[Gllug] Distro for an EPC-301

[Harry Rickards]

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Richard Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:28:59AM +0100, Simon Morris wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have one of these beasties...
>>
>> http://www.bvm-store.com/ProductDetail.asp?fdProductId=469
>>
>> It came to us with a Compact Flash installation of PuppyLinux but I was
>> hoping to be able to install something with a package repository behind
>> it, ideally Debian.
>>
>> The main issue is the lack of FPU support on the processor which means
>> that Ubuntu, Debian and DamnSmallLinux won't install.
> 
> The data sheet says the processor is compatible with a 486SX.
> 
> I think your other problem is that most distros have dropped 386/486
> support ... years ago.
> 
> I'm curious about the market for this.  It's more expensive, larger
> and slower than beagleboards and gumstix.
> 
> Rich.
> 
You say that, but until a couple of weeks ago I had a 486 kernel on
Debian sid on my main machine. Due to wireless and graphics card issues
the easiest way I have to install Debian is via a chroot on an Ubuntu
live CD. Somehow, probably by mistyping the package name, I installed
linux-image-2.6-486 instead of linux-image-2.6-686. As I said, I only
found this out a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to work out why
only 1gb of RAM was recognised, but apart from that my system was
running fine. If you can get around the FPU issues and can get a shell
in puppy linux, you should be able to install debian via a chroot using
the instructions in Appendix D.3 of the Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide.

- --
Thanks
Harry Rickards <hrickards at l33tmyst.com>

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