OE on a laptop

[omro]

Would OE be possible on a laptop?

Such a small linux footprint would boot up so fast and revive a really old laptop......

Just a thought!  

[Mickeyl]

(parrot) OE is a build system, not a distribution. (/parrot)

Yes, OE can build a rootfs for an x86 machine.

[JohnKiniston]

I see I'm not the only one with a older laptop gathering dust

The problem I see is Opie is designed for pen input and not mouse input?

I've got a Libretto 50 that's got 32mb of ram, a 640x480 display and a whole 75Mhz Pentium 1 CPU that I'd love to find a use for.

[omro]

That libretto would be fab with a lean, mean linux PDA type software running on it, it would blaze along compared to how it must have run with Win98.

I keep thinking that OE is a distribution. So is OZ the only distribution built upon it?

So someone could conceivably use OZ to build a distribution for an old laptop?

Or would it just be better to Gentoo it?

[lardman]

So is OZ the only distribution built upon it?

No; off the top of my head: OZ+GPE, OZ+Opie, Familiar+GPE, Familiar+Opie.

The idea is that the distributions are all the same (OZ & Familiar) except for the hardware differences required by the different machines (OZ for Zaurus, Familiar for iPAQ - however in the end I suppose that the two will be so similar that using two different names will be pointless, especially as there are already different machines supported within each distro).

The major difference between them at the moment, is that Familiar (for iPAQs) has a 2.6.x kernel running, however work for the Zaurii is underway - more volunteers, etc. as ever ;-).


Si

[Mickeyl]

The decision to stick with the names OpenZaurus, familiar linux, and OpenSIMpad was primary based on brand recognition, not on technical reasons.

Then again, it's pretty likely that OpenZaurus and OpenSIMpad move to uclibc in the future, while the familiar linux developers seem to want to stick with glibc.

[omro]

Then again, it's pretty likely that OpenZaurus and OpenSIMpad move to uclibc in the future, while the familiar linux developers seem to want to stick with glibc.

What's the difference and what does that mean for OE?

[Mickeyl]

uclibc is a lightweight c library especially designed for embedded systems. The size benefit is >= 1MB and it's also faster.

[omro]

So if it's better, why would they go with the larger, less sensible option?
And why would they fracture something that seriously needs to be a good combined front  

[lardman]

So if it's better, why would they go with the larger, less sensible option?

Just a guess, but they generally have more ROM space than we do (32Mb I think). So this could be a reason. However this is possibly a bit simplistic, anyone know the real reason (perhaps a trawl of the various mailing lists)?

And why would they fracture something that seriously needs to be a good combined front

Up until now, the latest familiar apps haven't really run on the Z (OZ3.3.6pre1 was the only ROM which had libc like the familiar apps, and we had no usable X11 GUI for it) so it wouldn't change that much.

Also, assuming the familiar apps, etc., will be built with OE, then they can just be linked against uclibc by changing one line in the local.conf file and running ormake again - so not a major issue.


Si