Just ordered the new Raspbery Pi 8gb model.I love these little boards.
Someone asks you for information and you refuse to provide it because you don’t agree with it? A little hypocritical, don’t you think? We’re all about freedom here.
if it’s really about freedom then i SHOULD be able to express my feelings openly and WITHOLD critical information if i BELIEVE it’s more ethical if i do NOT link to confusing material …
i say confusing because the link to that iso is buried so deep withing the ubuntu web infrastructure that it doesn’t do free-software justice …
if you, on the other hand, are of a different view point, then you could link to it yourself if you happen to find it …
i happened to come across it in one of Alan Pope’s interviews where he was bragging about how ubuntu is free-software … provided you know where to find it 
I dunno, that sounds an awful lot like censorship to me.
nice try.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or “inconvenient.”
I don’t see the line you think you’re not crossing.
oh ok. so what would be the proper way for me to proceed ? should i just NOT “suppress” critical information based on that specific phrase (plucked out of the bigger article by the way). read it as WHOLE ! more interesting things are beeing said.
censorship is a complex thing. and by the way what i did is not censorship because i did not “suppress” speech i merely WITHELD a link TO that information. i did NOT SAY or DO ANYTHING that interferes with YOU or ANYBODY else for that matter.
what you seem to be suggesting is a “proper” online behaviour in such cases is that people should just link to anything and everything YOU believe is “proper”.
yes language is a tool and it must be used according to what each person believes in …
reC, please do remember, its a Pureos Forum we choose to be on, Pureos stands for a point which is freedom, completely free from tracking us and that includes Free Gnu/linux systems like Ubuntu and ftee from hardware that’s track’s us. Thats our decision and that’s why we here. In my chase it is difficult because of we’re I stay. But I have to start somewhere. Facebook, google, Instagram… It gets deep and it’s a whole movement. It gets weird in some sence as to why would all these companies want to track you?
i do try to remember and i appreciate each person’s sincere efforts of spreading the word.
that beeing said Ubuntu as Canonical would have it - currently is NOT free-software ONLY it is open-source.
or you could call it FOSS or OSS or whatever tickles your fancy. just remember Ubuntu is a GNU component (free-software) + non-libre-Linux-kernel (because it uses drivers + firmware that is CLOSED source or Proprietary/Copyrighted even patent encumbered in some cases)
and that wouldn’t be as much a problem if - as i stated above - they would just have a clearly visible and easily accessible iso that would install a free-software ONLY distribution of Ubuntu (GNOME DE customised to Canonical specifications + a few other settings that are specific to standard Ubuntu distributions …
indeed because Purism “built” a GNU+Linux distribution based on DEBIAN that ships out-of-the-box with a Linux-libre-ONLY-kernel.
as long as you understand your choice it’s all good with me …
You can’t really suppress without withholding, but whatever. I’ll give @Jesica her thread again. My apologies, BTW. I keep highjacking them without meaning to.
Indications are that that won’t be possible any time soon, if ever.
I don’t speak for Purism but I really don’t think it will be a priority for them attempting to port PureOS to a Raspberry Pi.
I think you misunderstand the issue. The blobware boot files are for the various other hardware components, not for the disk. By definition, more or less, you don’t need blobs to access the SD card - or an SSD - because those blobs would have to come from the disk (chicken and egg). So whether you boot from SD card or an external (USB) disk, SSD or otherwise, it won’t solve the problem.
The Pi is all of that but it is not blob free.
Will Purism in the future create a blob-free PC that is based on an ARM processor? Maybe. Who knows? Not I. But you should keep one eye on it, just in case.
Would such a PC be “cheap”? Probably not - due to lack of scale. It will never be as cheap as a Raspberry Pi.
(The best near term option is the Librem 5 phone in convergence mode, but that is not cheap and at the current time it is unproven.)
For comparison of where ARM CPUs are up to, today I had the opportunity to run the same very CPU intensive program on two Raspberry Pi computers and on one of my x86 computers. As far as I know, the program is not able to use more than one core i.e. single-threaded only. Here are the results.
