Embedded Gentoo? 197
An anonymous reader writes "Gentoo Linux may soon begin showing up in consumer gadgets, thanks to a new project creating an embedded version of Gentoo Linux. The year-old project has achieved preliminary releases on x86, MIPS, PPC, and ARM. The releases include native core system binaries, along with toolchains for native or cross-platform compiling. Native compiling, eh... considering it's Gentoo, how long would X take to compile on an iPAQ? :-)"
So why is Gentoo the right choice for this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this? (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason I use Gentoo is not just because it compiles for my system, but because I like how it lays things out and its ease and flexibility of configuration.
It should be fairly simple to set up a "host" system with a cross-compiler to make binary packages for the embedded devices to download.
Complete control (Score:3, Interesting)
You can also just built the parts of the application that are relevant to your product.
Using any source that's not your own (whether you compile it or not) is a liability - fortunately law makes sure that corporations dont really have to worry about that.
This could be really nice! (Score:3, Interesting)
Recently I have been doing lots of devel. work to be used on Gumstix [gumstix.org]. At present I already need to compile the full root filesystem and flash that to the Gumstix, so there isn't much change there, but provided that the emerge and USE system work well without adding bloat like the emerge system itself or Python to the system image, this would make an excellent tool as it would remove the headache of creating
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and to qualify my comment: I'm a wannabe developer, I still haven't gotten an oe build for my iPAQ that I'm happy with.
This is actually a great idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Using a Gentoo like system to cross-compile apps with the options, etc that you need is an excellent idea. Some features that I would like to see in this project
o Keep the code for a package unpacked, so that I can make code changes to that package, recompile it & the package management system will build my changes into the binary. Updating the package version could auto merge my changes.
o Auto generation of root directories, in the file format you want (ie, nfs, cramfs, initrd, etc)
o Able to maintain several different configurations at once, ie one Gentoo maintained set of packages for my iPaq, and one set of packages maintained for my custom device. And to completely rebuild them I could go "emerge -set-board iPaq; emerge -u world"
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think anyone would really suggest compiling anything big on your PDA.
oh god I can't read anymore (Score:1, Interesting)
First I see the usual comments about how it makes no sense to use gentoo for embedded stuff because you don't need package management. Then I see the people defending gentoo for the blah blah features that make no difference for embedded devices.
Some developers will find this usefull others, will not. Some hobby geeks will compile x on an ipaq for fun, but normal people will cross compile on another machine.
The REAL advantage here is that somebody who is really good with portage will be able to dev complete systems for the embedded device very quickly and easily. The advantage here is completely different than the advantages gentoo on the desktop gives. The developer will (eventually) be able to wip up systems with a few commands rather than carefully assembling the parts, sounds like a good thing right? thought so.
Re:This is actually a great idea (Score:3, Interesting)
So I installed Debian, but I wasn't happy with not having had a choice of filesystems, so I went back and guess what I used - the Gentoo install CD - to boot up, manually mount, and move around my partitions from one to the other and make filesystems that I wanted to try out (JFS). Worked just fine. Used the Gentoo handbook to help me (re)-install GRUB, using the Gentoo install CD, on my brand-new Debian JFS Linux machine.
The Gentoo install process, the install CD, the forums, the handbooks, and much much else is really wonderful and puts a new spin on manipulating and customizing your system (in my case it was Debian).
So I think this is quite possibly a really good idea, because it's exactly the flexibility (I don't mean make.conf or USE flags) of the way things are set up that would allow you to sort of get your hands or brains around other things (in my case a Debian install) using the Gentoo philosophy and processes.
Even though Gentoo is though of as a distribution, I think that's it's really turning into something more than just a distribution - I don't particularly care to run Gentoo Linux on my machine, but I will continue to love the install disk if I need to mess around with my system, and the forums and handbooks, if I need questions answered that can make a lot of difference.
I wish them all good luck, and thank them for their hard work.
penguin on iPAQ is a daily bread for me (Score:4, Interesting)
Although I am using Familiar Linux on iPAQ (for years
Of course, for serious development or building whole system from the bottom I would rather suggest crosscompilation. iPAQ memory is too small to use templates in C++. And, by the time the build of X11 will be finished, certainly X22 will be the standard....
Just be glad... (Score:2, Interesting)