Marco van de Voort wrote:
On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 09:37:52AM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
wiki page on how to set up a native FPC environment on ARM/Linux.
e.g. an "ARM-based development systems" page referenced at
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Platform_list#Supported_targets_for_ARM
I'd be happy to contribute what I know, but in short the major issue is
getting a distro running on the available hardware. And, it must be
said, keeping it running: I've seen tales of woe from Sheevaplug users
who've ended up with corrupt or bricked systems.
In my case I'm using NSLU2 "Slugs", which are supported by a variant of
Debian- once running they can use the standard Debian package
repositories. I've made some recent progress towards getting something
running on some "PC-like" ARM development boards I've got, but I won't
have those up for a few weeks due to other demands on my time.
Some other interesting devices (all Marvell kirkwood based):
- WD GOflex.NET: 128MB but two 2.5" sata ports. First attempt at rooting it
failed, and I am waiting for a jtag cable
- IOMega IConnect - 256 MB.
Besides that I have GlobalScale reference equipment, SheevaPlug (512MB) and
since about a month an OpenRD.
The latter is particularly interesting since it is effectively a desktop
(sata + lots of USB + VGA). I'm planning to install the just new Fedora 13
and need to set up a crosscompile kernel.
Still, I wouldn't advise bying the kirkwood based reference stuff. Quite
expensive (specially when ordered from Europe), and the panda board with its
dual core and armv7 is more interesting. (but I'm told that the DVI from the
Beagle/Panda is digital only)
That OpenRD Ultimate looks interesting. I've got a small number of
development boards with most of that (no video) but they're unusual in
that they've got PC-style BIOSes and boot CE from a partitioned
CompactFlash. I'm hoping to be able to put Open Firmware on the CF which
will make it look very much like the Sun etc. systems I'm used to and
will save messing around with internal firmware, and from there I should
be able to boot Linux from USB.
At this point I need to come clean: I'm aware of one and possibly two
bugs that affect the Lazarus IDE on both ARM and SPARC: basically, an
exception when switching projects and when closing the IDE. It doesn't
happen on x86 and PPC, which suggests to me that it could be an
alignment issue. I was hoping to get more familiar with the innards of
FPC and Lazarus (not to mention Mantis etc.) before reporting this,
meanwhile lazbuild works fine as do generated apps.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
--
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