Parallella Community

hi
im very interesting in home parallel computing - so im here.
i never touch your device by hand and thats why i ask next may be stupid question.
everybody here discuss programming problem, but could please somebody explain me - what is it physically? how i can connect the device to computer or i dont need it? how i can load ubuntu on the device? generally i use debian. where i should put sdk for that? to computer or where? is there virtual machine for parallella? So give me please reference to short introduction - i want know what is it before i will buy it.
thanks in advance

ok. thanks for your detail answer, Andrew.
in this picture http://www.parallella.org/board/ i see that the board has two uUSB ports and one uHDMI port. Had you mean those ports for connection keyboard, mouse and monitor respectively?
thanks one more time

9600,

You said " Alternatively you could install the x86 (rather than ARM) version of the SDK onto a laptop." So, do I need a Windows box or a Linux box in order to work off board for development for a single core?

Also, I saw a lot of Linux commands being thrown around on this forum. I guess everyone here knows Linux. That being said, if we do need a Linux box, will there be a manual that works us step by tedious step to get up and running?

Thanks,
Brian

Just to add an alternative - it is also possible to use a Virtual Machine to install Linux if you are working on a Windows computer. You can use the VMware Player or VirtualBox (both free). Installation is straight forward and easy, and this is the way I work on my PC.

Although it is possible, I am not so sure it is a good idea, considering that an image would be at least the size of the allocated virtual disk. These files will be huge to download (dozens of GBs), and I am not sure if the VM instance itself is not a custom configured machine for your specific host PC.

Being really easy, I doubt the benefit of that. You just need the VM installer, the Ubuntu disc ISO image, and that's about it - the installer installes the guest OS at the time of configuring the VM, if you ask it to do so. Then, all you need is to ftp our eSDK tarball and configure your shell config file (e.g., .bashrc) and voila - you are ready to go.