Building Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi
As a result of the prior musings about crowdfunding and the rather shaky VAT status of the whole sector I have been thinking quite a bit about crowdfunding and where it might be useful and how we could get involved in some way. For our normal consultancy business we have no need of capital investments and we don’t produce anything that lends itself to the crowdfunding model, however I did come up with a project I have been wanting to do for quite a long time. Allow me to introduce it by way of a little video . . .
Back when the Raspberry Pi was in development it was shown running Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. This was the last Ubuntu release that supported the ARMv6 instruction set, from that point on Ubuntu was optimised for newer ARM chips and would not run on the Broadcom chip that the Pi used. I am the point of contact of the Ubuntu UK Local Community team and I was dead excited about this little computer with it’s exposed PCB and low price point. I asked some of the Ubuntu ARM folk if they could support it going forward, but that wasn’t going to be possible, they didn’t have the resources to build for two ARM platforms and the bottom line was that the Pi probably wasn’t going to provide a good user experience for the increasingly heavy Ubuntu user interface. This was sad, but it was the situation. I was a bit concerned that the Raspberry Pi foundation was proceeding on the basis that Jaunty was available – it was already old, going out of support and was a dead end, there were going to be no future updates for it. I was concerned that the UK Local community was going to be landed with a lot of new users who were having a poor user experience and there would be nothing we could do about it. Reluctantly I approached the Raspberry Pi foundation (I met the lovely Liz and Eben at an event in Oxford) and shared my concerns with them, and suggested Debian was the way forward, so the Pi would have a system based on a platform Ubuntu users would be familiar with, that would get updates.
So this was sad, I wasn’t happy about it, the foundation wasn’t happy about it, many users were not happy about it, but it was much better to have a new Debian with updates and prospects than an old dead end Ubuntu release.
Moving on to the present, the Raspberry Pi is a huge success, Rasbian is a great operating platform for it, the LXDE desktop is fine, the Wayland demo was brilliant and loads of cool projects are happening based on the Pi. We still want Ubuntu on it though. We are using it in embedded projects, it is also turning up in things like the OpenERP Point of Sale kit, situations where it doesn’t need a responsive user interface (or a user interface at all). It would be great to know that all the libraries we are using on it are the same versions we are using on other computers that are running Ubuntu. It might be nice to see what the Ubuntu Unity desktop looks like on the Pi, especially Unity 8 running in Mir, but that explicitly isn’t a goal. This project aims to build everything that will build from source without too much hassle. If that gets us a desktop then great, if it gets us a command line with python, that is great too.
Now for the armchair accountants in the audience, having seen the admin end of a campaign I can explain it a little better than before. This is a flexible funding setup rather than the all-or-nothing option and we are accepting paypal and credit card pledges. The paypal pledges happen instantly, the money goes from the end user direct to our paypal account and then there is an immediate debit of 9% of the amount which goes from us to indiegogo – so the money is not held in escrow at all, and it isn’t a big payment at the end. This is fairly clearly a purchase of a pledge to the full pledge value and a subsequent payment to indiegogo which is either a purchase of campaign hosting services, or some kind of financial services fee, not sure about that bit yet. Credit card payments are slightly different, we don’t have the money for those yet, after the campaign ends Indiegogo will do a bank transfer to us for the funds (less the 4% or 9% commission presumably). Paypal is regulated as a bank now, so I think the money should turn up in our financials when it is in the paypal account, not just when we make a transfer of it to a bricks and mortar bank. We will enter all the pledges as sales and pay VAT on them and we will reclaim the VAT on the materials purchased to build the cluster. If anyone wants a VAT invoice for a paypal pledge I can sort that out. Credit card pledges are a bit more interesting as it is questionable whether they have happened yet.
If you want to contribute to the cluster and help us build Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi then do head on over to Indiegogo and join the 40 or so other contributors we have so far.
From the technical side of things, designing the cluster feel free to pitch in your comments and suggestions below. We have had a lot of people suggesting that we don’t use the Raspberry Pi and use some other platform instead. These suggestions include: cross compile it from Intel machines, use QEMU on fast Intel computers, use cloud computing, use a Power Mac (whut!), use the OpenSUSE Build Service, Use a Calxeda box, use Pandaboards, use Wandboard quad core arm boards. Feel free to add to the list of other platforms we should be using instead, I think I will add the yet to be delivered Parallela board to the list of things we should be using. All these suggestions are great, they would work and they might even be faster or easier. They just are not things I really want (apart from the Parallela which I don’t have) and I don’t think it works as a crowdfunding concept to raise funds to build it out of anything but the Raspberry Pi.
To provide power to lots of Pis there are a few approaches, Southampton University did this:
and other cluster projects have build custom 5v electronics for feeding the USB or direct to the GPIO pins. The custom supply option doesn’t work out particularly cheap and to run the whole cluster you are looking at parts of the circuit supporting a current heading towards 32 amps, which gets kinda complicated. At the moment I am leaning towards using a special powered hub, the Pihub which can cope with powering 4 Pi devices from a single slightly beefy supply. This keeps the plug count down (they will all need PAT testing at some point so I don’t want to go completely wild on plugs) and keeps everything neat and safe and fanless.
Networking is another area where there are options. WiFi sounds mad for a cluster, but is it really? The Pi Ethernet port kind of hangs off USB internally, so wouldn’t a 150Mbit USB wifi dongle be comparable to a 100Mbit ethernet? Lets solve this using science. Initial testing with iperf shows 74Mbit throughput on the ethernet between two Pi devices, over WiFi just 20Mbit. This is rather less than I would expect, maybe there is more performance that can be teased out of the wifi, or maybe the initial feeling is right and ethernet is the way forward. Maybe you have an opinion or advice in this area?
The funding campaign runs through to Christmas but as we have some of the money available already I am thinking we will probably start getting some bits fairly soon and start setting up the cluster controllers and do some power measurements and more detailed performance testing.
Miserware Energy Saving Software now cross-platform
Perhaps you will recall the Miserware power saving software I blogged about last year?
I’m still running it on all of my machines here and it has been great – I really don’t notice it at all. It just sits in the background and according to the logs is saving between ~20% & ~60% power consumption by my various CPUs. And that’s just what it should do.
Miserware have just (18th Jan 2010) started a new trial programme to celebrate the introduction of the first Beta of the power saving software for that [ahem] other OS, Windows. The trial itself and entry into a competition to win iPod Nanos or Asus PCs is open from today and the Micromiser software is available for: Vista, Windows 7, Windows XP, Debian 4.0, 5.0, unstable, Fedora 8, 9, 10, 11, RHEL 4.7, 5.3, SLES 10 and Ubuntu 7.04, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10.
If you want to try it out and join in the trial and competition just follow this link to sign up.
Note: Do please note that (on Linux at least – am not sure about Windows as I don’t use it) there is a script you should run after installation called mw-feedback. It sends back textual information about your hardware. This is a plain text file of mine for Lobsang so you can see what it contains. The purpose is so they can identify any hardware issues with the beta software and also verify the widest range of solutions for which the product is suitable.
