Here's an announce for the latest version of mkxdeb (revision 1.19 and counting): http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/jornada820/bootimage/mkxdeb
mkxdeb allows you to build custom installations of debian for your arm PDA. You can then copy the installation on your CF, SD, MMC, Flash, or whatever. mkxdeb will help you partition your installation between stuff to copy to your PDA and stuff to keep on your workstation (and that may be NFS-mounted). You may thus save precious space without losing the secondary functionality (that will only work while connected to your home network). mkxdeb is developed with a jornada 820 http://jornada820.sourceforge.net/ but you can reasonably easily adapt it for other machines, arm or even non-arm (as long as qemu supports it). mkxdeb installs directly from etch, and has previously been used with sarge. sid is not recommended and many things break. mkxdeb currently requires debian to run, but you can probably adapt it to some other distribution. Packages notably required: zsh debootstrap gcc. The new mkxdeb is well-documented, unlike previous versions. Easier to configure, easier to use, easier to hack. It will give help when run without argument. It wil allow to run or re-run only an interval of the steps required for a full installation. Each user function and configuration variable is now documented. If previous versions were unusable to you, give it another look! There are still a few things that the script won't do for you: finish customizing your machine, mount your CF disk, package things into a nice .tar.bz2, etc. You need to be a system administrator, anyway, if you're building a debian distribution. Improvements welcome! A great advantage of this script for building distributions is that things are reproducible and upgradable: the time you spend on it will not be wasted when you want to build a new, clean, debian image with an updated distribution. Just re-run the script with your modifications, or just the modified parts, and get a clean image with the latest packages. And others can easily build on your work and obtain custom-fit images with exactly the packages they want and none else. Creating a debian jornada image for your PDA from a debian workstation will now be a breeze. You'll need a bit of reconfiguration to have it work for a target different from the jornada820, but there shouldn't be too much difference on a jornada 720, zaurus, or any other beast. Feedback welcome. Enjoy! [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] Always remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else.
