ARM as a primary architecture

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 2:28 PM, drago01 <drago01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I see that this discussion has gone from ARM as a primary architecture
>>> for Fedora to a general Tablets vs PC market discussion. IMHO, While
>>> there is no doubt that the tablet/mobile market is growing rapidly,
>>> The desktop and laptops are there to stay.
>>>
>>> Considering ARM as a primary architecture for Fedora is not a bad
>>> idea. But Sorry, why is this proposed? Do you intend to run Fedora on
>>> your smartphones or tablets?
>>
>> It's got nothing to do with smart phones and tablets. We don't intend
>> on supporting Fedora on smart phones (not to say a third party group
>> can't though), we're reviewing tablets and it will certainly be
>> possible to run it on tablets, the level of support out of the box is
>> undecided.
>
> Well this is harder then you think as most tablets don't allow you to
> change the OS (easily) while others don't allow you to change it at
> all.

It's not harder than I think, I've been working on Fedora ARM and I
know exactly the level of hardness and a number of the possible issues
involved so I would actually appreciate if you would do some of your
own research, I've been looking into and dealing with tablet options
for running Fedora for quite some time.

> The only ones where this is possible right now are actually x86 based
> tablets. Even Windows 8 wont help here as MS mandates that the
> devices are locked with secure boot without having an option to disable it.

No that is definitely not the case that it is x86 only, for tablets
that are BIOS locked, yes, it's a non starter, but there are many ARM
tablets that are BIOS unlocked and will, in time, be able to run
Fedora just fine. For starters the OLPC XO-3 tablet will run Fedora on
ARM out of the box, it's relatively easy to get Linux running on the
Asus Transformer [1] as well as a number of other Tegra based tablets
and then there's the Spark tablet that will run KDE's Plasma tablet
interface out of the box using Mer, but there's won't be too much work
to make that Fedora.

So it is possible, it would be even possible right now for the
determined hacker, but with time we'll make this easier for the
general end user to install it onto various tablets but in the
beginning we're aiming for the servers and the dev
boards/nettops/smart books as they are readily available and easily
supportable.

Peter

[1] http://gizmodo.com/5874133/olpc-xo-30-hands-on-the-100-wonder-tablet
[2] http://www.xda-developers.com/android/almost-perfect-native-ubuntu-on-asus-transformer/
[3] http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Spark-tablet-announced/