Gobolinux On The Z

[dsteuer]

After playing around with my Z for only a few weeks I´m now looking for a way to dive into developing.
Gobolinux http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/Main_Page seems similar to gentoo. they have announced an arm port of their distribution  http://gobo.kundor.org/wiki/GoboLinux_Embe...g_GoboLinux-ARM
complete with a seemingly nice toolchain. Is there a HOWTO or something to build/use a kernel for my zaurus 860 with this distribution. Or should I let my fingers away, if I need a HOWTO for such an experiment? :-)

Perhaps I can combine this question with a more general one: I've successfully build some applications in my cacko/Xqt setup but the 2.4 kernels seems to get old and I´d like to have a 2.6er for the reports of snappier operation. What toolchain and distribution would you recommend?

Waiting for the next pdaxrom? Angstrom? They seem to do a lot of things "the right way".
Something else like gentoo/gobo? Is there any way to streamline repositories, so that say a packages compiled with softfloat can easily be recompiled as a hardfloat one and can be used in different roms?

Any pointers to documentation of the current status of Z developement with respect to setting up toolchains and roms are highly appreciated.

And by the way: Thx to everybody in here! The Z community is a nice place to be.

detlef

[Da_Blitz]

if it was me i would always go for the latest, but thats not for everyone and always causes headaches

i would say try and stick with a gcc4 as there is a raft of features in there that come in handy for reducing boot times and such. kernel wise it seems most people are maintaing a 2.6.16 kernel but with some of the recent features that went into the latest kernel i would be inclined to sugest somthing a bit more recent.

oh and if you do try this make sure you put kexec patches into the kernel. it makes for a better bootloader

i know there is an auto tool for gcc toolchains (kegels cross scripts) but that tends to have support for older toolchains and the arm stuff dosent appear to get updated much

check out richard purdies site for Z and arm related patches as everything you need is there.

if you can try and use the new eabi, it solves a couple of hardfloat/softfloat problems but you have to compile everything with it

might also want to look at buildroot or scratchbox for automated solutions. the openwrt SDK is buildroot bassed and very easy to blow your own rom (make menuconfig, select pacakges and libaries and "make" and it spits out an img file to be burnt

rom setup is a bit of a hardware issue and how willing you are to break the norm. for example my Z has 2 partions not 3 and they look nothing like the standard scheme, i cant go back to a stock rom without fdisking the MD and i also may have a slight problem with the flash partioning (pdaxrom beta thing)

it still works however and it now boots in a more sane way that resemblesthe BIOS boot sequence (which is 65% perfect bootloader in my opinion and is still one of the best ways to boot a device i have seen to date, it just works with everything and you cant f^%$ up your bootloader, its idiot proof)

however f you are thinking of using gobo then you are not afraid to break things. i migh suggest gentoo. it might sound wierd but if you have a compile farm of arm processors then distcc is your friend (remeber qemu has full arm emulation support now  add you PC today!!!) throw in an overclocked slug or 3 and compiling kde wont be that bad (still an overnighter but at least it will be done in the morning