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Marcin Juszkiewicz: AArch64 desktop: day two Published Sep 22 2015 via RSS

planetUbuntu

First day behind me. Had to disconnect DVD drive as X-Gene SATA controller still does not like it. And to resolve some issues with multimedia support. Got some questions too.

What is desktop class?

There were questions about desktop class hardware, links to Gigabyte mainboard etc. So why Mustang is desktopstein and not desktop? Or rather: what desktop should have?

For me to consider mainboard as desktop class it needs to have few things:

• microATX or miniITX format
• USB ports (more than two, USB 3.0 speed should be available)
• on-board sound with 3.5mm output (do not care USB/PCIe/SPI – has to work)
• x16 PCI Express slot for graphics (can have 8 lines)
• SATA controller working with optical drives (good-bye X-Gene 1)
• at least four SATA ports
• standard DIMM slots (without ECC requirement)

When it comes to AArch64 there is no such ones so far. Something can be arranged from few mainboards by adding extra cards or usb devices. And so far no new rumours about new hardware ;(

UPDATE: why 4 drives? I have system hdd, scratch hdd (to test installers) and want to have optical drive (also for installers).

Multimedia support

I use Fedora on my machines. And as lot of people know this distribution has strange rules when it comes to multimedia support. Forget about MP3, H264 and few other things.

Normally (on x86(-64) architecture) people go for RPMFusion repositories. But they do not support aarch64… So I did local rebuilds of everything needed to get MPlayer, VLC and H264 support for GStreamer (so Firefox is able to play YouTube videos).

There is no Adobe Flash support so some of YT videos does not work. Too bad that it includes live streaming as I am unable to watch Linaro Connect keynotes on desktop (good that it works on Android tablet).