Re: Anyone here?

Hi

* David A. Greene (greened@eecs.umich.edu) wrote:
> The thing that bugs me a bit about Familiar is ipkg. Why was it
> developed? What advantages does it have over .deb? It just seems

I think it was mostly written to save as much space as possible -
fitting a useful amount of software into 16mb of flash is pretty hard ;)

> It seems to me that it should be possible to make an embedded
> distriution of Debian that fits in the iPaq RAM while using
> the existing package system. Surely some packages (e.g. kernel

It is entirely possible, but really the focus of Intimate afaik is about
running a decent amount of Debian, which requires a CF card or hard
disk.

In reply to the thread in general, Intimate isn't dead, it's just
resting ;)

Seriously though, it's all about the time - none of us has much of it to
spare, which is why things have stagnated. There are a bunch of issues
that need to be addressed, the most fundemental of which is the
installer - the original rsync installer worked, but wasn't especially
graceful and was very heavily dependant on being kept in-sync with
Familiar. The second installer uses an initrd, which makes Intimate
independent of anything else on the iPAQ, but is a pain to manage.
We have for a while been talking about making the initrd out of the new
microdebs, which are designed for installers and small platforms and
so-on, but so far no actual work has been done in this direction.
Once an installer is written that's simple to use and easy to maintain,
life for Intimate developers and users would get a fair bunch easier,
but there is still an awful lot of work to do, things like a new X
package, packages for various desktop stuff (I think opie is mostly in
Debian now, but gpe isn't), etc.

If anyone would like to take up the challenge, please step forward!

Cheers,

-- 
Chris "Ng" Jones
  cmsj@tenshu.net
  www.linuxdude.co.uk