hi folks, good to see there's progress on this. do make sure to use a UHC Class 10 micro-sd card (the ones that say they are 75-80mbytes/sec), they will happily run at 20-25mbytes/sec read/write speed, which is about the same speed as an SSD from around 2012.
you should get a boot to xfce4 or lxde of around 20-25 seconds: again, comparable with a budget processor from around 5-8 years ago (which is what this is). for god's sake don't peddle gnome3 or kde4 at end-users. the performance will be absolutely atrocious, absolutely guaranteed. yes, the idea is to upgrade (and sell or repurpose the old one). this is the *first* in the series. for building can i recommend using "-Wl,--no-keep-memory" and report if it helps, here: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22831 there is a slow-boil linker problem which is similar to the "640k should be enough for anybody" - all of the quotes historic quotes techniques which used to be implemented to make it possible to link programs where there is not enough virtual or physical memory have been ripped out because "4GB should be enough for anybody". firefox now requires a staggering SEVEN GIGABYTES to successfully link. this is insane. please do try that linker option because otherwise people will believe that 32-bit hardware needs to be destroyed, due to it being utterly useless. l.