On Sat, 15 Oct 2011 23:24:32 -0600, Alan Post wrote:
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
By 'self hosting' do you mean that in a network sense, or in the sense
that you can actually compile on them? That does sound interesting
although I wonder if there are any systems that can run a full shell for
the Ben (not busybox). Thanks for the interesting links.
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