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

This could be really nice!

[Halthar]

Depending on how they set up the cross compile environment this could be a very very good thing.

Recently I have been doing lots of devel. work to be used on Gumstix. At present I already need to compile the full root filesystem and flash that to the Gumstix, so there isn't much change there, but provided that the emerge and USE system work well without adding bloat like the emerge system itself or Python to the system image, this would make an excellent tool as it would remove the headache of creating .mk files and ensuring that I have all the right patches for each package, or even worse porting the packages myself. This is all assuming they set the portage system up so that emerge can be used to send packages to the cross compiler and merged into the root filesystem being created.

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

[kiatoa]

Well, someone has probably already pointed this out but the openembedded.org build system is kinda similar to gentoo in a way. Personally I'd like to see a rubyx or gentoo marriage with openembedded so that developing for embedded devices (a cheap old ipaq H3650 in my case) and keeping the software up to date is made easier. Note that although it is technically feasible to compile on the ipaq cross compiling is orders of magnetude faster and thus worth the setup pain IMHO.

Oh, and to qualify my comment: I'm a wannabe developer, I still haven't gotten an oe build for my iPAQ that I'm happy with.

This is actually a great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an embedded software engineer, so hopefully I know what I am talking about. I work with ARM chips, and every linux system that I have built has been compiled from scratch. Not because I want to, or because I am some kind of speed freak - but because in general there are not any up to date binary packages for ARM available. Or if there are you often find that they are not compiled quite right for your particular needs.
Using a Gentoo like system to cross-compile apps with the options, etc that you need is an excellent idea. Some features that I would like to see in this project
o Keep the code for a package unpacked, so that I can make code changes to that package, recompile it & the package management system will build my changes into the binary. Updating the package version could auto merge my changes.
o Auto generation of root directories, in the file format you want (ie, nfs, cramfs, initrd, etc)
o Able to maintain several different configurations at once, ie one Gentoo maintained set of packages for my iPaq, and one set of packages maintained for my custom device. And to completely rebuild them I could go "emerge -set-board iPaq; emerge -u world"

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

[3Suns]

There's nothing about Gentoo that says you have to compile stuff from scratch. And with embedded devices, it's all going to come pre-loaded anyway. Apparently, Gentoo is very good for building specific, shrunken-down distributions, like the recently-released FlashLinux project. Gentoo lets them optimize the packages very easily, to shring down binaries, etc. This is a pretty big concern with embedded devices.

I don't think anyone would really suggest compiling anything big on your PDA.

penguin on iPAQ is a daily bread for me

[Maljin Jolt]

Native compiling, eh... considering it's Gentoo, how long would X take to compile on an iPAQ? :-)"

Although I am using Familiar Linux on iPAQ (for years ;-) not Gentoo, native compiling is a great curiosity but simply works for many GNU projects. Great to make impressions on WinCE users, whose usability of the PDA is rather limited in sortiment of apps in comparision with full abilities of linux on the same hardware. I have already converted several coders from windows to linux just by demonstration of my iPAQ running at the same time a web server, python curses app in terminal, Quake1 in dynamic desktop icon and C compilation on background.

Of course, for serious development or building whole system from the bottom I would rather suggest crosscompilation. iPAQ memory is too small to use templates in C++. And, by the time the build of X11 will be finished, certainly X22 will be the standard....