Build a 64 Bit ARM Odroid-C2 Ubuntu or Android Desktop for $40
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PCWorld reports on Hardkernel's upcoming "to be released on" March 4th 64 bit ARM Cortex-A53 based Odroid-C2 single board computer (SBC) capable of running either Ubuntu 16.04 Linux (set to release in April) or Android as a desktop system. The little $40 board has 2GB of RAM and has integrated ARM Mali-450 MP3 GPU capable of processing h.265 4K video at 60fps!
For $40 this sounds like a very interesting low power, low cost Linux desktop option with built in HDMI 2.0, GigE and USB!
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It looks great, but main problem with this Raspberry alternatives is the support.
Rapberry PI support community is amazing.
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@iroal said:
It looks great, but main problem with this Raspberry alternatives is the support.
Rapberry PI support community is amazing.
Depends on what you want to use it for. For me I would get one just to run Kodi for now, so as long as it just works i'm happy
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@iroal said:
It looks great, but main problem with this Raspberry alternatives is the support.
Rapberry PI support community is amazing.
How much support do you feel that you need for an SBC?
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I can't wait till these kinds of devices have 4GB RAM, to me that will be the big leap to "this is my new desktop."
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@scottalanmiller said:
@iroal said:
It looks great, but main problem with this Raspberry alternatives is the support.
Rapberry PI support community is amazing.
How much support do you feel that you need for an SBC?
Almost everything you want to do with the Raspberry has support.
In my case was very easy to install all the services, Samba, Ftp, Mail, Transmission... thanks to all the tutorials you can find in Google.
Also from http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals you can view all the Hardware compatible with Rasperry, very very useful.
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@iroal said:
Almost everything you want to do with the Raspberry has support.
But all you want to do is to install the OS.
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@iroal said:
In my case was very easy to install all the services, Samba, Ftp, Mail, Transmission... thanks to all the tutorials you can find in Google.
Those are all applications on the OS, though. Not related to the Raspberry Pi. It's just a computer. You don't get tutorials on that stuff specific to every piece of hardware.
I find the RP community to be very weird and they seem to regularly confuse their hardware with an OS.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@iroal said:
In my case was very easy to install all the services, Samba, Ftp, Mail, Transmission... thanks to all the tutorials you can find in Google.
Those are all applications on the OS, though. Not related to the Raspberry Pi. It's just a computer. You don't get tutorials on that stuff specific to every piece of hardware.
I find the RP community to be very weird and they seem to regularly confuse their hardware with an OS.
Most of us are amateurs, who haven't ever wanted to mess with computers before. To most of us, it's all the same thing.
I had thought we had already commoditised computers at $200 for a laptop. I was wrong. I've never been a great educator, and that is one wall I really don't want to try scaling.
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@travisdh1 said:
Most of us are amateurs, who haven't ever wanted to mess with computers before.
In the RP community? That seems odd. It's definitely on the power user end of the scale. Non-standard, RISC computer with a LOT less hand holding than a normal PC.
But the community seems to approach it very strangely. In the PC world, people expect "how to install an app" to be app/OS specific (how to do this on Windows.) But in the RP world seem to look at the hardware very strangely. If you install Windows on there, doesn't that break all of those assumptions?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@travisdh1 said:
Most of us are amateurs, who haven't ever wanted to mess with computers before.
In the RP community? That seems odd. It's definitely on the power user end of the scale. Non-standard, RISC computer with a LOT less hand holding than a normal PC.
But the community seems to approach it very strangely. In the PC world, people expect "how to install an app" to be app/OS specific (how to do this on Windows.) But in the RP world seem to look at the hardware very strangely. If you install Windows on there, doesn't that break all of those assumptions?
Oh, the platform itself is very much power user side. It was also meant as a learning platform, and let's just say that we have lots of people learning.
It's actually incredibly frustrating seeing how so many people use them. More often than not they should just be using a $4 embedded processor rather than a general purpose computing device. Trying to get them to actually use proper terms for things would help a lot for sure.
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@travisdh1 said:
It was also meant as a learning platform, and let's just say that we have lots of people learning.
Always surprised by that too. People say they want to learn Linux and instead of directing people to Linux, they get directed to learning ARM hardware half the time these days. Why someone would learn new hardware in order to learn an OS blows my mind. Nothing like confusing people when they are trying to learn Linux. They'll never figure out what is what.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I can't wait till these kinds of devices have 4GB RAM, to me that will be the big leap to "this is my new desktop."
I was thinking the exact same thing.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I can't wait till these kinds of devices have 4GB RAM, to me that will be the big leap to "this is my new desktop."
I was thinking the exact same thing.
Even just web browsing often needs that these days.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I can't wait till these kinds of devices have 4GB RAM, to me that will be the big leap to "this is my new desktop."
I was thinking the exact same thing.
Even just web browsing often needs that these days.
I had around 30 tabs open on Friday - Firefox was eating nearly 3 gigs of RAM. Currently this system only has 4 GB RAM - that was a painful afternoon.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@travisdh1 said:
It was also meant as a learning platform, and let's just say that we have lots of people learning.
Always surprised by that too. People say they want to learn Linux and instead of directing people to Linux, they get directed to learning ARM hardware half the time these days. Why someone would learn new hardware in order to learn an OS blows my mind. Nothing like confusing people when they are trying to learn Linux. They'll never figure out what is what.
I'm confused. Are you saying that learning Linux on R Pie isn't necessarily a good place to learn it?
There definitely seems to be a misconception around the use of R Pies and special requirements when it comes to running apps (I had this misconception until right this min) - but as Scott said, Assuming the OS is the same on R Pie vs x86/x64 - the software would be nearly identical if not identical when it comes to setup and admin commands.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm confused. Are you saying that learning Linux on R Pie isn't necessarily a good place to learn it?
Unless RP is the only system you have ever known, that's the worst place to learn it. If you don't know architectures well, you will confuse what is Linux vs. Windows rather than ARM vs AMD64.
If you want to learn X, the first thing you never do is go out and start learning Y. Using RP to learn Linux is total misdirection. It adds zero value but adds many stumbling blocks.
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@Dashrender said:
There definitely seems to be a misconception around the use of R Pies and special requirements when it comes to running apps (I had this misconception until right this min) - but as Scott said, Assuming the OS is the same on R Pie vs x86/x64 - the software would be nearly identical if not identical when it comes to setup and admin commands.
The differences between Linux on ARM and Linux on AMD64 is the same as the differences to Power8, Sparc or Itanium. If someone wanted to learn about Linux, we'd never tell them to go buy a non-standard RISC or EPIC server to begin, right? We'd throw them on a VM and tell them to get started with as few differences as needed so that they can get right to learning.
Sending someone to RP to Learn Linux is like telling someone that the first step to learning history is to learn to speak French. Having to learn a new language is going to be a barrier to studying history for the first, you know, decade or so and is totally random.
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Now, on that rare case where someone is ONLY familiar with ARM hardware and has no experience with a PC, then the opposite might be true. Telling them to go learn PC hardware before learning Linux would be strange as well. People should learn where they are familiar, for the most part.
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Then there is the additional issue that there is no enterprise Linux on ARM today. There will be soon, but it won't be Raspberry Pi hardware, either. So learning ARM hardware installations for learning how to run a Linux server is not good as the skills that people will need in the workforce is Linux on Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware.
So RP isn't just random "non-standard" and "unknown" hardware, it is also specifically non-applicable hardware to the arena for which the purpose of learning Linux is normally needed. It's specifically a hobby platform, not a business one.
The degree to which the RP is the worst possible option for learning an OS is pretty dramatic.
