First A15 Device
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Matthias Faust (490) 38 posts |
The new Samsung Chromebook seems to be the first available device with a A15 ARM processor. See here and here |
patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
That’ll be the Exynos 5 then, good luck Surface! edit: they’ve just updated the page, said “OS: Windows 8” at first – which did seem a bit odd for a Chromebook ;-) |
nemo (145) 2529 posts |
I have to admit that my first thought when I saw that device was “how long before some enterprising soul gets RISC OS working on it?”. My second thought was “why is the battery life so poor?”. :-( |
Malcolm Hussain-Gambles (1596) 811 posts |
My thought was we really need wifi in RISC OS. |
patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
Well we’ve got 3G support (ComCentre) as well as ethernet over USB so that’s not too bad. More often than not 3G turns out to be more useful than WiFi anyways. As for having something to run RISC OS on: wouldn’t hold my breath! I really doubt Samsung is going to give us access to their documentation. And of course “someone” would have to port RISC OS and that’s not going to happen anytime soon. The Chromebook itself probably won’t be as hackable as you’re thinking. The great thing however is: the Genie’s out of the bottle – Samsung did it and others will follow. |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
I would kill for WiFi support. I am averse to using wired Ethernet after this and if I want 3G I gotta go stand in the middle of a field. At this exact moment in time my mobile is receiving exactly NO network signal. And its on the windowsill. Rain attenuates the already-poor signal. It’s great when I’m buying stuff online and the bank sends me a code by SMS. I walk up the lane a little to get reception, the code arrives, I walk back, the transaction has timed out. Rinse and repeat… BTW, Patric, where do you live? Here in France, my monthly data allocation (on a contract) is 500Mb. The cost of pay-as-you-go 3G is scary. I wonder if they still measure it in 10Kb units? A few years back, I took my Nokia 6230i (IIRC) to the bbc.co.uk homepage. It loaded about half of it. And burned through €5 of credit in a few seconds. Prices have come down since then, but if France finds itself in the hardshoulder when it comes to 3G – they’ll only have themselves to blame! |
patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
Google seems to think I’m currently here (which isn’t too far off the mark): I used to be on WiFi but it was terrible, usually cutting out at the worst possible moments (cheers KingstonCom!) and felt like a rip off too. The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain OTOH when on the move I hardly ever get a chance to log into free WiFi (apparently Berlin is planning an “open citizen LAN” though, giving you 30min free use in certain districts. Probably not anywhere near my flat in Charlottenburg I reckon). Of course you could use a gaming dongle thingy if you really really had to. tl;dr: for a portable device I found 3G to be far more versatile, desktop machines(1) (currently all capable of running RISC OS falling into this category) working ok cable(2). (1) Not when living in rural France |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Was this in the city? I have seen some startling results while scanning WiFi in towns with my mobile phone (WiFi analyser app for Android). Namely, while there are 12-13 designated channels, it seems only three are actually used by the majority of routers; and with those three, EVERYBODY piles in on top of each other. I’m surprised anybody can receive anything.
EDF is actually pretty good about handling lightning. So long as it isn’t our 230V “final kilometre” that gets hit1, the power usually browns out on a strike as it is automatically dissipated to ground. |
patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
Well I don’t do a lot of wardriving these days but in this case I unfortunately had no control over the router. Trying to get some help from the company responsible for the equipment during christmas was an experience that I’m not keen on having to repeat. And their call centre was somewhere in Spain :-( Sorry to hear about your livebox. Thought it had been more of an isolated event, tough. |
Jess Hampshire (158) 865 posts |
I do on my Pi/Lapdock |
Raik (463) 2059 posts |
At this time the only reason I use the Pandora with Linux is WIFI. At home, at work … |
patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
Makes sense when you’ve got reliable access to the WiFis ;-) Let’s get this straigth: I’d be the first to welcome WiFi on RISC OS. Just trying to be realistic about it and point out that it’s far from being a show stopper when it comes to portable devices. |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
…in my opinion. There. Fixed it for you. (^_^) Seriously, the problem with portable devices is that everybody has a slightly different idea of the sorts of things they want to do with them. What applies to one may not apply to another – you and I are at opposites regarding WiFi vs 3G. |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Hehe… This is why I am with Orange which is “notoriously expensive”. I pay €40/month for my internet [*], other cheaper services run in to €32-35/month for equivalent. This decision is based upon the fact that we do not have an analogue phone line (it is a VoIP-phone) and we are at the end of 4470 metres of cable, so if something went wrong I doubt we’d be a priority if Orange were only the people in charge of the wire. I personally knew of a woman in a nearby town whose Internet was out for almost seven months and a loud screeching on the phone every 30 seconds. She paid for both the entire time, and could pretty much use neither. The companies spent half a year blaming each other. Finally Orange sent out a guy who replaced the €4 ADSL filter and charged her a large call-out fee (as the filter was supplied by the internet provider, not Orange). [the sad thing is, I told her right at the beginning that it sounded like the filter was duff; but some people only want to hear information like that from a guy wearing a serviceman’s uniform… <sigh>]
This is what worries me about nannying blocker software. It seems it is worryingly easy for sites to be added to these lists, and remarkably difficult to get them removed, especially when the lists are not public, are treated as trade secrets, and attempts to do anything about examining the lists would result in scary DMCA nonsense. That said, educational campus services these days often tend to operate on a “whitelist” principle that things are blocked unless permitted. Saves the campus a pile of trouble about “twelve year old gets hardcore porn at school” – you can imagine what the Daily Mail might do with that!
