ODROID-U3: 2GiB ram and quad core 1.7Ghz CPU at a whopping $59
 

I'm seriously considering getting one as it's a very competitive price and, on paper, delivers more power than anything else I've come by including the Matrix mini PC. The only snag is that it don't have SATA port !
Anyone tried one ? or the predecessor ODROID-U2 ?

Hi,

did you buy one and do you run Slackware on it?

Not yet ... I've not yet made up my mind between matrix and odroid (if you make similar setups the prices are quite close but odroid is still missing sata and Gb ethernet) so a got a PI while still trying to make up my mind :D
As far as Slackware ARM is concerned I'm pretty much sure that the user-land will run on both and that both come with some sort of community supported kernel fork (as far as I recall hardkernel itself maintains a 3.8 kernel version fork for their hardware with a community support).
Obviously if you expect to use the Slackware ARM installer you will need to do a little work yourself but if you go the miniroot way (with a borrowed kernel) I'm sure you can have slackware ARM on either pretty quickly.

How is Salix OS doing ? and what's the plan for it on ARM ?

Currently I've got a Raspberry Pi and a Beaglebone Black at home, both running Runeaudio. And to be honest: Nowadays I'd never buy something slow like a RPi again :) At the moment Odroid is available for 70 € in Germany, so I've thought it might be a nice 24/7 server. But I'm hesitating because there are two competitive problems for me:
1. I don't want anything else than Slackware on my servers
2. I want to use an armv7hf distribution on such devices :mad:

I'm also sure it should run with a third party kernel and the miniroot. Just wanted to ask if someone already has made it because I don't want to spend much time ;)

Currently there are no plans for a Salix OS ARM port because the only one of the devs who was really interested probably was me. And I actually don't have the time for it (and no interest in bringing an armv5 soft float distribution to my armv7 hard float hardware :rolleyes:)

I had a look and the community edition offer is over ... now it's just 65 USD + shipping (25 USD)+ import tax (another 30% on the total including shipping for Italy) it would work out to be close to 89 € if you buy it direct ... gorm Germany it's 70 + shopping expences + shipping (I think that's not going to be less then 80 €).
I saw that matrix mini pc is on amazon.it for 129 € ... considering what you get (on board 16Gb emmc, Gb ethernet, sata, wifi ... the only down side is the 1Ghz quad core) I think it's a better bargain currently.

Even if the kernel supports hardfloat the userland can still be softfloat and never ask the kernel to perform hard floating point operations. You can safely have Salckare ARM on the odroid.

I've done the same thing an all my ARM devices running Slackware ARM (even if the installer works). Once you have the kernel it's just a matter of unpacking the miniroot, adding networking and slackpkg to it and then I add whatever else I need.

gus3 was telling me that there is a sort of mid way between hard and soft float:
Maybe we could have a few extra packages like bob does for the multibit x86 stuff ? I wonder is Stuart would have anything to say about this sort of thing ?

Currently lack of time is my biggest issue too.

BTW: the new Nvidia TK1, as far as paper is concerned, should beat the crap out of the U3 ... but the price if far less appealing

You can't run Slackware on the odroid?

I probably can run Slackware, but it's not a hard float distribution.

I was thinking about one for my webserver, I wouldn't think hard/soft float would make much difference.

I think it has more than enough power for a web server, also without hard float and ARMv7 optimizations ;)

Unless the web server is doing some really computationally expensive stuff, it won't make any difference running soft float.
I remember some time ago I found the build logs and timings from Fedora ARM hard float build systems, and guess what - the timings were almost identical (fraction of a seconds difference) to the soft float build systems when building the same packages.

I guess 95 % in computing is integer anyways. Hard float will only make differences for multimedia and mathematic calculations, e.g. decoding/encoding of audio/video or image resizing. But therefore it should make a huge difference.

My personal experience is that on servers that don't to audio/grafix or other floating point intensive calculations it makes hardly no difference while on personal computer systems the difference is noticeable in may circumstances enev while simply surfing with firefox.
But apart from old nutty me who runs Slackware ARM on their ARM based Netbooks/Tablets and uses them as portable desktop replacement ?
I'd be curious to know if I'm in good company.

I want to pick up a tablet and get Slackware Arm running on it. Dell venue 8 pro or HP elitepad or similar. Have a Dell Venue 8 (Android) currently.

I'm running my (OwnCloud) server on an old laptop and tried to move to a Raspberry Pi but it couldn't quite take the load. I'm thinking of splitting the DB off as well, leave it on the current "server" then when I move the Apache part to an Odroid in the DMZ and then just have the db port open back to the database server.

Does anyone have a previous Odroid running as a web server, how is the performance?
My current "server" is a Dell Latitude D630 laptop. Slackware, Apache, MariaDB, PHP running OwnCloud. Its also my SAMBA and miniDLNA server, Drupal and phpmygpx.

I have a 100G partition for OwnCloud on the 1TB drive and 100G for the Slackware OS then the rest for /home. /home is the master copy for all my data (~150G of pictures, ~5G music, 50G documents, etc. A subfolder in /home with my most recent pictures and most important documents is synced to OwnCloud using their desktop client and then my phone, tablet, and other laptop syncs to owncloud as well as my calendar and contacts. Wife and kids sync to it as well. So its just the 4 of us with average two devices each hitting Apache.

The Laptop is a 1.6GHZ cpu and running 2G of RAM. So I'm thinking the OD3 being close in specs should work. Realizing the OD3 is going to be slower architecture but my "server" also has me logged in with X running and other things running on it as well. So slower architecture but less load should even out.

I tried a Raspberry Pi but my calendar crashed it.

I don't have one yet ... but this dude here on this forum recently got one: jheengut and he has Slackware amongst the distributions ... he might be the one to ask for a quick answer. Have a look at this thread.