Best TinyCore (microcore) alternative for ARM?

[mb]

I want, essentially, a microcore for ARM, to use primarily with the upcoming RasberryPi. Not for general purpose use, but (mostly) for headless tasks like home server, media centre, music player, home automation, maybe router, etc etc. So i want a bare-bones linux. Microcore would be pretty close to what I want, but there is no ARM version.

What would people recommend as the best choice??

-Stripped down debian
Debian has an ARM version and will officially support rPi, too. But how easy is it to strip it down? (can anyone reccomend a good guide or something?) The default install size is way too big, and i'd guess there are saving to be made re: memory use, too.

-Use a 'router' linux
Like OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etc... some areas i'm not sure about with these, but would definitely provide a stable, v. low resources base. I like the possibility of flashing/ external updating.

-Roll my own linux
This would provide a 'perfect' distro, in theory.. but is it practicle? How hard is it?? (again, any guides??)

-Convert TCL
Is anyone working on this?/considering it? Or has it been done? .. again, i'm not sure of the level of complexity involved compared to 'starting from scratch' (my guess is it would be harder for someone like me, but easier for someone up to speed with TCL dev)

-Another Distro?
Is there another v. lightweight linux, which supports ARM??

For anyone who hasn't been following it the RPi should be out early next year (as in January; they have finalised the design, made 100 beta boards on the 1st). 128MB ram for the base model.

[hiro]

I'm considering converting TCL, shouldn't be hard. Most work would be providing useful extensions I guess.

[Juanito]

This would provide a 'perfect' distro, in theory.. but is it practicle? How hard is it?? (again, any guides??)

cross linux from scratch

[netnomad]

hi mb,

i share your opinions.
perhaps we are lucky and some more folks are looking for the same goal!
an arm-port for microcore would be really good:
i guess that they could be a dream team, that would be a benefit fo both,
for the raspberrypi and for tinycore.

[Juanito]

following the clfs documentation worked fine for tinycore on the cell processor in a ps3, you could aways give this a go for arm..

[curaga]

Yep, CLFS doesn't have ARM as a supported target, so you'd need to only use it as guidelines though.

Alternatively, use one of the build frameworks the router linuxes use, buildroot yocto and the rest of the pack.

[hiro]

What do you guys think about a tinycorelinux ARM port based on uclibc instead of glibc? I would probably go the armv5 or armv7 route. But can't decide...
Perhaps all variants and hard float even, depending on how bad it will seem when I'm at it eventually.

[curaga]

All variants?
You and what army (there's quite a bit of those variants once you look deeper...)

On uclibc, while there's (so far) no binary-only software on ARM to worry about, uclibc still loses in features and performance (and has a bit more bugs). On these grounds I would recommend against it.

[mb]

Hiro, do you have any ARM devices currently/ are you planning on getting the r.Pi?
The RasberryPi will use an ARM 11 cpu, which is ARM v6. Most new devices are cortex's (v7).

[hiro]

I have a dockstar, iomega iconnect (both kirkwood) and a toshiba ac100 (tegra 2).
I will get a rasberry pi if they won't mess with us and delay or overprice it in Europe.

[dhlii]

So has anyone done anything about an ARM TinyCore ?

[hiro]

I'm still running a debian and two ubuntus on them and have not yet found a justification to change or reinvent anything about that.
Perhaps an other time when I don't have anything to do
Try the archlinux distros in the meantime.

[martin]

I don't have the hardware (yet), but I wouldn't mind giving it a go of porting Microcore to ARM.

Someone would have to send the hardware to me first though. 

[curaga]

Maybe ask Genesi:
http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/program/imx6/add

[vinnie]

Great martin, make a request!

However, I am willing to participate in a whip-round for buying an arm to any developer decides to build tinycore for arm