Well, it was a one-off and I think only my Livebox got fried, so you possibly could call it an isolated event. ;-) Hopefully it will be a true “one off” event. I’m quite depressed about the loss of the Livephone. I mean, I picked it up in a boot sale for €3 so it isn’t that, it is that it was a good quality signal – it had a rather impressive range, it sounded good, and it had a nice seagull ringtone. The phone itself (and the charger base) still works. The little USB communicator thingy was destroyed. I can’t find spares or parts. Might see if I can get one off eBay next Spring. Aside: Took the things apart to look at damage (communicator, extensive!). Both parts contain ARMs. (^_^) |
patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
Eh, no. Not having native support for WiFi isn’t a show stopper per se. - get a gaming adapter, enjoy the wifis (modest initial cost) Reminds me how excited I was when I bought a Netgear SPH101 wireless SkypePhone (yeah, Skype is the AOL of VOIPs I know) just to find out it didn’t really work for me. Luckily I absolutely hate making calls and go out of my way to avoid them (Reginald Barclay would be proud of me). |
Jess Hampshire (158) 865 posts |
Since I am posting this from a wifi connected Pi, I have to agree. For a device with built in hardware (that works on other OSes), then it could be regarded as a show stopper. But for any thing with no built in wifi, then you need additional hardware anyway. So using a gaming adaptor isn’t that big an isue. I found firefox on packman, and it runs OK and controls the adaptor. The remaining issue is ip addresses. If I leave the built in DHCP server running, does the device start acting as a NAT router? Or does it disable the server if it finds one on the network? Or does everything go horribly wrong? I shall have to try. |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Sorry, mom wanted to go for a walk, forgot the footnote. It is horribly pricey, but I get… Free unlimited calls to French landlines, plus 1H to mobiles. Free unlimited1 calls to landlines in many parts of the world2 that isn’t a sandpit full of terrorists. Possibly free unlimited calls to mobiles in the US, although given the price otherwise, I don’t plan to try it! Evidently unlimited3 internet up to ~20mbit4. It isn’t a bad package, it’s just typically expensive as comms seems to be in France. :-/ 1 The “limitation” is that the call disconnects after 2 hours. You can call right back. The quoted restriction in the documentation states that you cannot make more than 24 hours of calls in any one day (I don’t know how you would do otherwise!?) and you cannot call more than x different numbers (it’s a large number, like 50 or 100) in any one day. 2 Useful to remember if I ever get around to finding this cute Japanese girl I dream of. Calling Tōkyō otherwise could be…costly! 3 My friend in the UK is worried of downloading more than 1Gb/month for fear of the mostly unspecified Fair Use Policy kicking in. Me? I used to transfer a known ~1.5Gb a month, but since I listen to AnimeNFO on Shoutcast (192kbit) we could be looking at 3-4Gb/month. Now with animé and such, it’s potentially 1Gb/week with streaming radio on top. Actually, I have JPopSuki’s streaming TV on in the corner of the screen, and now NHKWorld have fixed their mobile app, I have been watching stuff on that too. 4 I am paying for “up to 20” but I actually get 2mbit down, 256kbit up due to the length of the line. |
Malcolm Hussain-Gambles (1596) 811 posts |
Patrick: Well there will be soon (1-2months) at least 2 RISC OS users in Hull…. |
Jess Hampshire (158) 865 posts |
The only really good VOIP device I have found is the Nokia N8. (and other recent symbian phones.) |
patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
Now that’s an angle I hadn’t thought of, hmm. Not only would it be slightly embaressing for the hardened zealot having to face RISC OS’s inadequacies while trying to get signal @Starbucks (not that I ever go there, I hasten to add!); it would be a show stopper for everybody else. “Want to get online? Well you’ll have to buy a naff adapter first!”
How long are you intending to stay? I’ll leave around the end of next month so just drop me a line: TynHau (at) shared (hyphen) files (dot) de or @TynHau |
Steve Drain (222) 1620 posts |
I have a teeny little Edimax USB WiFi dongle that protrudes 5mm. It works fine at home with my windows laptop and with Linux on the Pi. I would be delighted to be able to use it from RISC OS. Bounty anyone? |
Malcolm Hussain-Gambles (1596) 811 posts |
Please donate to this bounty, to update the USB stack ;-) |
Eric Rucker (325) 232 posts |
So, hrm, would wifi support be such a problem? If the drivers are done right, it’s basically just a user interface for configuring what network is selected (so, have a !WifiPicker or something that can be used to quickly scan for and connect to networks), and then otherwise, it should look to the system just like ethernet. Obviously, the USB stack would need to be working reliably for USB wifi to work reliably, but that also applies to USB ethernet. The big thing would be, forcing it to get a DHCP lease on connection, and cleanly handling dropped connections (although I was just playing with forcibly dropping connections on the Pi, and it seemed to handle it OK). |
WPB (1391) 352 posts |
I think the bigger problem with wifi is the security protocols which it mandates. |
Raik (463) 2059 posts |
Look here http://www.stdevel.co.uk/wlan.html Could this be the basis for further development? I know, the wrong USB stack, but dreaming is still allowed ;-) |
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