[gentoo-embedded] Howto guide or something?

[Tyler Akins]

Hi!  I'd ideally like to get X and a few apps on an Aquapad (x86 
instruction set).  I like the idea of Gentoo embedded, so I installed it 
on a box.  Thus, I am a newbie to this flavor of Linux, but I still have 
experience with other variations.  I've been hanging out on this list 
and I see the stage tarballs here and there (lost the URLs at the 
moment, but they are around somewhere), but I'm so amazingly new to 
Gentoo that I don't know what to do with them besides "tar xvfj".

So, now that I have a nearly blank hard drive and the most basic 
components of Gentoo installed, I was wondering what I should do next.  
Is there a howto document or something laying around?  Or, perhaps 
people could show a few sample instructions and provide a few steps to 
get me started?  Some sample commands for compiling a library or one of 
the things that X requires?

Ideally, I would like to create an image for other poor souls who are 
using the Aquapad.  I would like to get firefox going at the very 
least.  Once that works, everything else should be a downhill battle.

If there is no documentation, maybe a wiki could be started so that 
people can share their instructions with the world, or information could 
be dumped into gentoo-wiki.com.  I, for one, would be very appreciative 
of some sort of documentation that I could refer to and possibly enhance 
when snags get hit and whatnot.

If I missed this information in the past few months that I've been 
subscribed to this list, please forgive my inability to read and kindly 
remind me where the documentation is.


Additionally, I was wondering what the definiton of "embedded" was for 
this list.  I am working with a laptop (more or less) with CF instead of 
a hard drive and a touchscreen instead of a keyboard/mouse.  Is this 
meant more for routers and other hardware without much of a user 
interface, or would kiosks and cheap-cheap computers possibly fit into 
this category?


On an unrelated side note, my Gentoo box locks up after X minutes of 
inactivity (me not touching the keyboard).  As long as I'm there to tap 
the space bar or something every 20 minutes, it is fine.  I think that 
30 minutes is the magic number for the lockups.  The screen is blank 
(setterm didn't keep the screen on for some reason) and the computer is 
completely unresponsive (from both the keyboard and from the network).  
Any idea what I have misconfigured?


Oh, I also wonder if there are any good programs that a tablet computer 
should have.  I've been thinking of festival, a lite X client (icewm?  
matchbox?), a read-only filesystem (ext3? reiserfs? JFFS2? cloop?), 
firefox, handwriting recognition, etc.


Thanks a bundle for any advice offered!!

-- Tyler


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