Hackberry A10 : Ubuntu 12.10 with Razor-qt

Having heard about Razor-qt, I thought I would give it a go on the Hackberry. Razor-qt is a light-weight desktop built for simplicity and speed. It is also intended to target 'weak machines' therefore I was hoping it would perform well on the Hackberry giving that we still lack full hardware acceleration.

To start with I reused my XBMC image which is basically a Ubuntu 12.10 install complemented with a 3.0.42+ kernel. You can remove the xbmc install by removing the /allwinner (ie rm -rf /allwinner).

I couldn't find a pre-compiled armhf package of raxor-qt therefore I built from scratch (using root user) following the build instructions here as a guide. Fortunately the xbmc image already includes most of the build tools for compilation.

Download the latest release and untar to a directory (eg src/razor) :

    mkdir src; cd src; mkdir razor;

    wget https://github.com/downloads/Razor-qt/razor-qt/razorqt-0.5.1.tar.bz2

    tar xvf razorqt-0.5.1.tar.bz2 razorqt-0.5.1

    cd ..

    mkdir build

    

Before building get some additional packages for building:    

    apt-get install qt4-dev-tools qt4-designer

    apt-get install libmagic-dev

Now build (this takes a bit of time) and install

    cd build

    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ../razorqt-0.5.1

    make

    make install

Once built successfully we need to replace the existing window manager fluxbox with openbox the default for razor-qt.

    apt-get remove fluxbox

    apt-get clean

    apt-get install openbox

Now we create a simple startup script to invoke razor-qt.

    echo 'exec razor-session -w openbox' > /root/.xinitrc_razor

I suggest setting the CPU governor profile to performance:

     cpufreq-set -g performance

To start razor-qt from the command line:

    cd /root

    xinit ~/.xinitrc_razor -- :1

The basic desktop has minimal applications because the XBMC image has no defaults application installed (eg browser, file manager, text editor, etc ..) however these is can be easily installed. You would also need to customise the image to your requirements ie wifi/ethernet etc. Also further work is require to auto-start razort-qt and use for non-root users.

Although the desktop experience is primitive I found it to be more responsive than the Linaro image although my main use has been for code development/compilation on the Hackberry, requiring multiple open command shells.

I also compiled the mesa-demo library to stress the windowing system/cpu along with 'openssl speed' to see how responsive the GUI would remain under load. Below is a another badly made video to demonstrate how it performs.