Thursday, July 3, 2008

Snapgear Linux or Angstrom..

I am currently building and deploying Snapgear linux onto a LEON3 system aboard a xilinx-xup board. However I have several issues with Snapgear:
  1. Despite all the hard work that has gone into it, it feels poorly constructed. I think they are discovering just how hard it is to maintain and build embedded linux distros. I am thinking of the early days of OpenZaurus
  2. Functionality that just doesn't work out of the box: dhclient, openssl, ssh and sshd. Pretty fundamental tools here. Not to complain about the good work of uCdot
I think I shall try to get Ångström up and running as it is much better at handling these things. The main effort will be:
  1. Toolchain. Assembling the patches and CFLAGS etc for the toolchain (glibc in the first instance).
  2. Backend: Packaging the system such that it will be able to build images for the various GR tools.
Further posts will follow as I address these issues. Overall I think it is more valuable than fixing problems in Snapgear.

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