I think you have hit it closely. I like my Dreamplug and hope to go onto more different types of hardware, but it seems everyone of the platforms have proprietary hardware of "intellectual property" associated with the device. Until we can get manufacturers to build these with open hardware, we will have problems getting the complete box to work properly. That's the biggest rub for not going with Linux is some things just don't work out of the box, because of this. Of course Debian doesn't want if if we don't have open source, which I understand. But it takes us to complain, and loudly, to try and shift the manufacturers to our side.
Another problem is that I would like to be able to run these plug computers on towers outside. Here in the Arizona desert it easily goes above 115 deg. With a top of 122 one year, so I'd like to be able to purchase equipment that would survive here without having to build an air conditioned box for it and lose the possibility of running it off solar. They make some very wide ranged (temp wise) computers such as vehicle types, which live under a hood anywhere on earth, that's what we need. IMHO... Personal experience... I purchase a G5 around 2005, and in a couple of years Apple changed to an Intel processor, then I was no longer supported. Over a decade after the wifi hardware came out, it was still proprietary and I couldn't use the wifi for my box, which meant no Internet access. And since my 'hot spot' was an Apple iPhone, I couldn't use the USB connection either (kernel Oops occurred). I am for and would sign up for a newsletter. Is there a possibility to have it be somehow selective as to what gets distributed? Jack On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 1:34 AM, Jeremiah Foster < jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com> wrote: > Hello, > > On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 8:44 AM, W. Martin Borgert <deba...@debian.org>wrote: > >> On 2013-07-22 10:02, Jeremiah Foster wrote: >> > While the amount of discussion may not be large enough to warrant >> another >> > list, asking people to subscribe to debian-devel to follow debian-cross >> I >> > think is suboptimal. It is very hard to pick out the relevant threads >> from >> > debian-devel and there is a lot of traffic. >> >> I agree. A lot of people (e.g. colleagues in my company) are >> interested in cross-compiling on Debian, but not necessarily in >> any other aspects of Debian development. As long as mailing >> lists do not have e.g. standardised tags for automatic >> filtering, we need to use specialised mailing lists, even if >> there is not much traffic. >> >> Note: I assume, that debian-cross will not only cover >> Debian-to-Debian cross-compiling, but also cross-compiling to >> other targets, e.g. Android, 8-bit-microcontrollers or >> proprietary systems such as MS Windows. Please correct me, if >> I'm wrong. >> > > Actually, I suspect there won't be a lot of that for two reasons; Firstly, > Debian ARM folks tend to be Free Software advocates. This may be due to the > prevalence of cheap hardware with "linux" on it. One begins to hack on > these machines and discovers some scary things -- missing licenses, > incorrect kernel versions, hacky drivers, etc. It is so much easier if > there is a corresponding source code repository and a one-to-one > correspondence of code to binary and good Free Software distributions > provide this. Of course many of us prefer software licensed under the GPL > so that will likely have an impact on list discussions. > > Secondly, I've not seen a lot of discussion on microcontrollers (do many > of them run Linux?), Wince, or even Android. I suspect the Debian tools > tend to be Debian specific, i.e. debbootstrap creates a new Debian (or > Ubuntu) chroot and doesn't have a lot of usefulness for Fedora for example, > let alone Windows. > > As usual, YMMV, but I don't think there will be a lot of non-Debian > discussion. > > Cheers, > > Jeremiah >
