On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 11:31:12PM -0500, [email protected] wrote: > I am wondering what you all think about how far I, or any of us, for > that matter, should go with hacking on the Ben. For one, Qi adapted > OpenWRT rather than made a new distribution from (near) scratch. Was > this due to time constraints, or something else? Would it be worth > it for someone to learn the MIPS architecture sufficiently well to > make a Ben Tailored OS? Or, since the new Nanonote may or may not > have a similar chip, is it better to stay "on the surface" as it > were and not get too involved in low-level stuff? Maybe the > experience alone of deep MIPS knowledge will be worth it even if we > move to another chip in the future? If one does not go deeper than > the kernel and other basic utils, I suppose "from scratch" would > mean getting a custom kernel and utils, tuning them, then building > from there, right? I think in general, x86 GNU/Linux is assumed to > be as optimized as it could be, but I'm not sure about other > architectures like ARM, MIPS, etc. Since someone has already done > the work, perhaps it is not good to try and re-do it...? >
If you'd like to stay with Linux, but are interested in moving off of OpenWRT, you might find one of these projects interesting for your effort: https://github.com/pikhq/bootstrap-linux http://www.landley.net/aboriginal/ Neither of these are "ready-to-go" for the Ben; the second isn't strictly a distribution. They are both an attempt to build the smallest *self-hosting* linux environment, and in that role make good bootstrapping tools. They're essentially one step above Linux From Scratch. -Alan -- .i ma'a lo bradi cu penmi gi'e du _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
