[IAEP] One Laptop per Child and Marvell Join Forces to Redefine Tablet Computing for Students Around the World

[Chris Ball]

Hi Peter,

   > There is an ARM port for Fedora, and it happens to work very well
   > with the Marvell ARM chips with at least two contributors from
   > Marvell helping out. The Fedora ARM port is good enough that it
   > was used straight up as the basis for the MeeGo ARM support. The
   > only thing that's missing is a kernel for the specific device as
   > the arm kernels can be very device specific but I doubt that will
   > be a major issue as that is currently the case for the XO-1 and
   > XO-1.5 (of course I wish its wasn't but there's still outstanding
   > kernel patches needed for event the XO-1).

Thanks.  I've been using the Fedora ARM packages on our Marvell board,
so I do know about their status -- what I meant by "no port" is that
it's not an official Fedora port, not even as a secondary architecture
yet.  I don't know whether it would be a good idea to ship product
with a Fedora remix based on a port that doesn't officially exist yet;
at the least, it would require a lot of work.

For example, there's no Fedora 13 release for ARM yet.  They're still
on F12.

   > The Fedora ARM movement is growing very quickly with a full koji
   > build farm of 20 odd buildsystems and an increasing community.

Unfortunately, as I understand it the koji build farm has been
dismantled, with some replacement machines on order, but I agree
that there's some promising momentum behind Fedora ARM.

   > From the gnome side I mostly agree, although the underlying infra
   > will be fully multitouch enabled with gnome 3. The issue with the
   > gnome 3 interface, which is relatively touch friendly, is its
   > dependence on 3D GPUs for the OpenGL rendering and the face that
   > the existence of open source 3D drivers on ARM is non existent
   > and even worse than the state of the x86 a year or two ago.

Our hardware only supports OpenGL-ES rather than OpenGL, so that's a
complicating factor too.

   > Let me know if you need help, or details of people from the
   > Fedora side who could assist.

Thanks!  I'm already spending time with the #fedora-arm folks, and we
are considering trying to use Fedora all the same.  It's not an easy
decision, though.

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child