Embedded Gentoo?

An anonymous reader writes "Gentoo Linux may soon begin showing up in consumer gadgets, thanks to a new project creating an embedded version of Gentoo Linux. The year-old project has achieved preliminary releases on x86, MIPS, PPC, and ARM. The releases include native core system binaries, along with toolchains for native or cross-platform compiling. Native compiling, eh... considering it's Gentoo, how long would X take to compile on an iPAQ? :-)"

Comments

You wouldn't compile from scratch.

[Principito]

Compiling from scratch would be insane. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to put cross compiling tools on a host machine and build your iPAQ or whatever in a chrooted environment. After which you would transfer your build.

$0.02

PS:
Cross compiling tools are part of this project.

Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?

[GileadGreene]

How many program projects that you know of offer linux-ppc or linux-mips or linux-arm binaries?

Well, Debian for one. In fact, Debian supports x86, Motorola 68k, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, PA-RISC, IA-64, and S/390 architectures. Porting to the AMD64 and Hitachi SuperH is also underway. Note that the 68k, PowerPC, ARM, and SuperH are all popular for embedded applications.

compiling

[SuperBanana]

how long would X take to compile on an iPAQ?

Helloooooo distccd.

I have a P2/300 Mobile, a Celeron 450, and a P3/600. Compiling stuff with distcc set up is a breeze and I fail to see the complaints about gentoo compile time...of course, they're all bare-bones console-only systems (firewall, mail/web, and fileserver), but you get the idea. Two of them only have 128MB of ram...