[ARMedslack] Raspberry Pi support for Slackware ARM 14.1

[Stuart Winter]

> Hi Stuart,
> I could own the "master' image' if you would like. I could set aside
> some hours a week to administer fixes and such.
>
> Q. Would I create the base image myself or do you have one in mind? If

I have only ever considered what would be appropriate in the mini root
(which was essentially everything needed to have a working OS + some every
day tools I needed in order to bootstrap new architectures).

Normally people tend to ship minimal roots (check Fedora etc.) and the
people can then download the packages they require.  This has some obvious
benefits such as it's faster to download, faster to upload, easier to
maintain and people can use slackpkg or whatever to install the packages
they want.

Ovbviously if I was doing it, there'd just be an installer so I would not
have to consider what to supply ;-)

I'll leave it for you to decide.

> so do you think my modified Versatile-initrd is a good starting point?
> or should I start back with David Spencers installer? I would value
> your views on this.

I have not looked at your initrd and I don't have a Rpi (if I did I'd have
done the support myself).  My two questions are:

1. - what are you modifying and why?

For example, when I add a new architecture all I edit in the installer is
the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules-arm.  The generic installer is then built
(actually it's the versatile one but I'm going to make it generic for
Linux 3.10), and my scripts unpack it, determine what modules the
versatile/generic installer has and replaces them with the versions for
the particular architecture, then adds any arch-specific modules and
finally wraps it up again.
http://armed.slackware.com/scripts/mk-tegra.sh
It's pretty ugly but it's simple.

2. - can any of your changes be merged back into the original installer?
This is more of a rhetorical question ;-)

> Also, what name? I have been using Slackberry as short for
> 'slackwarearm on a raspberry pi' is this appropriate?
> I could register a domain for this.

If you were turning it into a different product which was based
on Slackware, then it makes sense to give it a different name.
The only reason Slackware ARM was called 'ARMedslack' was because since I
didn't really know Patrick in 2002, the web site said unofficial
stuff shouldn't use the Slackware name, and so respectfully I gave it
a separate name. However, the OS has *always* been Slackware but on the
ARM architecture - apart from porting it and making necessary or particularly
(what I think are) appropriate changes, it's the same product as x86.

So the short answer is that I personally prefer 'Slackware ARM on a
Raspberry Pi' because you're actually taking the same product but making it
installable and runable on the Rpi.

Cheers
s.
-- 
Stuart Winter
Slackware ARM: http://arm.slackware.com