ARMopenSUSE

Most of the good work we have done with the Novell and openSUSE folks over the last few years can be attributed to Peter Czanik. Peter is an industrious, hard-working sort of guy. He is working on bringing up openSUSE support for ARM and the Efika MX now. He is also recently the proud Father of Son #2.

Peter Czanik is on the job!

openSUSE is being ported to ARM. The infrastructure for this work is the openSUSE Build Service, which supports the ARM architecture using Qemu. The first prototype of a minimal openSUSE ARM environment is already available on build.opensuse.org in the repository Base:build:arm. You will find a set of packages that is capable of bootstrapping itself. It is still in an early stage, as it uses full emulation. It cannot yet be installed on a real machine because it lacks a kernel and other support packages, but the road ahead is clear. Using the full machine emulation is slow, so the current work is focused on speeding up the compilation process by using cross-compilers instead of Qemu. This will speed up the development considerably. ARM related patches are already being pushed to factory, the development branch of openSUSE, so it is no longer just a fork, but being fully integrated into openSUSE. The ARMopenSUSE release and the Efika MX should be ready to go at about the same time.

Keep up the good work Peter!

The Community is the Computer - Go Zig!

R&B