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Re: [LUG] OT- Cheap Laptop + ARM netbooks

 

Michael Mortimore wrote:
On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:49:23 -0000, Alan Pope <alan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Not true. I spoke to people from ARM and Freescale this week. The
devices are on the way, and indeed you can already buy an
ARM/Freescale based tiny netbook device which runs Ubuntu by default.
I played with it this week. Very nice. More are on the way next year.

One thing that puts me off about arm is that the likes of flash and marbleblast are distributed as x86 binaries. Another thing is wine wouldn't work on arm since it doesn't translate the instruction set. Admittedly I only use wine for games which couldn't run on a netbook (well starcraft might but civ certainly wouldn't be playable).

If you live a completely open source life then it wouldn't be a problem, but I don't so it would be.

Adobe have released an ARM version of Flash. I see Marbleblast is available for Linux, so perhaps the developers could release an ARM build if there is enough interest.

You're right about Wine not working, but if you don't use Wine then it isn't a problem. Then again maybe some bright spark might bring out a combination of QEmu and Wine to emulate Windows on x86.

Rob


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