[Coco] CocoPi3 "PacoOtaktay Winter 2017-2018 Edition" now available

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 23 November 2017 00:57:25 Ron Klein wrote:

> Hi Frank,
>
> As a quick follow-up to this, it looks like there is a Raspbian distro
> for the x86 platform.  That might make porting over what I've done for
> the RPi3 a bit easier.  I'll try to look at this as I get time.
>
> Thanks!

All this talk about the r-pi, the rpi3 TBE, makes me point out a couple 
things that are not so great about the r-pi3.

1. All i/o except the spi, has to find its way thru a very small, busier 
than that famous cat on the equaly famous tin roof usb-2 internal hub. 
It is running a medium sized metal lathe for me fairly well, because all 
the i/o to run the lathe is spi. Bertho Stultans put the finishing 
touches on the spi driver, so it writes 32 bit packets at 41 megabaud, 
and reads the 32 bit responses at 25 megabaud.  So it runs the machine 
fairly well. But you have to get keyboard and mouse stuff thru that 
usb-2 pinhole, while its reading and writing to the video and its sd 
card storage media, with the net result being keyboard and mouse events 
thrown away in wholesale quantity's. With several reboots, you can get 
all the ducks in a row and it will run for several days, but every 
reboot is a crap shoot to see if the keyboard and mouse work.

Theres a much better card out there now, quite new where the pi's are 
getting looooong in the tooth, from Pine, called the rock64.  I am 
running the raspbian version of debian 8, "jessie" on the pi. The rock64 
running ayufan's version of debian 9, "stretch", does not have this 
internal architecture pinhole, and is quite easily 10x faster than the 
pi, 20x or more for disk accesses. Essentially the same updates, 
security related stuff, took the pi nearly an hour to do this evening, 
whereas the rock64 was finished with a nearly identical update list in 
just 3 minutes. And both are sucking those updates over the same 10 
Megabaud circuit.

The rock64 is available with up to 4GB of ram for $44.

Be aware that until one of our linuxcnc guys digs into that spi driver, 
which is currently built to run only on the pi, will need to be tickled 
to run on a different set of header definition files before it will run 
on newer SoC hardware. And while each of these arm platforms has what is 
called pi compatible gpio, it takes a matching driver to do it.

But first you have to get the broadcom headers and excise the am I 
running on a pi checks in that are in that code now so it will run on 
something else. The existing linux spi driver is so speed limited its 
effectively broken.

What I am trying to say, is that there is lots better hardware out there 
than the pi's. In another 5 years, the pi's light will have burned out. 
Its popular because it was first, but IMNSHO, it set a very poor 
standard doing it. Put your porting efforts into more capable hardware.
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 11:20 PM, Ron Klein <ron at kdomain.org> wrote:
> > Hi Frank,
> >
> > One of the big benefits of working with the RPi3 is a standard
> > hardware platform to develop for.  I don't have to be concerned
> > about different video chipsets, video hardware acceleration
> > capability, etc..  That being said, the menu system and scripts I
> > developed would work with many Linux distributions.  In addition,
> > all the development tools/utilities should work without issue. 
> > Perhaps I can take a look at Lubuntu as a low overhead/resource
> > distribution for the PC as a base for "CocoPC3."
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 9:19 PM, Francis Swygert <farna at att.net> 
wrote:
> >> The latest release of CocoPi3 is now available. Dubbed the
> >> "PacoOtaktay Winter 2017-2018 Edition", it provides many updates
> >> and new features. Some of these include:
> >>
> >> Built on the latest Raspbian "stretch." ....
> >> =============================================
> >> Any chance of making a distribution on a more normal Linux that
> >> will run on a standard computer, not a Raspberry Pi? Would be nice
> >> to have a Live CD to boot up... I have an older laptop (P3 HP
> >> Omnibook 3000.. 512MB RAM) that would be a good candidate. Nice not
> >> to have X-windows and all that other high overhead stuff on one
> >> that is just used as a CoCo emulator. Frank Swygert
> >>  Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
> >>  803-604-6548
> >>
> >> --
> >> Coco mailing list
> >> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> >> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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