Personally, I think the best way would be to stick with Debian since it
appears to be the only true non-commercial distro out there. Being
stuck in the 'Slink world' for development has made it difficult to work
with, but I believe this was because of the libc dependencies more so
than anything else.
What would be nice would be to have a *.deb to *.lrp type converter to
only pull the necessary pieces out for repackaging. Given that *.debs
contain dependency checks nonexistent in *.rpms, I feel their format is
superior.
Debian has been ported to a number of different processors as
well(although, I haven't even heard of the IBM one you mention) and do
support cross-compilers for them. I believe our biggest problem was a
lack of a method to use a different i386 version as the host for
development efforts as it was always easier to just bring up another
box.
I suppose another option would be to change/add to the focus of the
whole thing and have a master set of scripts etc. that would consolidate
the pieces req'd for a base system from whatever distro/source tree you
have installed. I realize there would be prerequisites(kernel switches,
busybox builds whatever), but again this could be documented as the
preliminary steps. This would be the 'ultimate' as it wouldn't be tied
to any specific distro and could be recreated at whim for 'whatever'
environment was currently running.
In that the LRP project started life as trying to get all the
functionality required and squeeze every byte of space out of it as
well, alot of *.lrp packages have been compiled 'non-standard'(ie. the
pathing during .configure). This forces one to redo the same thing for
any upgrade, and any stock distro's binaries -even if they could work,
probably wouldn't.
Just my $0.02, actually, much less, unless it's in Canadian currency.
Doug.
Jack Coates wrote:
>
> I've used HardHat in lab systems (Ziatech Ketris, sweet boxes) when I
> was at Rainfinity. From an admin/hack perspective, it feels like RedHat
> with some kernel patches. It was a pleasure to work with compared to a
> regular embedded system, but I doubt it would run nicely on a 486/33.
>
> --
> Jack Coates
> Monkeynoodle: It's what's for dinner!
>
> On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
>
> > In light of my recent decision to abandon waiting for Butterfly, I am taking
> > a long, hard look at working with Monta-Vista's Hard-Hat linux. I think
> > this would make an excellent base distribution for the next generation of
> > internet appliance releases.
> >
> > Of course, the proof is in the pudding (or so they say), so I'm downloading
> > their (free) Journeyman release to play with. I've also e-mailed the
> > HardHat linux folks, to see if they have any interest in a project like LEAF
> > using their distribution. While I don't think we currently need sponsership
> > from Monta-Vista, an alliance (or similar) might be nice. It would at least
> > be good to know things like if they plan on keeping a free development
> > platform available, be informed of major upcoming changes to the
> > distribution ahead of time, and similar.
> >
> > Another benefit of using something like HardHat is multi-processor support.
> > This will mean absolutely nothing to 99.999% of our users, but several folks
> > are embedding LRP into 'black boxes' which may or may not run an Intel
> > architecture CPU. I personally would LOVE to play with something like
> > HardHat on the new IBM NPe405 CPU with 4 built-in 10/100 ethernet ports and
> > multiple T1/E1 support. That would make a pretty cool LEAF platform...
> >
> > NOTE: I'm still very open to suggestions on what to use as the base of the
> > next generation of LRP like functionality. I'm mainly looking at starting
> > with an existing distribution because 'out of the box' you get a working
> > cross-compile environment (no more dedicated Debian Slink boxes just to
> > compile an application or two), and much of the software will be
> > pre-packaged. While the pre-packaged stuff will likely be in RPM format, it
> > should be possible to easily convert the RPM's to a tar.gz file or something
> > else shell-scripts can deal with. A lot of the hard work (that requires
> > maintainence and debugging) goes into making sure the packages all work well
> > together...we should be able to leverage this work from a mainstream
> > distribution and speed our "time to solution". I really don't want to try
> > to create or maintain a complete, from the ground up distribution...it seems
> > like too much duplication of existing work.
> >
> > Thoughts/commments welcome, as always
> >
> > Charles Steinkuehler
> > http://lrp.steinkuehler.net
> > http://c0wz.steinkuehler.net (lrp.c0wz.com mirror)
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Leaf-devel mailing list
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leaf-devel mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
_______________________________________________
Leaf-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
