> Ubuntu got in touch with us to say ‘how can we stop you saying that Ubuntu runs on Raspberry Pi?’ Which I thought was pretty brutal, actually. So, yeah: they don’t support our chip, they’re not interested in supporting our chip, they’ve been quite vocal about trying to stop us from saying Ubuntu, so we stopped saying Ubuntu.
Way to go, Canonical...
You want to make Ubuntu the Linux desktop, yet you can't be arsed to support one of the cheapest and easiest solutions to run it on?
The Raspberry Pi is a brilliant way to introduce children and adults alike to linux, and Ubuntu doesn't deem it worthy of supporting that effort...
In their defense, ARM11 is a 10 year old chip. I don't think they want to support such an old legacy. Does Windows 7 support Pentium 2?
Still, I'm hoping Raspberry Pi moves to Cortex A7 as soon as it's available, which is based on the ARMv7 architecture, and Canonical might support it then.
Debian has two ARM ports: one that supports ARMv4 and newer, and a second that supports ARMv7. It looks like Fedora is pursing the same approach. If they have the expertise and resources to do this, surely Canonical could do it too if they thought supporting older ARM devices would benefit them.
The PII is 15 years old at this point, 10 years ago was Northwood p4 and the Athlon XP for AMD
Those chips started at 1.6 and 1.33GHz respectively, and Windows 7 requirements start at 1GHz. RAM might be a dicier issue (W7 requires 1GB) and I don't know the state of the chipset drivers, but technically W7 probably supports x86 chips from 10 years ago.
i586 has stayed backwards-compatible (although performance isn't the same if you don't know what you're targeting), ARM hasn't. The raspberry pi's ARMv6 is very different from a Cortex's ARMv7. The kernel also needs patches to know how to initialise an ARM device, and those patches need to be forward-ported.
Canonical is in a tough spot. They've put a lot of resources into developing a new desktop environment and branding that as Ubuntu. That desktop isn't going to run on a 700mhz ARM11 with 256MB of RAM.
I think Canonical suffers from NIH syndrome. They've displayed that tendency in the past. And they're on their way with their own ARM stack with the Boot-from-Android thing announced and I assume a few other things in the pipeline, so Raspberry Pi is competition they probably would prefer to do without.
Way to go, Canonical...
You want to make Ubuntu the Linux desktop, yet you can't be arsed to support one of the cheapest and easiest solutions to run it on? The Raspberry Pi is a brilliant way to introduce children and adults alike to linux, and Ubuntu doesn't deem it worthy of supporting that effort...