April 27, 2016
The GNOME Foundation welcomes ARM device donations
ORINDA, CA. Recently, the GNOME Foundation sent out a request seeking donations of ARM build server hardware so that the GNOME project could improve the support and quality of the GNOME desktop on ARM devices.
We quickly received a great deal of support from the larger GNOME community and would like to thank and acknowledge the people and companies behind each of the donations offered and accepted. All of the donated systems will be used to build and test the GNOME desktop and its applications on both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the ARM architecture.
A big thank you to the following generous donors and supporters:
ARM
Andrew Wafaa from ARM quickly responded to our request and reached out internally to find us some hardware. In just a few weeks, he was able to secure an OVERDRIVE 3000 from SoftIron which has an octa-core AMD Opteron A1100 64-bit Cortex A57 ARM processor with 16Gb of RAM and 1TB hard disk. This machine is already being hosted in the Red Hat Phoenix datacenter where other GNOME servers are located.
Banana Pi
Leo Xu from Banana Pi reached out to us and donated a total of five Single Board Computers with different Allwinner ARM chips. We will send them to developers interested in enabling such hardware for use with GNOME.
Codethink & Endless
Paul Sherwood from Codethink reached out to us offering us several blades at Codethink’s HP Moonshot system hosted by them in the UK. Endless is sponsoring a project with Codethink to use this hardware to make xdg-app runtime, SDK and app builds for ARM.
Qualcomm
Manik Taneja and Victor Ruiz from Canonical reached out to Ketal Gandhi at Qualcomm about GNOME’s need for ARM hardware. Gandhi was able to have Qualcomm donate four Dragonboard 410c Single Board Computers from the 96boards project. These boards will provide a great platform for application developers who want to test their apps in ARM.
Other Offers
The Foundation would like to give its thanks to several other people who offered help:
– Arc Riley who kindly offered rack space
– Michael Larabel from Phoronix who offered a lot of unused PandaBoards
– Kevin Fenzi from Fedora who offered hardware from the Fedora infrastructure
– Mikael Frykholm from Tranquillity Hosting offering us rack space
– David Tischler from miniNodes.com offering to buy Raspberry Pi 3s for us if needed
– Yann Leger from scaleway.com who committed to offering ARM servers in the future
ARM support will be added initially to the sdk.gnome.org initiative where binary releases of the GNOME platform and applications will be built. End-users and developers can use the results on a wide variety of Linux systems, running inside xdg-app sandboxes. Later, the GNOME project also hopes to add ARM support to the GNOME Continuous project, so that the latest development versions of the whole GNOME desktop will also be built and tested on ARM systems.
These initiatives will allow the Foundation and its developers to build and test the GNOME desktop on ARM systems, helping to further the mission of the GNOME Foundation to bring a free and powerful desktop environment to as many people as possible.