OpenMandriva ARM Powered Laptop at the OpenMandriva Summit in Budapest

Posted by – April 11, 2017

At the OpenMandriva meeting in Budapest with Bernhard Rosenkränzer and Colin Close, President of OpenMandriva, showing off the ARM Powered laptop that could run Open Mandriva at the Open Mandriva meeting in Budapest. This video was taken at the OpenMandriva annual meeting which this year took place in the City of Budapest where the OpenMandriva team met to talk about their plans to workw to move their distro forward. One of the major decisions taken was to move fully to the Clang compiler suite by using lld as their default linker. This is in line with their efforts to create a distro that can be used on more modern architectures. The Clang compiler/linker suite brings with it built in cross-compilers which make the creation of packages for alternate processors such as on their prototype laptop using hardware for 64bit ARM architecture using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Extended 96Boards, they have built sufficient core software to be able to provide a distro for it. Recently a key element required for them to bring this project to fruition was the demonstration of freedreno graphics driver running on the latest Adreno GPU. The OpenMandriva team are looking forward to test this new driver alongside the OpenMandriva software compilation. Another major discussion point was the OpenMandriva package management system. A decision was taken to start using the dnf package manager for the core management function, they will however provide a wrapper script so that users will still be able to use familiar command to perform package management. These changes will have a major impact on their distributed build farm as it will require restructuring the repository metadata on their ABF (Automated Build Farm) while they are doing this they will take the opportunity to incorporate a QA system and a method for building multiple dependent packages within a container. They hope these changes will improve the overall quality of the OpenMandriva distribution. If you would like to to join the OpenMandriva Association either as a user or as a developer you can visit their website http://www.openmandriva.org or contract them through the developer irc channel on freenode #openmandriva-cooker, if you have no packaging experience there are plenty of interesting jobs to do that don’t require coding skills.