[fpc-devel] "embedded" again

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Michael Schnell wrote:
> On 01/16/2013 05:31 PM, Luca Olivetti wrote:
>>
>> You can install debian on it, then you'll have everything you need 
>> (no, I don't own one, I just googled it).
> You are right, but as I use it mainly for it's intended purpose (NAS) 
> and here the QNAP-tuned Linux distribution offers really nice feature - 
> while not preventing installing additional community software via ipkg 
> or from the sources, I'd like to stay with the original distribution and 
> install fpc via cross-compiling. Maybe I can somehow extract the binary 
> from the fpc apt-get-Debian-ARM package and just copy it to the device. 
> Any idea how this (with a PC finding, downloading  and unpacking the 
> files from a Debian package without using apt) might be done ?

I've used a tool called alien for this sort of thing on Debian, and 
something comparable for reading .rpms on Slackware. My recollection is 
that .deb, .rpm etc. use fairly standard file formats, the "added value" 
is in the metadata and scripting.

Having said which, if you're looking for a binary VNC server for ARM 
then Debian might not be the best place to start: there's some 
(licensing?) issue with a patch that went into VNC to make it run on ARM 
which stops Debian using the standard vnc4server package and they've 
instead got something with slightly-different parameters (possibly 
tightvncserver but I'd need to check).

> I also 
> might try to upgrade the (seemingly outdated and not normally 
> upgradeable) Debian on my old Slug to do the task. (Do you know how to 
> do this ?)

Don't. Your Slug's probably got Lenny on it which is fairly robust. 
Knowing that (the processor in) the Slug behaves fairly similarly to 
SPARC as far as alignment etc. goes, and knowing that there are gross 
failures in Debian Squeeze and Wheezy on SPARC which particularly affect 
graphics-related stuff, I'd strongly suggest that you sniff around and 
find out what you can do on the existing OS before considering an upgrade.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

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