[conspire] Wondering about the "parallela" Ubuntu board

[Ross Bernheim]

Simply put, if the hardware can do your job, then pick the one with the best software and community support.

Life is too short to fight hardware and software. Hardware is inexpensive. $35 to $65 will buy a lot of hardware these days. For personal projects where your time is the most valuable asset, trying to save a few dollars on hardware doesn’t make sense the ease of having more and better software to make your job easier is worth far more.

The Raspberry Pi has sold over three million Pi’s and has a huge support community. It comes with the Wolfram language as part of the Raspian distro. There are a number of other distress available with more being added. The Pi has gone well beyond critical mass. Do note that the Pi is far from perfect. It has no real time clock, serial is +5V not RS232. Both of these can be overcome with a small board for about ten dollars if it is important for your use. If you need to talk to a large amount of hardware, then use the communications library to talk to an Arduino to handle that which it does better.

Ross

On Apr 11, 2014, at 10:10 AM, Paul Zander <paulz at ieee.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> The March SVLUG meeting had speakers demo Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black.  (and several alternatives).
> 
> The RPI lists for $35.  You supply SD card and load it using a different computer with SD card interface.
>   Plus:  you get to choose which distro to load.
>   Minus: you have to choose which distro to load.
> 
> BeagleBone Black lists for $45 and comes with programmed card.  
> 
> To Ken,
> The decision is to go with one of the above, because there are lots of other people using them 
> Or go with one that works with Ubuntu because lots of people use Ubuntu.
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Tony Godshall <togo at of.net>
> To: Paul Zander <paulz at ieee.org> 
> Cc: Conspire Mailing list <conspire at linuxmafia.com> 
> Sent: Friday, April 11, 2014 8:45 AM
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Wondering about the "parallela" Ubuntu board
> 
> 
> One of the vendors who sells and supports
> Raspberry Pi also offers Occidentalis.
> 
> Essentialy, those are basic Debian,
> compiled for specific variant of ARM
> chip in the RPi plus some drivers for
> the extra I/O.
> 
> For a little more, a BeagleBone Black
> gives better performance, and still
> quite low power.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:53 AM, Paul Zander <paulz at ieee.org> wrote:
>> Ken,
>> 
>> I am one of several people using Raspberry Pi.  This is also an ARM based board.  Retail price $35.  While there are a number of Linux distros for RPi, the one I use is Raspberian which is basically Debian with LXDE.
>> 
>> See http://www.raspberrypi.org/   and http://www.raspbian.org/
>> 
>> 
>> Paul
>> 
>> 
>> ________________________________
>> From: Ken Bernard <kenbernard at gmail.com>
>> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 9, 2014 7:40 PM
>> Subject: [conspire] Wondering about the "parallela" Ubuntu board
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 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.)
>> 
>> Please see:
>> http://www.adapteva.com/
>> http://www.parallella.org/board/
>> http://www.parallella.org/docs/parallella_manual.pdf
>> 
>> Thanks much,
>> Ken Bernard
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> 
> 
> -- 
> --
> Best Regards.
> This is unedited.
> This message came out of me
> via a suboptimal keyboard.
> 
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