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Possibility of Zorin OS Lite on Raspberry Pi?

john.mills

Mon Jun 18, 2012 10:20:24 am

Hello all,

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post about this. Anyway I understand from reading the literature on this site that the 'Lite' version of Zorin OS is based upon Ubuntu 11.10.

My question to you is would you consider basing a version of Zorin OS on a version of Debian and release this for the Raspberry Pi? The LXDE environment is already up and running well on the Pi hardware? Given the fact that the Raspberry Pi has a lot of 'momentum' around it and the educational market that it is targeting it would appear to me to be an excellent opportunity to further your educational release by targeting this platform.

The maintainer of the Raspbian Project (Debian Wheezy recompiled to support the Hard Float operations of the ARM V6 CPU) is working towards producing a desktop / education orientated distribution.http://www.raspbian.org/

Additional information can be found on the official Raspberry PI website:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=66

Perhaps depending on your schedules you might be able to lend some time support to this very worthwhile project. There are already base images available to test using LXDE and these can be installed via virtual box (with qemu) or of course on physical hardware.

http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianImages

There is also a developer virtual machine available for compiling and testing packages:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=7345

This might be an for you opportunity to really help make a big difference to the educational market and help fill an important niche that exists. Consider that the Raspberry Pi will be distributed in the hundreds of thousands if not millions from September onward. It would be a big boost to your distro to have it of the features from it available in a market that has strong synergies to the type of releases you target.

Thanks and best regards,

John

daveca

Tue Nov 13, 2012 7:42:32 pm

Agreed, especially as well as Zorin connects to wireless.

Two observations, on a bit of a tangent:

1.) the OS for the Pi also has the BIOS built in. The Pi has no on- board BIOS (it does nothing at all without the SD card and OS installed)

2.) The Pi has two USB ports, neither is USB compliant. The circuit board layout is incorrect and some component values also. It does not work with wireless keyboards/mice (I tested two, neither worked)

Be cautious attempting to develop code on a hardware platform thats not 100% up to par.

Once upon a time story:

I was analog engineer on a computerized HVAC (building heating and cooling system) controller, the controller board (8051) worked great until the control output relay that engaged the system closed, and an AC noise pulse propagated across the board so severely that it caused a hard-reset. Electrical noise can cause code problems and send programmers on terrible wild goose chases to fix code thats not faulty.