[Freedombox-discuss] On small programs

[Sandy Harris]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 4:00 PM, Alex Stapleton <alexs at prol.etari.at> wrote:

> The main reason for smaller libraries is to save RAM. I think that even today a
> few hundred MB of SLC Flash and DRAM would not make the cost targets
> impossible and by the time a FB makes it to market...

Depends a bit who our target market is. I live in China where $500 a month
would be a fine salary offer for a new university graduate. Will they be willing
to spend a week's salary on a plug computer for this?

There are lots of people here who make far less, and there are other countries
with even lower numbers. Arguably, some of them are politically the ones most
in need of Freedom Boxes.

> E.g. I am currently working with an industrial ARM9 SCADA system with
> 64MB of RAM and 128MB of Flash and no swap. ...

> I dont really think that the memory pressure will be high enough to
> make the use of embedded libraries a requirement unless you really
> want to fit everything on a cheap MIPS WiFi AP.

Nor do I, but the question still seemed worth asking.

On the one hand, a couple of decades ago a Sun III was a high-end
server that people ran whole companies on. Top-of-the-line had 32
megs of RAM and a 25 MHz CPU. It is not clear to me that a
Freedom Box actually needs much more than that, except of
course that if you want to share media files, that requires space.

On the other hand, today's plug computer is an order of magnitude
or more better in all areas, so why not design for that?

Even then, though we may have to trim some. du -h on my desktop
Ubunutu box says /bin is 6.7 megs and /usr 4.9 gigs.