• Registered: 2015-04-08
  • Posts: 9

Topic: Software on Novena

Hi All,

After months waiting and customs struggles I got my Novena today ( Soooo excited) and the first question in my head was to think what software is the community using and what are the steps/difficulties you have found installing it. Do you use  the default browser or people are compiling a version of chromium? Which development environment for web, GPBB or the fpga?  and those kind of things. So it would be great if we can use this thread to share your weapons of choice in Novena.

So far I'm looking for ( web browser  the default one seems a bit slow, development environments, SDR, FPGA, GPBB, etc.. )

What do you think?
Thanks,


PS: As I start using Novena as my work laptop will share the software as well smile

  • Registered: 2014-06-15
  • Posts: 146

Re: Software on Novena

I don't even want to know how long Chromium would take to compile... Probably in excess of 12 hours. And that's assuming things don't overheat- the default heatsink is insufficient, as far as I can tell.

Part of the slowness you've experienced might be lack of GPU acceleration. I compiled Midori, and it didn't really seem much better. Disabling scripts and whatnot should help.

Otherwise, I'm still on basically the stock setup. Once I finish up my case and get the LCD issues worked out, I'll probably put a Fluxbox setup on there like my other machines.

I gave FreeCAD a whirl, and it's unsuable. I'm not sure if even full 3D acceleration would make it usable, even for simple models. The rest of what I've used is the terminal and web browser.

  • Registered: 2015-05-10
  • Posts: 3

Re: Software on Novena

I built my own copy of Firefox, which does take most of a day. The kernel I was using at the beginning didn't do thermal throttling, so it was indeed important to watch the temp and keep fanning the heatsink while compiling. Newer builds throttle to keep it from overheating, so an external fan just makes the build go faster. smile

It...isn't a fast machine. I expect once the gpu driver is working we'll be able to use compositor-based desktop environments and graphical stuff will be more responsive in general. Right now dragging an expensive-to-redraw window can tie up the machine for seconds at a time.

As far as development, I use vim and other command line tools in the (xfce) terminal, which of course run fine. It doesn't make sense to work on large applications on the novena, but for small projects (C and web) it's been fine. For C code it's nice to have a native build environment on arm. I haven't done anything with the fpga other than the gpbb blink tutorial.