[ARMedslack] Hello everyone

[Stuart Winter]

> So an installer of some description could be performed, perhaps the
> simplest would be a pxe boot to boot a minimalistc image to bring up the
> 10/100 ethernet and install over the internet from a repo.

Have you had a chance to look through the INSTALL_* docs in the main tree
yet?  This will give you an idea of how it's currently done when you use
the installer.

> You have to be careful I think with SD card partitioning as fat is required
> for MLO Uboot / Kernel combo and then the root for the linux stuff ( ext3
> jffs or something similar ).  I think it would make sense to have a decent
> default set.
>
> Then the installation would take place there after installing the current
> release.

I don't follow that.  If you booted the normal installer (after swapping
in the panda's kernel modules), you've got a fully functional system
there.  Only imagining, I would assume that the tools on the installer can
be used to partition the SD card and format it as appropriate.  Given that
you'd need to do this on *some* machine, you may as well do it from the
installer then proceed as normal?

> The panda is quite advanced vs say the Pi its a Dual Core A9 @ 1.2Ghz and
> has Neon Hard Float and all the trimmings.  My question to that end is I
> was looking at using the linao gcc toolchain for this one as they seem to
> have the best speed / results for this board, is there any preference /
> thoughts on this?.

Yes - I was going to wrap them into the gcc build in Slackware ARM.  Due
to Debian being the only really reliable source of ARM patches back in the
late 90s and early 00's, I've always applied most of Debian's ARM patches
to glibc and gcc, and it's served us well.  In the gcc patches there are
some linaro diffs which whilst don't get applied at build time, some of
the hunks do not apply as they're already in place.  I don't have time to
look further into that at the moment - I might have a look when glibc is
updated to 2.17 as I need to rebuild gcc to get 'gcc-go' (as on ARM this
dependes on at least glibc 2.16) anyway.