[joezydeco]

Virtualbox is free. Debian is free. Code Sourcery ARM/GCC Lite is free. I've set up ARM crosscompile environments this way in under an hour. This isn't really a superhard thing to do.

[EDIT] Vendors do this too. I went to a workshop on the Freescale i.MX line and guess how everyone got the development system? A VMware image on a thumb drive. You don't have to be a hero when it comes to cross-compiling, just get the work done.

[dominicgs]

This is anecdotal evidence from my own experience, so take it with a pinch of salt. I work on an open hardware project[1], I believe that we lose a significant portion of users (~50%) at each step deeper in to the development process. It seems that the steps are along the lines of: binaries - source releases - code from GitHub - updating firmware - compiling firmware - debugging hardware.

I think it would be useful to have a Virtualbox image available with everything set up for cross compiling for the Pi, BBB, etc. The thought of setting up non-standard toolchains seems to put off a lot of users.

I've also been working on a project[2] involving the BeagleBone Black and I saw a sharp increase in users when I began distributing an OS image with everything pre-installed.

[1] https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth [2] https://github.com/dominicgs/USBProxy

[joezydeco]

I'm surprised it hasn't been done already. Wasn't the RPi supposed to be an "educational" product, or is this just a case of "shut up and give my my toys already"?

[leoc]

The whole intention of the Pi as an educational tool was to provide a clean-slate platform where users could experiment without worrying about breaking things on their OS install or having to sludge through layers of virtualisation, build systems and compiler configs before doing any programming for the target system. If what you're suggesting is that RasPi users in this original target group ought to be plumbing together virtualised cross-compilation for their Pi with their own hands, that would defeat the purpose.

Of course not everyone who wants to play with early versions of the new Q3A port falls in that category. But the fact that the Rasbpian developers themselves have steered clear of x86->RasPi cross-compilation suggests that it's not necessarily straightforward even for experienced people.

[joezydeco]

"We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children, and we’re looking forward to what the future has in store"

That's from RPi's mission statement. It's on their website.

RPi had nothing to do with being a cheap Linux platform for hardware hackers and people who wanted a cheap XBMC or MAME box. But now it's 99% that.

[leoc]

"RPi had nothing to do with being a cheap Linux platform for hardware hackers and people who wanted a cheap XBMC or MAME box."

Indeed; I didn't suggest otherwise. Mind you, getting families on the Internet for $50 or $300 wasn't really in the original mission either:

"The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, based at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.

Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on.

There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment. From 2006 to 2008, we designed several versions of what has now become the Raspberry Pi; you can see one of the earliest prototypes here."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/about

It was meant to be a direct, hands-on programming environment with nothing valuable to break for programming beginners, thus David Braben and all the BBC Micro nostalgia.

[joezydeco]

Well, then I'm glad we're all busy porting Quake to this device instead of all the noble things you listed above.

[slashdotaccount]

I hope your OS image is GPL compliant.

[pjc50]

It's probably a good thing to do if you're doing a lot of ARM kernel development, but for a oneshot thing? For someone unfamiliar with those tools?

It would be interesting to race someone unfamiliar with that toolchain installing it and cross-compiling versus someone just following the instructions.

[joezydeco]

If it really takes 12 hours to compile the kernel and application on the target, I think no amount of instructions would be slower.

And it's a one-shot thing, why make people compile the kernel at all?

[fhars]

Start the compile, eat dinner, go to bed, breakfast, go to school, eat lunch, done. Beats fighthing with a cross compiler toolchain for a one-off job by miles.

(Reminds me of a povray benchmark I did some time ago: start the render, go on a holiday trip, wait some more, done: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/de.comp.os.linux.misc/XmdkN1... )

[trippy_biscuits]

In the 90s I built a FreeBSD firewall using discarded PC parts. It took 10.5 hours to build world and kernel. There were 2 power outages that forced me to start over each time. I bought my first personal UPS to fix that problem. I would learn how to cross compile instead of waiting 12 hours.

[DanBC]

At the moment this is the winning result of a competition (first person to run Qiii with the open source drivers at 1080x? At 20 fps) so there are further optimisations to be made.

Once the code has been tweaked there'll probably be an image for it somewhere.

[vkjv]

Considering this really isn't a, "have to have it right now" type feature, it's simply easier to kick off the compile and walk away.

[DanBC]

That's great.

I haven't looked but are there documentations to allow 14 year olds who have never done this before?

[chris_wot]

So not hardware coding by any means, but I use VirtualBox to build LibreOffice on Ubuntu.