On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 22:12, derek holzer wrote:
There is another distro called Intimate for Ipaq that uses all standard Debian ARM packages, but it is pretty much dead in the water for more than a year, so kernel support for newer Ipaqs isn't really there.
Kernel support is largely unrelated to the distribution you run on top of the kernel. The kernel will always be one from handhelds.org CVS.
Sometimes I wished there was a good Gentoo for ARM... big problem would be how to actually compile anything in less than 5 years on an Ipaq!
The answer to this is and has always been cross compilation. Gentoo doesn't support that (yet?).
The core of Familiar is Open Embedded, which may be less "user friendly" than Opie or GPE Familiar, but more flexible:
You are confusing "GUI environment", distribution, and build system here.
Opie and GPE are "GUI environments". They provide the user interface to the system.
Familiar is a distribution. Familiar provides you with pre-built images you can flash onto your handheld and numerous packages to install later.
OpenEmbedded is the build system that's used to build Familar (and Openzaurus and ...). It's basically a set of tools and package description files that allow you to build a distribution (i.e. a set of packages and images) from scratch (including the toolchain and everything cross compilation related).
You've called for a "good Gentoo for ARM" (which may never actually become a reality). OpenEmbedded provides you with the same possibilities today.
The package description format will look quite similar to that used by Gentoo portage and building stuff is just as easy (or difficult for that matter).
In fact, OpenEmbedded is based on Gentoo portage (although most of the code base has probably been re-written by now). Think of it as portage plus cross compilation support plus other goodies.
So, if you want to build your system from sources you can do that with OpenEmbedded. The same is true for rolling your own distribution.
Rene