCSI has made me come to hate local storage full stop these days - everything should be on a snapshotting, copy on write backend (except laptops, obviously!).
Ahh guess I'll need to find another SD card, or maybe upgrade the one in my phone to something bigger and use the old one.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq