Photos of RMS
Danny
> Hi all
> Here's a photo of Richard Stallman opening his Sim.One while visiting Italy!
Hi all,
RMS recently came back to Cambridge, MA from his most recent travels,
and passed the Sim.One in the picture on to me.
At the moment me and some friends from a local university-affiliated
hackerspace - http://builds.bu.edu - and a co-op that happens to have
several gnu/linux and embedded systems hackers - http://pika.mit.edu -
are taking a look at it.
I've searched around a lot, but have not been able to find anything
that talks about the plans / philosophy of simplemachines - eg what
niche do you all see the machine / future machines filling, what are
your hopes & dreams for the future, thoughts on pricing if produced en
masse, etc.
Specifically it would be nice to know how the freedom and plans for
the machine differ from other ARM SOC based boards, such as http://beagleboard.org
/ http://www.hawkboard.org , as well as other libre hardware projects,
such as http://qi-hardware.com .
Even more specifically, it would be good to know if there is anything
on the board that is not supportable by free software (with no binary
blobs). For example FSF can't endorse the beagleboard, since its SOC
(TI OMAP3) has integrated nonfree 3d graphics.
Someone may want to put some info about the box up at
http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Hardware/Freest :-)
Also, were you looking for any specific help from rms / fsf? If there
was a blog post about it or something like that, are there any
specific places where additional developers would be useful?
Cheers,
--
Daniel JB Clark | Free Software Activist | http://pobox.com/~dclark
sergio.sorrenti
> RMS recently came back to Cambridge, MA from his most recent travels,
> At the moment me and some friends from a local university-affiliated
> hackerspace -http://builds.bu.edu- and a co-op that happens to have
> several gnu/linux and embedded systems hackers -http://pika.mit.edu-
> are taking a look at it.
Nice news...
> I've searched around a lot, but have not been able to find anything
> that talks about the plans / philosophy of simplemachines - eg what
> niche do you all see the machine / future machines filling, what are
> your hopes & dreams for the future, thoughts on pricing if produced en
> masse, etc.
Simplemachine Philosophy, in two words is hacking and sharing.
I hope this will remain unchanged also in future.
Regarding the pricing on our products, we will try to keep as low as
we can,
because our main interest is not in the profit, but in run our
organization,
and finance new projects...
The Price of the Sim.One is 99 Euros including VAT with its accessory,
we will made public, a list of all the parts cost, in order to help
evaluate the real price.
For future machines, we are working from this summer
on a new board based on AVR32, with a lot of add-in modules,
the name of the new board is not Sim.Two, as many can imagine,
but Mizar. It will be realeased in January 2011.
> Specifically it would be nice to know how the freedom and plans for
> the machine differ from other ARM SOC based boards, such ashttp://beagleboard.org
> /http://www.hawkboard.org, as well as other libre hardware projects,
> such ashttp://qi-hardware.com.
The Sim.One is our fist Free/Open Hardware Project,
we are using the TAPR OHL License to share its design,
we hope this design is helpful to anyone,
individual, company, students...
And that modifications remain Free.
> Even more specifically, it would be good to know if there is anything
> on the board that is not supportable by free software (with no binary
> blobs). For example FSF can't endorse the beagleboard, since its SOC
> (TI OMAP3) has integrated nonfree 3d graphics.
No, fortunately there are not binary blob on Sim.One.
Of course we don't have the Chips VHDL
so we make what we can, to keep it Free/Open :)
> Someone may want to put some info about the box up athttp://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Hardware/Freest:-)
:-)
> Also, were you looking for any specific help from rms / fsf? If there
> was a blog post about it or something like that, are there any
> specific places where additional developers would be useful?
We consigned the first Sim.One to RMS.
He did enought accepting it...
Additional developer interested in the project are welcome,
Our current unresolved issues are random USB disconnects and
occasional read/write failures to the SD card (so the only 100%
reliable rootfs at present is NFSroot or a tiny initrd or romfs in
Flash).
Also, the audio chip sometimes resets for no obvious reason or
sometimes outputs white noise instead of sound, believed to be due to
the poor quality of CIrrus' AC97 driver patches.
Finally, although we have drivers for all the board's devices in a
patched version of linux 2.6.24.7 and support for the board is going
into mainstream linux at 2.6.33 or 2.6.34, the ALSA driver and support
for the battery-backed RTC are missing from our current 2.6.32
patches.
There is an issue tracker under sim1.googlecode.com
Apart from these issues, it is a general purpose board and we are
happy for people to use it, modify it or extend it for any purpose of
their own.
Regards,
Sergio