You can run Debian on the Jornada 820.

There is no preinstalled image available (yet?), but you can roll your own debian ARM distribution and cross-create it from your linux server, thanks to debootstrap, qemu and chroot. A script that does it all is available in our CVS as bootimage/mkxdeb

-- it must be customized first then run as root. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

My own experiment with the script, including XEmacs and a minimal X setup, weighed 383 MiB to be copied over to CF and 282 MiB to remain on the server (as NFS). Obviously, depending on your package selection, YMMV.

The script uses symlinks to put a lot of cruft out of the way in a directory /remote. You may exclude /remote from CF and instead mount /remote from NFS on the j820.

When you copy to CF, exclude proc and remote, with a command like

rsync -ax --exclude /remote /usr/src/j820/deb/ /mnf/cf/

If you have linux PC that serves NFS, we also encourage the use of distcc and ccache.

On an old 1GHz PC with 1GiB of RAM, debian cross installation is MUCH faster than native installation. However, a few programs don't work with qemu (notably clisp) and you may have to dpkg-reconfigure common-lisp-controller natively (/usr/lib/common-lisp/bin/clisp.sh install-clc).

BEWARE: the pcmcia-cs package includes a file /etc/pcmcia/config.opts that will Oops the kernel, because of its statements that ask the kernel to scan I/O space that is meaningful on a PC but invalid on the architecture of the jornada 820. You should remove or comment out the contents of this file.

Apart from that, my mkxdeb created installation seems to work quite well!

TODO
  • debug and document the script
  • make configuration easier, put it in a separate file.
  • document how to setup NFS
  • provide good defaults to skip the debconf questions?
  • provide a pre-installed tarball?