On 12/08/2011 07:15 PM, Nick Sheppard wrote: > On 06/12/11 23:11, Peter Tworek wrote: >> Hi, >> >> For some time now I've been spending some of my free time on getting >> NetBSD running on my Freerunner. > > At last someone bringing NetBSD to the Freerunner! I've been waiting > for the day when I can point to my phone and casually say "Of course > it runs NetBSD ...". Thank you! You're welcome :). > > I'm only a tinkerer myself, but some years ago I enjoyed getting > NetBSD running on an old Blue & White Mac G3. I was really impressed > by the enthusiasm and helpfulness of the NetBSD community, and by > their mission to make it run on every possible hardware, down to > toasters if possible. What, I really like about NetBSD is the code and documentation. While hacking on linux kernel when I wanted to learn something, I've always ended up spending enormous amounts of time on digging trough mailing list archives, some random web pages, text files under Documentation/ etc. I've usually found what I wanted, but the whole experience was tiresome. With NetBSD I've never had any problems with finding valuable information in the manual pages. > It always seemed to me that the Freerunner would make a great project > (if I only had the time and the skill). So I'm really happy to see > what you're doing. Well I can't promise that this project will ever be as usable as linux is on the GTA02. I'm afraid that there is still enormous amount of work to be done on this port. I also don't think I have the necessary skills and time to do it all by myself. I'll probably continue working on it as long as it's fun, but can't promise anything more.
> One question now - what about the GTA04? Looking at NetBSD > development, it seems that people are already working on ports to > current OMAP and BeagleBoard type hardware. Does this mean that a > port to the GTA04 would be relatively straightforward? Or is this too > good to be true? I doubt I'll buy GTA04 myself. The hardware looks nice, but at this moment it's a little bit above my price range. Maybe this will change over time... Porting NetBSD to GTA04 is certainly doable. As you've said there is already some sort of support for OMAP boards in NetBSD, so it should be just a matter of getting it to run on GTA04. I guess that with the debug board working it should be a couple of days of work to get the kernel booting. After that however, all the drivers for GTA02 peripherals that NetBSD doesn't support have to be written. This is probably the most time consuming task. > > Thanks again for letting us know what you're doing, > > Nick Sheppard > > _______________________________________________ > Openmoko community mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
