Ben Nanonote - Emacs and Alternate OSes

Paul Boddie

2016-06-20 10:15:29 UTC

Post by Eastern Daylight Time
I know this isn't a high-volume mailing list or anything, so this
topic isn't liable to generate an enormous amount of discussion, but I
figure if I'm likely to get the chance to talk to anyone else actively
using the nanonote it's probably going to be here or on the IRC.

Here is a good enough place to discuss it. There's not much activity around
the Ben these days, but some of us are still doing development-related things
with it.

Post by Eastern Daylight Time
I'm relatively new to using the Nanonote, and though I'm not really a
hardware guy (that's threatening to change with something like this
device) I see a lot of potential in the device for solid use. I know
emacs has been ported to the nanonote, and see that the qi hardware
wiki page on software included has it listed, but even though I
flashed my nanonote using the wiki's instructions it's not on there.
Since a lot of what I do with computers is through emacs (I like the
unified interface with text it provides, and it's a cool lisp machine
on its own) I was wondering how it would be easiest to install on the
nanonote.

I see you got some support on IRC for this. (It's interesting that Ida Systems
still has them in stock, which was something I wondered about.)

Post by Eastern Daylight Time
Another thing I'm holding under consideration is running Debian or
Gentoo (the MIPS ports of either) on my nanonote. Anyone have any
experience with either? Thoughts?

I contributed the following page to the wiki:

http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Emdebian

Initially, the use of Emdebian was motivated by the convenience of the cross-
installation approach plus potential package size savings. Since then,
Emdebian as a distribution variant no longer exists, with only the multistrap
tool still really being relevant, but multistrap works with "normal" Debian
and I've installed recent versions onto a microSD card for use with the Ben.

I haven't tried the other approaches:

http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Debian

One other product of Emdebian and related Debian activities is the suite of
cross-toolchains that are now available in Debian unstable. I've been using
the mipsel toolchains to build "bare metal" payloads for the Ben, and if you
end up using Debian, you'll have this option to cross-build rather than build
on the device. Otherwise, the OpenWrt cross-toolchain is quite usable, and
I've used that to develop software for hardware interfacing via the Ben's
MMC/microSD/8:10 port.

Let us know what you end up doing!

Paul

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