help me find any active UNIX distro compatible with StrongARM SA-1110 (armv4)!!
 

Hi Linux people,

I own an IPAQ 3660 that I already successed to install Familiar Linux on it. Unfortunately Familar Linux has stopped developing and the website is not either online.

What I wanted to do is to install Debian on my IPAQ 3660 that is based on Intel's StrongARM SA-1110 (version armv4) but starting from Debian 6 the arm support is only from armv4t and above (then StrongARM is no longer supported).

My questions are:
*Is there any other UNIX based distros that works on StrongARM and is active?
*Is there any easy way to cross-compile/compile Debian to suit the StrongARM CPU?

==================
If you wonder why I'm tring to use this old PDA:
-I liked it (it is "extensiable": PCMCIA, CF card)
-I want to be able to read PDFs while I'm on the subway!
-As a hobby: I would like to modify things, so I want to expand the flash and the RAM modules and add USB host on it!
==================

If You have any ideas or better things I can do (like changing to a better PDA...) please tell me! You are more than welkom!

Hello,

I don't know. Worst case though, you can look at netbsd: they are strong on working on a wide range of platforms.

Probably, but I have had lots of issues building cross-compilers, let alone getting them to run. There is a HUGE difference between compiling a linux kernel for StrongArm and having the rest of the system compiled to run. Either way will require a compiler to generate the binary code for the processor in general, but the kernel will need to know the specifics of your processor.

Take a look at GenToo linux. Here's a link to their handbook: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/. Gentoo's thing is you (can) build it all yourself. I personally have never done it, but I did work in the embedded systems industry for a while.

I hope this helps...

--jason

Thank You too much Jason, it seams to be a solution (NetBSD works on StrongARM). It will be interesting to test it.


GenToo do also support StronARM, thanks for the tips, but as You said it needs compilation which needs a bit of work (especially for me that is not used to compile..). I will maybe test it also if I success to boot the PDA from an external media


It was indeed helpful, thank You again, I hope that I now found the solution (seams to be NetBSD) but it will take time until I got time to test it