Subject: Re: Port to EBSA285

From: Francois Desloges <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 15:18:23 -0400

On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Alex Holden wrote:

> You don't need an EBSA285 specific distribution, the NetWinder, Debian,
> or Titan (I would recommend the latter) distributions should work on it.

What is the difference between the three distro and why do you recommand Titan?

My goal is to build a small linux 2.2 based system on a SA-110+21285+flash
platform embedded in our pure  hardware Layer 2-5 data-comm switch, in order
to provide it a good TCP/IP stack, SNMP, and all the great networking stuff
Linux provides..

I know the Embedded world is one of the main target of Linus (with SMP on the
High End).
Do you know if there's something like an ARM-Embedded Linux group/project.
Something that would looks like 
"The LinuxRouter Project meets The Linux-ARM project "?

If not, would it be a good idea to start such a sub-project?
--
François Desloges
[email-masked]
unsubscribe: body of `unsubscribe linux-arm' to [email-masked]

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From: Alex Holden <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 08:43:13 +0100 (GMT)

> What is the difference between the three distro and why do you

I found various problems with the Corel distribution, largely caused by
various packages which hadn't been recompiled since Russell's original
port of RedHat 3.something (A.OUT based). Titan has been rebuilt from
scratch completely using RPMs. The Debian I tried seemed very incomplete,
and also seemed to be still using an unversioned Glibc, like Corel
(which is a bad thing because it means you have to recompile everything
when you upgrade Glibc, which amazingly Corel actually did at one point
without switching to a versioned Glibc at the same time), but this was
quite a while ago so they may have managed to improve it a lot since then.

> High End). Do you know if there's something like an ARM-Embedded Linux
> group/project.

The Linux-7110 project (Linux on the Psion 5 and Geofox 1) is probably the
closest to this. I started working on a basic embedded distro at one
point, but haven't got much further than an initrd with Glibc, bash, and
lots of tools in it:
ftp://ftp.linuxhacker.org/pub/flatcap/

--------------- Linux- the choice of a GNU generation. --------------
: Alex Holden (M1CJD)- Caver, Programmer, Land Rover nut, Radio Ham :

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From: Jim Pick <[email-masked]>
Date: 31 Aug 1999 14:42:12 -0700

Alex Holden <[email-masked]> writes:

> The Debian I tried seemed very incomplete, and also seemed to be
> still using an unversioned Glibc, like Corel (which is a bad thing
> because it means you have to recompile everything when you upgrade
> Glibc, which amazingly Corel actually did at one point without
> switching to a versioned Glibc at the same time), but this was quite
> a while ago so they may have managed to improve it a lot since then.

You must have tried it a long time ago.  We've been using the
versioned glibc since February.  At the same time as that big
transition, we retargeted the userspace at ARMv3, so the userspace
will run on almost every ARM platform from ARM6 to StrongARM.

The Debian ARM port is starting to look fairly complete, but we've
still got a ways to go before it's polished enough to be released as a
"stable" port.  In particular, the installation procedure needs lots
of work.

We're finally now using the same gcc and glibc as the other Debian
ports, so things should go fairly smoothly from now on.  Hopefully,
we'll have an autobuilder installed soon, so we should be able to keep
in sync with the other Debian ports.

Cheers,

 - Jim