On Fri, Mar 06, 2015 at 02:03:48AM +0000, James wrote: > > For the distribution, I'd recommend Alpine: > > http://www.alpinelinux.org/about > > Why would that be better than putting lilblue (gentoo) on > the board. Maybe somebody who has success with booting off > of usb (and that definitely is not me) could test lilblue > on an alix2d3 board?
I don't know much Lilblue but it looks like a somewhat recent project. Alpine started back in 2005. It's based on portage to build the distribution but uses the apk-tools that fit better for embedded systems, IMHO. Also, Alpine comes with a very lightweight minimal installation, reliable toolchain to build the distribution and uses openrc. The well known debian-like configuration files allow new maintainers to quickly be comfortable with the device. The recent move to musl over uClibc is a good thing too, FMPOV. I expect Alpine to have a wider community than Lilblue. > How did you have your make.conf files (or similar under Alpine) set up? You don't have make.conf on the target. Embedded devices are bad at compiling. With Alpine, you cross-compile the target from your desktop/server/VM. > If I go this route, I'd really rather run gentoo or something > quite similar, rather than a distro I not familiar with. On the target device, apk-tools are very easy to use and requires MUCH less time/ressources than emerge. Quiet frankly, Alpine doesn't require specific skills. I've started with the binary provided by the maintainers and never had to compile any package myself. > > That's the combo I used in a recent past and it worked quiet fine > > (802.1q VLAN, traffic shaping with tc, advanced firewall with scripted > > iptables rules, ethernet cards controlled with ethtool (I could fix > > speed/duplex for incompatible network hardware), ssh, etc). > > I'm not familiar with Alpine linux. How many of your scripts would be > useful on gentoo? If what you did is sensitive, just drop to me privately..... Sorry, I can't. I don't have them anymore while I'm sure they are still used in production. It's something easy to do, though. The scripts themselves are distribution agnostic. E.g. my ipfilter service only used $IPTABLES. The only thing to update are the service files for openrc, systemd, upstart, whatever. -- Nicolas Sebrecht
