Custom Query (532 matches)

I'm going to be reciving a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 soon. This system is already linux based and has a Intel XScale PXA270 CPU at 416 MHz, 64mb of ram, a 4gb harddrive, 16mb of flash for the kernel/bootloader, and a fill qwerty keyboard. This system is perfect for development. We could get a lot of bugs out of the way using a chroot build or a boot build instead of trying to cross-compile the whole system like you would be forced to do with almost all of the other PDA/Embdedded arm systems. I would like to add arm to the book. Thoughts?

Major new release, builds with the same instructions. Any objections.

We've built yaboot (but not hfsutils or powerpc-utils which are needed to install the loader onto a bootstrap partition and bless it), but we don't have any indications how to set it up. As far as I can see, there are at least 4 plausible build scenarios -

(a.) build on a different machine - you'll need to have access to the target machine so that you can copy everything over. possibly, using a rescue disk. I suppose you could use that to format the disk, install the tarball of the bootable system, and then chroot into it to run ybin.

(b.) build on the same machine running osx. Note that you cannot do this from the current (Tiger)version of osx, that broke ext2fsx and at the moment they only have it working read-only so you cannot write to ext2 disks. For a detailed example of how this used to work, consult the 'lfs-from-osx' hint, this approach is only for the very brave.

(c.) build from a Live CD - I suppose it might be convenient to install a bootloader so that you no longer have to boot from CD after this point ? (most of these machines are not superfast, expecting people to sit through a complete build in one go is not realistic)

(d.) building multilib on a G5 from 32-bit userspace (distros have a habit of supplying 32-bit uerspace and a 64-bit kernel for 64-bit machines) - if the kernel has acquired a 32-bit personality (uname reports 'ppc' and libc is 32-bit), you can't chroot. For this, you have the host's bootloader.

I guess this means we have to assume that people have booted from a LiveCD when setting up yaboot. Either we have to build (and install) hfsutils and powerpc-utils, or we have to explain in sufficient detail how to boot from the OF (don't ask me!).

Any alternative views on a sensible way to do this ?