Re: Anyone here?

Hi

* David A. Greene (greened_at_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 ipkg was created mostly to save space, in many respects it is a
lot like dpkg.

> 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.

I really don't think it is, unless you replaced most of Debian's base
install with things like busybox to save space, which kinda defeats the
point of Intimate (i.e. as few changes from Debian proper as possible).

It's amazing you can fit as much as the gpe/familiar stuff does into 16
or 32mb, but since any iPAQ newer than a 3800 has an MMC slot, it makes
sense to me to target that as the place to put an OS, especially given
the low price of MMC cards. It's way more convenient than hanging a
PCMCIA hard disk off the back of your iPAQ (although, obviously, you can
install Intimate into a large CF card in a thin sleeve).

Mangling the usefulness of the OS to fit it into seriously tiny amounts
of space is definitely not something I would like to see Intimate do
(not that I speak for the project or any of its developers or users). I
already have enough problems with busybox's partial-at-best
implementations of many commands.

> Surely some packages (e.g. kernel
> modules) will have to be split but that may be something that

You might be able to construct a very small OS out of the udebs that are
being worked on for the Debian installer, but that is going to require
vast packaging efforts to make useful.

Cheers,

-- 
Chris "Ng" Jones
  cmsj_at_tenshu.net
  www.tenshu.net