Gentoo on hx4700: a website opened

Hello, All!

I would like to tell you about the Gentoo GNU/Linux on PDA project
status.
A stage0+core installation has been tested on a few
hx4700s and caused no problems to their users.
Now there is a website, still in development stage:
browser works: http://pda.gentoo.ru/

There is not much you can do there, but you can browse the binary
package list, explore runtime dependency list and download them.
To install Gentoo, simply unpack stage0 files
(http://kmeaw.com/ipaq-gentoo/stage0.tar) on your card. I have collected
a reasonable minimum of packages to start with and called them "core".
You can download them at
ftp://ftp.gentoo.ru/people/kmeaw/packages/iwmmxt/core
Then pick any packages you like and unpack them into the root directory.

If you want to build your own packages, try using stage4:
ftp://ftp.gentoo.ru/projects/handhelds/stages/stage4-20071116.tar.gz
You can boot it over NFS (over usbnet), so it won't consume any space
on your card. Stage4 is a bit outdated, expect an update soon.

xkbd has been finally switched to cellwriter. It supports
alternative keyboard layouts much better. But it is not just a keyboard.
It is a hardwriting input module, that relies on a user-entered
handwriting patterns. See more info at http://risujin.org/cellwriter/
Cellwriter has been patched to fit better on a PDA screen.

To dual-boot from int.flash/ext.card, use a patched version of SDG
bootloader: ftp://ftp.gentoo.ru/projects/handhelds/romfile (md5:
ftp://ftp.gentoo.ru/projects/handhelds/romfile.md5). It looks for
/boot/params and /boot/zImage on a first FAT partition of CF card.
/boot/params should contain "set linuxargs root=/dev/xxxx rw
console=tty0 rootdelay=5", where /dev/xxxx is your boot device (/dev/hda2
or /dev/mmcblk0p2, I suppose). Try increasing rootdelay, if your card is
not fast enough to get recognized during kernel initialization process.

Feel free to contact me, if you have any installation problems.

--
kmeaw