Arm (or armel) Linux For Balloon
You can run anything you like on your Balloon. It doesn't have to be Linux, but so far that's what everyone has used, except one project that essentially ran using just the bootloader.
There are various distributions used by various people for various purposes. Here we bring together the options.
Things are made more complicated by the 2006/7 incompatible change in the arm ABI.(Called oldABI and EABI respectively below)
Balloon3
The Balloon team maintains a 'distro' for the balloon. This actually includes several rootfses and corresponding kernels, bootloaders etc. The current release is test-v0.3. This includes
- Buildroot image (2MB including kernel, uclibc based, supports usb drives, pcmcia wireless, usb ethernet networking. OABI/EABI )
- Debian arm/armel rootfs. (120MB)
- Emdebian Grip arm/armel rootfs. (56MB)
- and kernel, bootloader, utilities, cpld/fpga vhdl
Other systems produced so far are:
- Toby-churchill familiar-derived distro: (old-ABI, hard-float)
OpenEmbedded: (old-ABI, soft-float). This was a proof-of-concept release, not currently being developed
Android image: The google OS system targetted for phones.
Balloon2
On Balloon2 there are:
Toby-Churchill distro incl ipkg tree available on http://husaberg.toby-churchill.com/balloon/.
- Guralp Systems limited also have a distribution.