On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 07:58:22AM -0400, James wrote: > Well, let me clarify things. For normal unix/linux task, Debian in > wonderful.
Excellent. I won't have to disagree with absolutely everything you wrote :-) > I do very much agree with the focus on stability and security, but, my > work has taken me into writing 2.6 based device drivers, and > customizing the kernel for openmosix, on portables, servers, and > workstations. This is no sweat in gentoo. > > Is there a Debian document that takes one thru the latest 2.6..... Objection: kernel patching and building has very little to nothing to do with the distribution you use. Go survey the 20 most active kernel developers, I'm ready to bet they use any which distro. I learnt how to build Linux 1.2 on Slackware, I now compile 2.6 on Debian, and essentially nothing has changed (you don't need to do 'make dep' anymore.. hey.. but you can still do it without dying, if you really want to.) [big snip on porting and embedded systems] Does anyone who embeds Linux, embed an actual distribution? The notion sounds most remote to me: most packages want to install all sorts of man pages and documentation which I certainly don't want clutering my flash. Worse, most embedded systems are also cross-compiled, which usually means out-of-the-box packages just don't compile. I must precise I've never actually looked at Gentoo in details, but I'd be surprised if it were so much better than any odd distribution. [snip about an irrelevant embedded FAT development] Good on her. I'd have ticked the box 'FAT' in make menuconfig, re-cross-compiled, and have it in about 5 minutes. I don't think your story is relevant, because if she is as good as you say she is, she'd pick up Linux development quickly as well. 2 months is, if I recall, the time it took me to get my first embedded system working from scratch (as in, from starting to build the cross-compiler to running Tetris remotely through the network.) It's a time investment: invest the time to learn Linux now, and save yourself developing FAT later on. That goes for most technologies, incidently. > Debian is wonderful, but, maybe it needs a 100% sourcecode compile > process option, or at least a document where one could go down that > path to see what/how it was done? apt-get source -b mozilla-firefox It's really not _that_ hard.. until you want to cross-compile it. > Let's face it, most of linux's problems are a result on not being > about to recruit a sufficient talent pool of low level embedded > developers. Most of those that do convert (after a convoluted learning > path) end up at a proprietary shop that puts linux on a processor, and > hides the key low level details..... No, most of Linux' problems are the results of hardware manufacturers not publishing specifications for their hardware. > As companies roll out embedded linux and low level details of > their hardware, the are clandestine with many of the necessary > details, and source code snippets..... > > In selected hardware areas, such as video hardware/drivers, the > picture is actually quite bleak.... These are two different, unrelated things. The first is mostly wrong: companies that embed Linux usually publish their GPL-derived code (well, they should, anyway). The second paragraph is about hardware manufacturers not documenting their hardware, and has nothing to do with embedding Linux. Indeed, it has nothing to do with Linux at all: any operating system that is not Windows would suffer equally from that. Y.
