[E3-hacking] Newbie E3 owner

[lists at mice-software.com]

Quoting David Given <dg at cowlark.com>:

>
> 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 had already made a cable before it arrived - a simpler zener diode  
cable. It seems to work fine anyway, as I was able to flash it with  
the "starter" Linux distro you can download. Next step will be to try  
and build something myself ;)

> 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 had a quick Google around, the only thing I found is  
https://www-a.ti.com/downloads/sds_support/LinuxDspTools/index.html,  
which is supposedly some sort of Linux-based (but I don't think Open  
Source) tools for OMAP5912 development (ours is a OMAP5910?). I can't  
install it presently anyway as I have no X-enabled Linux machines, and  
it has some bizarre InstallShield installer.

Anyway, it's good to see a community still exists. I thought the  
mailing list looked a bit quiet before I posted, but there seems to be  
plenty of people still :)

Colin