opensource.dyc.edu

Cross platform development is difficult and I don't like (re)building toolchains targeted for other architectures. I much prefer a fully featured native environment. In porting tor-ramdisk to the mips, I've worked in uncomfortably restrictive situations, like busybox coreutils with just enough of binutils to be able to compile libraries like zlib and libevent. Much better to have a full blown desktop!

We'll I've done just that. I got Debian 5.0 running on the RB433AH, a board using the Atheros AR7161 cpu with 128MB of RAM. The way I did it was to create a vmlinux-initramfs image which boots the router with enough tools to then nfs mount the full root file system from another box. You then bootstrap into the new root, get up to runlevel 2 and start up an entire desktop which you can VNC into (or XDMCP into gdm). Gnome is a bit fat, but I like all the desktop apps it gives. I still installed it, but use Fluxbox which I nicely configured.

I distribute two versions: 1) slim which uses a non-module kernel and has only the bare minumum filesystem (about 500MB uncompressed), and 2) full with all of Gnome and Fluxbox, plus a modular kernel with most relevant modules compiled and installed in /lib/modules/2.8.28.5.

I love it. Much better than working in the restriced QEMU environments.

I've uploaded it to the server and you can get it here. I've also uploaded my QEMU environments which you can get on the same page.