Hi Christophe
Am 09.09.2014 12:07, schrieb christophe:
> Hello dear list members,
>
> i posted this thread on the opensuse forum :
> https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/500751-13-2-arm-tablet-support
>
> I got no answer and someone told me to post my question here.
>
> I own an intel based tablet and managed to run opensuse 13.1 on it.
> But i would like to install and run opensuse on arm based tablets for
> me and for other members of my family.
>
> NB : On my intel tablet, though it runs quite well, the graphic interface
> isn't very good. Kde is bad and gnome a little less bad.
Well, there is e.g. PlasmaActive which tried to do a tablet UI based on
KDE. It is really nice, and I had v4.0 working(not very well) on my
gta04 phone with opensuse 12.3 quite a while ago.
>
> But that's not the main problem... Arm tablets are more available,
> cheaper and there's more choice. So our next tablets will have arm,
> mostly.
>
> Will opensuse 13.2 be easy to install and run on such arm tablets ?
No. Not at all! With most tablets and phones you dont get the
information required to replace the kernel, flash root filesystems, or
change bootargs. And if you do, you are still in need of a good kernel
tarball that is not missing anything. With rockchip, e.g. you get a
kernel that has only parts of flash and gpu driver. But there is the
rockhip-linux project that has it working anyway.
I'd suggest to look for some really special tablets that are well
documented and encourage you to do your own thing, or such that are
already running regular linux (not android).
And then you still have to pray for quality graphics drivers.
>
> To install, what is the procedure ? Copy a dowloaded iso on an usb key
> and boot and install like on classic pc ?
On arm, you do a lot manually. build kernel, perform some magic, like
signing or checksum adding if required by the specific device in use.
Then you copy a filesystem image of an already installed OS on your
memory, e.g. sdcard and hope it will boot.
>
> Will there be all the same packages than on x86 opensuse ? Like
> packman, google-earth, etc...?
We are going to get there, but so far we are not. Packman has a few arm
packages, of which again a few work flawlessly. proprietary stuff like
google-earth, forget it, They will try to jump on standard linux-on-arm
when the desktop is dead(maybe a bit earlier ...).
Other than that, any opensource software should be portable to arm. The
main obstacles are usually RAM and graphics aka OpenGL.
>
> How is the support ?
Its do-it-yourself as far as I know, though some devices are beeing
cared for by opensuse staff.
>
> Thank you for your answer.
>
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