[ARMedslack] ArmedSlack on EmbeddedArm TS-7800?

[JW Smythe]

  Good evening all...

  I just started on a new project, and it happens to be ARM based.  The
bought me two TS-7800's from embeddedarm.com.   It's a 500Mhz ARM9 with
128Mb RAM.  They were excited that it came with Debian, and had a somewhat
modern kernel.  Unfortunately for me, it's Debian 3.1, and much of the
hardware isn't supported under the more modern releases.   That's sent me
wandering a bit.  I've put Slackware on almost everything I've worked with
for many years, so this seems like an obvious thing for me to consider
jumping into.

  So, my initial questions..  Is this worth pursuing, or am I going to run
into serious and unsurmountable headaches?

  The board is kinda funny.   Well, imagine that, an ARM being not like a
PC.  :)  They have their own boot loader, that only knows how to go to the
second partition for an uncompressed kernel, then partition 4 for the root
partition.  It can either boot to the built on NAND, a SD card or a micro SD
card.

  Am I going to be able to support all the devices?  It has DIO for a 4x4
matrix keypad, LCD for a 2x24 LCD screen, and a whole variety of serial and
other ports.  On this project, I'm going to use at least some of everything.

  It doesn't have a VGA connection, so the console has to go to the serial,
which I don't suspect will be a serious problem.

  I'm not exactly sure how much is in the kernel, and how much is in user
space.  The problem that's tripped me up today is a wealth of information,
and now trying to rebuild the kernel to have the FUSE module (built in or
module, as long as I have it).

-- 
I ήπιαν τι;
- Socrates (15/Feb/399 BC)
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