Pi 2B Rev 1.1 - Cortex-A7 900 MHz - 2011 - runtime: 8587 seconds
Pi 4B Rev 1.2 - Cortex-A72 1.5 GHz - 2016 - runtime: 959 seconds
v.
x86 laptop - Intel i7-7500U 3.5 GHz - 2016 - runtime: 110 seconds
So in the 5 years between 2011 and 2016, ARM has achieved a 9x speed up, while Intel by comparison flatlined, but Intel was ahead by about 9x. (For those who are into this kind of thing, the x86 hit 68 degrees C during the run, while the Pi 4 stayed a more moderate 43 degrees C.)
There are numerous objections to the above comparison - and I am probably already aware of most of them. It is presented just as a point of information. Certainly raw CPU speed is not the whole story as far as getting a responsive computer to use. The Pi 4 seems reasonable for personal use. (I’m just setting it up for someone else.)
As a digression, for this particular program the results are needed on the Pi itself but it is, in this case, possible to run the program on a much faster x86 and then copy the results across to the Pi, which I would normally do. I would not normally wait for over 2 hours for a Pi 2B to do the calculations itself !
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Thanks for that
I find it good
I like to see such information
I wonder what the difference would be if the files the pis were working on were stored on USB instead of the SD card? Or were they already?
File is on µSD card in the case of the Pi computers but the file is not particularly large, 20 or 30 MB. The Pi can only pull a little over 10 MB/s off the card but that’s going to be a negligible difference on a run time of over 2 hours.
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I hope I did not oversee something/some information anywhere in the forum but…
did anyone think of installing phosh with libhandy on a RPi with a (official) touch display? Is this possible for testing the UI?
Just an FYI… The interview you’re looking for, that leads to the link to download the software you’re trying to find has most likely been uploaded to YouTube.
The alternative is to use a search engine, and look for Alan Pope interviews.
It would probably be faster than waiting for someone else to find it & share the link.
I don’t know where it is and haven’t looked for it, but if I do get bored enough to look, I’m not going to post the link for someone who could have found it themselves.
Also, there is some software for the raspberry pi that uses a rather typical pi kernel with squashfs support added.(and possibly kexec too, if memory serves. Kexec allows the kernel used in booting to seamlessly hand off control to another kernel used by the operating system.)
This modified pi kernel comes with an initrd that mounts & runs a squashfs disk image in a chroot/pivot_root without a jail.
Something akin to the init script in Barry Kauler’s Puppy Linux.
The stated purpose of this software is to allow multiple disk images to be put in a partition & booted without installing them. (I don’t remember the name of the software, but web searching “dual boot raspberry pi” or “multi boot raspberry pi” should bring it up)
The only modification an arm/arm64 operating system requires is the kernel modules be added to the proper directory before converting the disk image into a squashfs image.
Assuming a kexec kernel is used to boot, you may be able to simply modify the init script, within the initrd supplied, to hand off control to the PureOS kernel & initrd (installed to a partition, not a squashfs)
Failing that, you can still run PureOS in a chroot/pivot_root without the restrictions of a chroot jail.
Hope that opens some open source doors for your pi project.
The USB bus speed is slower than the micro SD card bus.
Yes, I realize that they both use a common controller, but the manufacturer’s literature says different busses.
I was about to suggest this then saw you had already. The only drawback is that i.MX8 is more expensive, but at least running PureOS in it makes sense, unlike a SoC such as RPI’s that needs blobs.
FWIW there’s the Cubox Pulse which is essentially the above hummingboard in a nice enclosure, and can definitely be used as a PC. I don’t own that particular one but have been using a few (i.MX6 based) Cubox-i for a long time, they seem to have great build quality and longevity.
I’m not sure this is a market that Purism could compete in very effectively. But that’s up to them of course.
Some of us are working on killing the blobs in the pi, but between broadcom being tight lipped about those blobs & booting from the video core, it isn’t so easy.
Who in their right mind would say “hey, you know what seems like a good idea? Let’s build a pretty cool SBC & sell it at a reasonable price, then screw it up by making sure it can only boot in the most convoluted way imaginable.”
Broadcom, that’s who.
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