Re: Status of Emdebian Grip

On 3/02/2014 9:31 PM, Neil Williams wrote:
> Riku commented, when Grip was first announced, that storage was not
> going to remain the principle problem for Emdebian systems and the
> availability and affordability of 64Gb SD cards means that this is now
> the reality.
>
> [snip]
> Emdebian Grip has no role in "resource limited" deployments other than
> reducing the storage requirements, so if the ARM boards currently in
> active usage have no practical storage limits, it is time to reconsider
> the work involved in maintaining Emdebian Grip
>
> If you have interest in retaining Grip *and are prepared to provide
> some solutions to the issues above* then say so here. Otherwise,
> neither testing not point releases will get updates and we then ought
> to consider if unstable is worth retaining.

Unfortunately I don't see how I can help with your issues zero through 
five (unless you can be financially motivated?), but I thought I should 
let you know that systems with a need for something the size of Grip do 
still exist.

We (ThinLinX Inc, http://thinlinx.com) are using Grip 3.1 on a variant 
of the Beagleboard xM that has *no* SD card slot and only 256 MiB of 
NAND flash in which to fit U-Boot, kernel, main userspace and recovery 
userspace (yes, I know what you are going to say - this is a "design 
flaw" that we brought on ourselves).  This means that I have to cram 
Debian into 211 MiB for the main userspace.  It's a difficult job 
getting Grip to fit in this space, there is no chance that standard 
Debian would fit.

This device is an omni-protocol thin client, and it has to be able to 
support COTS add-ons such as Citrix Receiver, provide an up-to-date X 
server, web browser, and full-featured subsystems such as CUPS, so Crush 
is not a viable alternative for us.