[conspire] Wondering about the "parallela" Ubuntu board

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Wed, 2014-04-09 at 19:40 -0700, Ken Bernard wrote: 
> Hi All-
> I haven't been to the CABAL install days at Rick's for some time, about a
> year and a half I guess (longer??). I have been without a Linux box for
> about 6 months, and am looking for something to put a Linux distro on. I
> would probably want to use Inkscape (SVG drawing prog.) and some music
> creation software (edit WAV files and create songs saved as FLAC.)
> 
> I ran into an article about a low cost ARM based board running Ubuntu. A
> Parallela board, offered by Adapteva, and I wonder what you as a group
> think about it. I need to know if it I could get it to work. (Rick "get it
> to work" means that it would be easy and simple get it running and
> configured. That I could use it for tasks mentioned above. Also that it
> would be easy to maintain, for someone with slight Linux technical
> knowledge beyond comfort with the Gnome and KDE desktops.)

The board has a main CPU and a coprocessor, with additional processing
capability on each chip. Ubuntu and all its apps would run on the main
CPU and not even touch the on-chip FPGA nor anything of the coprocessor.
Those, which provide the bulk of the board's processing power, are
reserved solely for programs written to use specifically them. In brief,
this is completely not what you're looking for if your aims are as you
state.