It's Alive...

Well, I just got the first glimmer of hope that my plans will work - I got the Gentoo kernel to load the Angstrom root filesystem after being loaded through U-Boot. So basically, I'm using technology from three different distributions to load a (not very usable) system.

You can try it yourself, but there's not much to see (yet). Assuming you have pdaXrom beta4 or r121 installed on a C1000/Akita:

-Download the kernel here and copy it to an SD/MMC card or USB stick. Renaming it to "kernel-gentoo-arm.img" or somesuch is a good idea.

-Also download the pdaXrom kernel image for Akita and put it in the same location.

-Download the Angstrom filesystem tarball here. You need bzip2 installed on your Zaurus if you're using that to decompress. Take an ext3 formatted SD or MMC (it MUST be one of those; CF won't do) and extract the tarball with the following command: "tar -xvjpf [name of Angstrom tarball] -C [mount point for SD/MMC]"

-And now, get the modules that go with the Gentoo kernel here. Extract to the lib/modules directory on the SD/MMC.

-Press the reset switch inside the battery bay of the Zaurus, while holding OK; wait for the Emergency System to load.

-Move to the location of the kernel images and type the following command - "nandlogical /dev/mtd1 WRITE 0x5a0000 0x160000 [name of Gentoo kernel image]"

-Type reboot and watch the pretty OpenMoko logo.

To switch back to pdaXrom:

-Load the Emergency System again; now, repeat the command to flash the Gentoo kernel, but this time, point it to the pdaXrom kernel.

So now we have a somewhat clunky way to dual-boot between Angstrom and pdaXrom - Angstrom can live on the SD card while pdaXrom lives in the internal flash. There's still a lot to do for Etched Marble, though; Angstrom is already fairly complete. The whole point of Etched Marble is to create a new distribution and document the whole process. So now it comes down to the Linux-from-scratch goodness.