[luau] linux porting question

Jimen Ching jching at flex.com
Mon Apr 7 17:38:52 PDT 2003


On Mon, 7 Apr 2003, Charles Lockhart wrote:
>I was going throught the "linux from scratch" book, and went through the
>whole process and built the distribution one peice at a time.  And I got
>to wondering how hard it would be to do this for an embedded platform.

Hard?  Not very.  But very time consuming.  The benefit of do-it-youself
is that you control exactly how much resources you consume.  This is a
plus if your tight on resources.  But if you have 1Gig of RAM, and
1Terabyte of disk space, why waste time trying to squeeze out every last
bit?  I'm sure with this much resources, your biggest problem isn't
getting the system to boot.

The drawback to do-it-yourself is that you have nobody to blame when
something goes wrong. ;)  You can't say things like: "well, it works on my
desktop system".  When something goes wrong, there is very little chance
of getting support.  The odds are, there is one or two other persons on
planet Earth with the same configuration as you.

Of course, unless the vendor has tested your specific hardware with their
distribution, there is no gaurantee that a pre-configured system will
'just work'.  I had first hand experience with this.  So, either way, you
still might run into problems.  The question is, how much hand-holding do
you require?  Its all a matter of risk management.

--jc
-- 
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org



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