Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now

[chris]

onpon4 is correct. There is no ARM port of Trisquel as Ubuntu discontinued  
its ARM build back around 8.04 I believe. That makes it a tad bit difficult.  
It would probably make sense to do a Debian-based version of Trisquel as  
there are Debian ports for ARM.

The way NAND flash on these devices work is such that there is not a  
controller with proprietary firmware (this is how a SSD works, but really all  
modern drives including the spinning disk kind have proprietary firmware in  
there controllers). Thus with the on-board raw nand there is no firmware.  
This means extra steps are ideal to prevent killing the nand. There are what  
I'll refer to as wear levelling file systems to compensate even though they  
are rarely used in practice. This is in part probably why microsd/USB flash  
drives/and internal nand flash has a particularly high failure rate. Many SSD  
drives also have a high failure rate. However there is also something called  
SLC nand flash. Unlike MLC nand flash it doesn't have some of the problems  
that MLC nand flash has.  It's also much more expensive and used in  
industrial environments where things can't fail. We're going to try and get  
SLC nand. We're hoping this combined with a wear levelling file system will  
increase the longevity of the on-board storage. If it ends up not being  
adequate enough for a laptop (and even if it is) we'll be investigating a USB  
to SATA adapter (or similar) so that you could still stick in a traditional  
hard drive. Many of the USB to SATA chips are garbage so we've got some work  
ahead of us. There supposedly are some decent ones though...