On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 05:05:30PM +0000, James wrote > My most sincerest hope is that we take the embedded > gentoo efforts from the the embedded gentoo handbook, > and integrate them into the regular Gentoo handbook. > The distro that does this will be king of the distros! > > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/
Problems with using embedded kernels as a base... * they use uclibc, which has some APIs that differ from glibc. This could break Flash, proprietary video driver binary blobs, and who knows what else. * they generally use busybox symlinks in place of most core utils. The busybox versions don't always exactly match the standalone versions. You would have to tweak quite a few scripts to fix that. Alpine Linux is based on uclibc and busybox (including mdev). From http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux:Overview > Note: As the About page says, Alpine is "designed for x86 Routers, > Firewalls, VPNs, VoIP and servers." But it's a perfectly workable > desktop system, too. The shortcomings just have to do with the small > community, and that sometimes you may need to get your hands dirty > modifying scripts written with more mainstream desktop distros in > mind. So you probably won't want to use Alpine if you're a newcomer > to Linux. If you're already comfortable with another distro, though, > especially a power-user, less-hand-holding distro like ArchLinux or > Gentoo, you should do fine. It would be interesting to see a "micro" port of Gentoo. But you can forget about bringing over KDE-OS, GNOME-OS, or CHROME-OS. If/when gnash is finally ready, or HTML replaces Flash, I could see Gentoo running with ICEWM or a lightweight desktop like XFCE or LXDE. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
