Ubuntu Linux?

Yes, I use Ubuntu (on a full PC) quite a bit. What do you want to know?

This is a pretty good guide to installing Ubuntu on a Gizmo2 if you want to use an SSD:

Gizmo2: Installing SSD and Ubuntu

It's odd that the guide is not easily accessible from the main pages. Or am I using the site the wrong way?

Anyway, thank you. I was extremely frustrated at this point, just straight up destroyed that resistor instead of desoldering and currently running the install (I know, I know, stupid thing to do but it was getting stupidly frustrating trying to get even an OS on this device...)

I guess the only question in my head right now while its installing is do I need to do something special to make use of the Radeon graphics?

Hi Mark,

You can install the latest drivers after the Linux install. The steps to install the driver are described in this blog post, navigate to the section "Upgrading the Graphics Driver for the Gizmo 2". There is no guide for a lot of the things you may want to do with the Gizmo 2, just community support. If this is a work project, it may be worth using Timesys' support options, I believe they offer this.

I don't really understand why the documentation is so lacking, but I'm glad there's a forum like this to the rescue.

Anyway, install was successful. The video playback and WebGL test were quite slow for an APU, I believe (hope) it's a driver thing otherwise Gizmo2 will be slower than my 2009 intel Atom netbook graphics.

And no, this is not a work project, I'm a maker.

This is for a device project which will need to disable desktop, run an OpenGL program on startup and communicate with an Arduino Nano via serial and send HDMI signal to a pico projector.

A more advanced and standalone version of this 'device': http://makezine.com/2011/09/19/pico-projector-light-fixture-free-code-desktop-spherical-display/

Thanks.

I don't really understand why the documentation is so lacking, but I'm glad there's a forum like this to the rescue.

Anyway, install was successful. The video playback and WebGL test were quite slow for an APU, I believe (hope) it's a driver thing otherwise Gizmo2 will be slower than my 2009 intel Atom netbook graphics.

And no, this is not a work project, I'm a maker.

This is for a device project which will need to disable desktop, run an OpenGL program on startup and communicate with an Arduino Nano via serial and send HDMI signal to a pico projector.

A more advanced and standalone version of this 'device': http://makezine.com/2011/09/19/pico-projector-light-fixture-free-code-desktop-spherical-display/

Thanks.

Hi Mark,

Some graphics tests may well be slower than a 2009 device - the Gizmo 2 shares some of its 1GB memory with the graphics engine, so there is quite limited memory available.

Also, I believe quite a lot of recompiling of libraries may be needed to allow most apps to be able to benefit from the acceleration fully. I suspect this because the Timesys image had better performance than I achieved through installing the latest driver.

I achieved around 10fps at uncompressed Full HD. I didn't research enough to determine what caused it, but for your project, you probably won't be dealing with uncompressed video and I suspect that you may have better results depending on what things are accelerated.

That will suck.

Another issue Im having right now with Ubuntu 15.04:

The USB3 ports dont recognize USB memory sticks. Also sometimes I need to reconnect the mouse and keyboard for them to work again. Does this sound familiar?

No, this didn't occur for me with Ubuntu 14.04.1.

I'd avoid short-lived releases anyway unless you have a specific reason to use it - 14.04 will be supported till 2019 whereas 15.04 will be unsupported in 5 months time.

I'm not aware of what "short term releases" are.

Anyway, not sure whats going on, if it doesnt go away I can reinstall 14, doesn't really matter to me.

Short term release versions are any release that are not marked LTS (long term support):

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

I think of the non LTS versions as Beta or experimental builds.