In theory, it'd be ideal especially with Eric's future hard float port running on it. However, I've become disappointed with development on the Trimslice. The audio and video drivers aren't in the upstream kernel; the U-Boot version required to boot Flattened Device Tree (Linux 3.7+) currently only presents 512MB of 1GB RAM -- which has now been this way since before December 2012.

All in all, it's really just useful as a build host (once they fix U-Boot to regain 1GB RAM) - I wouldn't suggest buying one.

I read something about Eric working in something at ARM!
It's only software or is a hardware too?


If I had the skills I would make a kind of raspberry-pi but more powerfull in hardware!
But ready to deliver! With a box and a power supply on it!
A total SlackwareARM mini computer and cheap.
Ideal for web browsing, listen some music, see movies and interact on social networks. And to make cheap calls too.
Nice to travel! Get in a hotel and connect it to a TV and that was ready to go.

The input device still would be a problem!
But it could bring a small bluetooth keyboard, that could be used also on your tablet or smartphone.


Just thinking out loud...

Slackware ARM is a software floating point distribution - it does not make use of the hardware floating point units in the newest ARM devices, which means you can't get the best performance out of the hardware.

Eric's working on a new ARM port which will support devices with the hardware floating point units -- it'll be a great asset to Slackware.
See his blog: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/call...rm-chromebook/

Wow. Such great ideas. If you can make it play a special brain wave frequency that puts babies to sleep, I'd buy several for every room in the house, and spares to take travelling ;-)

Thanks for the reply! I must have missed it initially or I would have responded sooner I did look a the presentation you provided. My goal would be to have a system that performs well on armv7 devices for general desktop/tablet use, and graphics will become important (frame rates for videos and the occasional game). Despite the rather limited gains hard float provides for the majority of software, there does seem to be a stigma in the community (outside of slackware, especially) that hard float will provide more gains than it probably does.

Since my previous post, I started working on armv6 and if I get a suitable result, I'll make a mini rootfs available for those interested. I had some issues cross-compiling everything on my x86 machine so I installed Arch Linux arm's raspberry pi image inside a chroot on my tablet (Tegra2 device) which is running Porteus-ARM (based on Slackwarearm), then followed a somewhat customized path through Linux from Scratch. I doubt I'll rebuild all of Slackware, but it might form a useful starting point if someone else is interested. Porteus is a live system that uses aufs to mount xz-compressed squashfs 'modules'. This makes reading data off flash media faster, but the xz decompression requires additional CPU cycles. I have to do some more testing to see if this kind of a setup can have any kind of efficiency gains on an armv6 device (I think I can get it there for armv7 but I'm not sure yet about the RasPi).

Thanks again!

Did you tested any kind of white noise?

Hi again,
I was thinking, since Mozilla browsers are no longer maintained for ARM systems and RPi (can't figure out why is that), is Chrome a viable solution. Has anyone managed to get it work on Slackware ARM? If I'm not wrong, in Slackware, the "building" of the chrome package is based on transforming a prebuilt deb package. So that is not usable on ARM.

UPDATE: OK, i ve found the answer, I was just forgotten to check the Slackbuilds.org

UPDATE 2 : Still the question remains, why is Mozilla no longer supported? Where is the difference?

So I tried to build chromium, from slackbuilds on RPi, and unfortunately it fails. If someone has got different results, please just let me know, though I guess it is also not supporting ARM. This is sad because it definitely needs a good browser to be available for RPi. I have tried Midori a little but I don't know if it is so powerful tool like chromium or even firefox. I have heard that Eric is making a new ARM port of Slackware, so I just hope that maybe sometime in the future it'll be available and maybe get a different result.

http://ftp.arm.slackware.com/slackwa.../ChangeLog.txt

Sun Jan 13 16:06:46 UTC 2013

I have built the latest Mozilla packages for -current only, and placed them out of
the main tree here:

ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/slackwarear...rrent/packages

These are built for minimum target of 'armv6j'. I can only build these because
my '-current' build host is an ARMv7 machine with a hardware FPU. The build hosts
for the stable releases of Slackware ARM are ARMv5 machines, upon which these
packages cannot be built, thus cannot be maintained. Therefore, I will maintain
the Mozilla packages *only* for users who follow -current closely, but will no
longer provide any new Mozilla packages for any stable releases (apart from 13.37
which uses Firefox v3). The reason for moving the new versions of the packages
out of the main tree is because anything in -current ordinarily implies that it
will be present in the next stable release, which of course cannot happen if they
can't be built on the hardware used to maintain stable releases.
+--------------------------+

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you a lot.

Hey guys quick question about running slack-arm on the pi. Say I want to set one up to run as a headless ssh server how would I go about setting it to auto-login a user after reboot?

if it is running headless, why the auto-login?. If you want to run a program on startup refer to it in /etc/rc.d/rc.local is the usual way.

if it is running ssh server (which it does by default for slackware anyway) then it is the client (on another device) that would have to be logging in, not the server. perhaps you could clarify what you want to do.

There is an article here http://littlesvr.ca/linux-stuff/arti...ginconsole.php which may help for autologin, but some more info might help for your actual problem.

I don't actually have anything set up yet, looks like I have some reading to do before I start trying to set this up.

So basically if I were to plug in a monitor it would show the login screen, but ssh and any cron jobs would be running already?

short answer: yes.

long answer: By the time the system has got to the login prompt all that and more are already running. In slackware, you'll find the "services" running as executable scripts in /etc/rc.d , or in some instances, being run by inetd ( config file is /etc/inetd.conf in the case of pop3, imap, telnet and rsyncd if enabled)

so, once the system is installed, and you've checked the network is ok, you can disconnect keyboard, mouse and screen, and ssh in remotely using putty from windows, or ssh from linux/mac
you can then do anything you want remotely.

Of course if the pi is going to be connected to some other hardware controlled by a program for example /bin/myrobotprogram
then add /bin/myrobotprogram to /etc/rc.d/rc.local and it will run when the system starts up before the login prompt.

Hi,
I have been trying to setup my Pi to boot from NFS, I have followed the instructions in several forums, but I always get the message "Cannot open device nfs" when setting root=/dev/nfs.
I installed the system following the instructions from http://www.daves-collective.co.uk/ra...stalling.shtml (starting from the barebones SlackwareARM image, and then installing ponce's kernel packages)

Is this because of lack of kernel support? If so, how can I add what I need? I hope it is just a matter of touching the initrd image.


Regards

you can check for kernel support with something like
zcat /proc/config.gz|grep "CONFIG_NFS"