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[ts-7000] modern tools (i.e. openembedded)

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Subject: [ts-7000] modern tools (i.e. openembedded)
From: "Christopher Friedt" <>
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:14:39 -0500
Hi everyone,

I've been using the TS boards for a long time, and helped getting the
2.6 kernel running on the 7260.

As much as I was overjoyed when I discovered that TS started releasing
the 2.6 kernel for the ts7800 devices, I still have this lingering
feeling that they, the manufacturers, (or perhaps we, the developer
community), are still light-years behind the rest of the embedded
Linux world.

Don't get me wrong, I do love the simplicity of having a toolchain and
a minimal userspace to program with, but at the same time, there is no
standardized way of upgrading the software on these boards or
replacing the kernel at runtime, etc. The linux-booting-linux method
is very interesting, but I believe it's still experimental.

While I am a die-hard Gentoo-er at heart, I've taken to using
OpenEmbedded for my Neo FreeRunner, BeagleBoard, and probably whatever
other boards I purchase. While I find portage to be great for my
desktop / laptop / server, OpenEmbedded definitely serves the embedded
world particularly well.

OE uses opkg to do package updates and supports multiple repositories
(yaayy!!), plus it's easy to create release cycles based on the
upstream Angstrom repository. You can create a filesystem image with a
single command in tar.gz, tar.bz2, or jffs2 (other?) formats.

Does anyone on the list have the inclination to use, or even help
port, the TS boards to openembedded? It's really just a matter of
getting the hardware specific kernel patches into the build system and
doing some touch-ups on the default userspace (i.e. /etc/inittab). If
we wanted to be daring, we could of course incorporate the latest
Maverick Toolchain developments from Martin Guy
(http://martinwguy.co.uk/martin/crunch/).

I, for one, have really enjoyed using u-Boot on my FreeRunner &
BeagleBoard and find that it's much more enjoyable to work with than
RedBoot. Aside from that, Angstrom is a great embedded distro, and
it's even quite easy to create a custom image based on Angstrom
including, say JamVM and RxTx, or any other set of packages.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Chris

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