[wplug] general or specific embedded-Linux advice requested

[James O'Kane]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Beth Lynn wrote:

> It is a Sharp Mobilon HC-4600! A handheld with a full keyboard and a
> color screen. Even though it's about 6 years old, IMHO there hasn't been
> a handheld that has rocked this much.
> Check out the specs yourself!
> http://www.planitroi.com/product_specs/oem_sharp_mobilon_4600.htm

I've looked at the specs listed on both urls and the only persistant
storage that's mentioned is a 16M ROM. If this hardware is similar to the
HP something or other I borrowed from your department in '97, WinCE is
burned into the ROM, and there wasn't a secondary boot method such as a
floppy or cdrom drive. I borrowed it for the weekend, then returned it
when I decided it would be too hard to install linux on something that
wasn't mine.

More to your direct question, the past few weeks, I've been working with
Linux from Scratch building a minimal linux install for my own project.
The HOWTO is fairly detailed, and worked fine once I stopped trying to use
versions newer than what they suggested.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

You'll need to find out how to build a MIPS cross-compiler version of
this, and you might not be able to do chapter 6 until after you've gotten
something to boot on the new device. Unless you tried building it on an
SGI?

-james