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lists@mice-software.com wrote: [...]
Anyway, has anyone tried any of these? I've had a look round the wiki and the past e-mails here but it's not really clear what the present state of drivers/etc. are - I don't mind working on drivers either (although my experience with drivers is primarily on OSX and a small amount on Windows)
As far as the kernel goes, pretty much everything works, mostly. There's a nice user-friendly OpenEmbedded distro that works if you want to try it --- but you'll still need a level converter cable to reflash the thing, of course.
I've had Debian running quite successfully on mine, using a USB1 hard drive and wireless ethernet. It's slow but not as much so as you might think; recompiling the kernel takes a few hours. The slow hard drive means that anything data-centric is unpleasant, and the low amount of memory means that anything memory-centric is even more unpleasant because it involves swapping, which involves that USB1 bus... but it's perfectly usable as a testbed system.
If you want to do anything involving audio encoding/decoding or video encoding/decoding you'll probably need to work the DSP; the ARM is low-powered to begin with, and has no FPU. There are some open-source DSP tools, but there may not be an open source OMAP compiler (I haven't found one).
I haven't done anything with mine for ages because I breadboard-based converter cable failed (all the wires pulled out!) and while I have a cheapo USB phone cable that will work, I still need to put a plug on it. Unfortunately, most embedded Linux toolchains these days want a bit more memory than the E3's 32MB. It'd be nice to use something like Maemo, but I doubt that would be at all feasible... I did nearly get GPE running on it once, but it chronically ran out of memory; someone else on the list had more luck with QTopia (check the list archives).
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