Apple A4 or A5

[ycUygB1]

Anyone got Gentoo running on Apple A4 or A5 chips?
Would be nice to get something nice running on Apple hardware for a change.
I think these chips are more common than many of the legacy platforms that gentoo supports,
such as ppc, ia64 and alpha

[Tatsh]

For jailbroken iOS devices, I'm sure you might already know we use Cydia which is a front-end to Debian apt,dpkg (whatever it's called collectively). It's kind of needed because obviously we are not going to compile on our devices. Portage could be used to distribute binaries but that was not what Saurik picked when he first started the project. There have been others too but Cydia at this point is just 'too big to fail'.

As far as getting Linux on these devices, that's a tough sell in the first place (as with Linux on Mac hardware). The primary reason I buy these devices is for apps that I know exist there and not elsewhere. Plus I like iOS from a user and developer standpoint.

Secondly, it's hard to justify the amount of time it might take to get something even half-working. There was progress getting 3G to run some version of Linux that wasn't Android and there is the project that aims to put Android on the iPhone (again iPhone 3G, no 4, no 4S, no iPad). At the same time, it always requires some form of jailbreaking, this is not documented hardware by any means, and there's a lot of crypto-know-how required. I don't think it will be exactly what you can call 'fun' knowing you can buy similar hardware for less and play with that and be much more successful.

There's a lack of interest. I'd prefer to spend my money on something less expensive (like an Android-based tablet) and put Gentoo on that. Even so, Android is more built up to be touch based than anything you can get off Gentoo (such as KDE or GNOME). So the same problem again except with Android.

The only thing that could be done at some point (and probably without too much trouble) is porting Gentoo/Mac OS X to iOS. But just like that project, not many packages are going to work. So it would just be redundant to Cydia's command line packages.

[ycUygB1]

An Apple TV box costs only about $100, so it is interesting even from a hardware perspective.
And some people are compiling kernels for it:

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/walk-through.html

Given the success of a more open system like Android, I think there might be some interest
in something even more flexible.

[Tatsh]

That would be the first generation Apple TV, and that is based on x86. The second generation is similar to an iPhone, uses an A4 processor, and is locked down at about the same tightness as iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV#Apple_TV_First_Generation

[ycUygB1]

Right. My point though is that there are people who aren't satisfied with iOS and
want to run Linux on the hardware. Just a matter of time until gcc is ported to
the A4.

[Tatsh]

GCC already targets ARM and therefore already supports the A4.

One of my projects is partially about this (building for iPhone): https://github.com/tatsh/xchain . This is for cross-compiling on Linux for iOS and Mac OS X. Building for non-Darwin is just as easy but requires a different toolchain.

However, note that mainstream GCC is considered deprecated at this point on OS X; LLVM-GCC is the GCC replacement. The final replacement is not any GCC but Clang (and that is already the default when you make a new iPhone project in Apple's SDK with Xcode).

[ycUygB1]

It is just a matter of time before we see Larry the cow bouncing around as a screensaver on my iPad 2.
It will be a welcome sight.

[tomk]

Moved from Gentoo Chat to Gentoo on Alternative Architectures as it fits better here.
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