[PD] PDA suggestions

[Rene Wagner]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 22:12, derek holzer wrote:
> There is another distro called Intimate for Ipaq that uses all standard 
> Debian ARM packages, but it is pretty much dead in the water for more 
> than a year, so kernel support for newer Ipaqs isn't really there.

Kernel support is largely unrelated to the distribution you run on top
of the kernel. The kernel will always be one from handhelds.org CVS.

> Sometimes I wished there was a good Gentoo for ARM... big problem would 
> be how to actually compile anything in less than 5 years on an Ipaq! 

The answer to this is and has always been cross compilation. Gentoo
doesn't support that (yet?).

> The core of Familiar is Open Embedded, which may be less "user friendly" 
> than Opie or GPE Familiar, but more flexible:
> 
> http://www.openembedded.org/

You are confusing "GUI environment", distribution, and build
system here. 

- Opie and GPE are "GUI environments". They provide the user
  interface to the system.

- Familiar is a distribution. Familiar provides you with pre-built
  images you can flash onto your handheld and numerous packages
  to install later.

- OpenEmbedded is the build system that's used to build Familar (and
  Openzaurus and ...). It's basically a set of tools and package 
  description files that allow you to build a distribution (i.e. a
  set of packages and images) from scratch (including the toolchain
  and everything cross compilation related).

You've called for a "good Gentoo for ARM" (which may never actually
become a reality). OpenEmbedded provides you with the same possibilities
today.

The package description format will look quite similar to that used
by Gentoo portage and building stuff is just as easy (or difficult for
that matter).

In fact, OpenEmbedded is based on Gentoo portage (although most of the
code base has probably been re-written by now). Think of it as portage
plus cross compilation support plus other goodies.

So, if you want to build your system from sources you can do that with
OpenEmbedded. The same is true for rolling your own distribution.

Rene