Libre La Frite

[Brian Beuken]

Been a lot of delays for this but its apparently  on the way so hoping it gets here soon.  Considering that Libre Tritium H5 is still in the drawer of shame awaiting GPU drivers I don't hold out a lot of hope this will be usable out of the box but we'll see when it gets here.

[Brian Beuken]

hmmm it arrived ok today, but I'm a bit miffed with myself, I didn't pay enough attention to the kickstarter, or the specs. It has no SD card, (check the pic) And boots from eMMC, which is nice, but I didn't clock that the $15 kickstarter cost was for a board with no eMMC...now quite apart from the, what use is that then, reaction... It means I had to pay for a $20 eMMC unit, from the site, making the total spend $35, add in a $5 case, and $7.99 shipping, and its much less of a cheap look and see board than I intended.

Oh well, I need to be more careful about reading the small print, in the meantime its in the drawer until the goodies arrive.

[Brian Beuken]

Apparently you can boot it from a usb....but they don't give any info on the process....and even better on facebook they told me to wait for the formal announcement.

of what?

They have the, and I mean THE worst website for info I have ever seen, their forums are empty and there's no direct links anywhere to OS downloads, you have to go round the houses.

Frankly, I think.......I'm done with this, its going to be a monumental waste of time..

[Brian Beuken]

coming back to this, since Ubuntu MATE is now possible....so far I managed to get it to boot from the USB in the right hand socket.... but its a slow flash and its taking an age to get MATE set up...it just seems to be stuck on an in progress screen, showing Ubuntu Mate, 5 cycling dots, and the usb flashing while being read/written to every so often. So its not dead, it just does not seem to be progressing, if at all. I'll leave it running in the background as I think this will take a while.

[Brian Beuken]

well finally worked it out... got it to boot, eventually, and in the process of transferring the OS to the eMMC which should improve perfomance

however, it did manage to run glmark2 and the results were odd like the Libre H5 system, off screen its nippy, with Mali 450 gpu correctly running it gives a GLMark2 score of 277, but on screen it barely manages 6 or 7 frames on each test, I didn't wait for the final score which would have been single figures.

Its a lot of bloody effort to get it to do anything, it maybe that this is just set up niggles and once done its fine, but if I don't see significant improvments when I switch over to eMMC it goes in the drawer (well actually now the plastic tub|) of shame.

I finally got the thing to transfer over, and also noted that I neededto put my keyboard/mouse usb in the right hand usb to stop it trying to boot from it.
(a bug no doubt)
1st boot was slow...ok, well I'll do an update/upgrade and see if the 2nd one is better
2nd boot after upgrade......was quicker...
but though the machine is overall a bit nippier running from its eMMC correctly glmark2 is still painfully slow on screen recording only single digit scores in its tests despite recognising the Mali450, so maybe some issues with X11.
ah well...

[Brian Beuken]

Amazingly, it built and ran my 3dMaze demo...only at 4-5 fps but really quite impressed it had a go at it.. It clearly needs something fixed in its X11/EGL systems but its got potential. Given the low interest it has in user groups though, I doubt it will ever be realised...back in the tub.