Sunday, March 21, 2010

Living in the LiveCD - Frugal Linux

The openembedded huge bitbakes were running uncomfortably slow in the virtual machine. So I decided to install linux on USB and take it from there. The Karmic installer unfortunately put grub on my Vista boot disk while I wasn't looking , what a naughty koala.

So I do have BootRec to fix the boot sector on my Windows recovery CD, just for the kicks and performance feel I decided to live in the liveCD instead. I have a couple of build VMs on the windows drive, I installed virualbox and started up some VM's for persistent work. The virtualbox booted at least 4 times faster than in windows, they must have done some nice optimizations in the linux build.

The verdex new kernel build is going very very slowly. Since bitbake is based on Gentoo portage and I have done Gentoo stage 1 installs, from experience this will take a whole day or so. I hope I don't have to repeat the same experience with the BeagleBoard, since there is a prebuilt ubuntu distro from the arm port. At least the beagle-board is much cheaper than the Gumstix and the shipping is tolerably inexpensive. Now the very competitive HawkBoard is also in the market.

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