Neil Williams wrote:
Portable does not necessarily mean PDA size or smaller. The target may be a moving device, like a robot, the size of shoe box or very small child, etc. (eg. 30cm x 30cm x 30cm). Solid State storage would be required as it is more robust for environments with moving vehicles where there can be sudden acceleration (or deceleration - eg. crash into an object).On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 23:26 +0800, GNUbie wrote:OK, that might be a little bit tight for a GUI based on Lenny, even withXFCE. However, I read below that you don't need a GUI so 512Mb is plenty of space. I'm still not sure what you want the device to do though because amd64 is a powerful architecture and I can't imagine that you'd get it to run without a fan or have much of a battery life if the device is meant to be portable, which makes it hard to see the appeal of solid state storage.
Embedded != Low PowerIt is true that a lot of embedded devices have limited storage, computing power and need to be low power, but not all.
eg. Communications equipment (think managed routers/switches, vpns, firewalls, etc) that sit in communication cabinets.
I've worked on this class of equipment and I would consider them to be embedded products. They have mid-range embedded processors targeted for communications (eg. PowerPC PowerQUICC) with now keyboard or video. They generally have a serial console port and network ports for management. This type of equipment can have 100W-500W power-supplies with lots of fans.
I do agree that Emdebian should cater for low power, low capacity, low speed devices, however it should also cater for higher end embedded devices too.
From memory, Emdebian Grip would be a good candidate for this, right ???I have developed for PowerPC architecture, using Apple PowerPC PowerMacs as the development hosts, however now that Apple have gone Intel, it makes it harder to find powerful PowerPC platforms to build powerpc binaries.
Ideally I would prefer to use powerful commodity PCs, and cross-compile everything I need to customize.
Ideally I could use all the pre-built powerpc debs from Lenny, and just cross-compile new packages that I need to modify or create.
Ideally, IMHO, Emdebian should be able to totally cross-compile a powerpc <or insert favorite arch> distribution from scratch, and produce exactly the same outputs (.debs) as a build on the native powerpc <insert arch> host.
Is that a goal of Debian Grip ??? Cheers, Brendan.