On Wed, 22 Oct 1997, Nick Bull wrote:

> 
> I have a shiny new Risc PC, on which I intend to install either RiscBSD or
> ArmLinux. I'm a bit torn because RiscBSD seems to be in a much more advanced
> stage of development wrt drivers for third-party hardware, but ArmLinux holds
> out the promise of access to the large amount of Linux software available
> globally.
>
For an i386 system Linux has the advantage of some commercial software
that is not available on other platforms. ArmLinux does not have any of
this software and is fairly unlikely to ever get it. The only other
advantage(for i386) is the large number of precompiled versions of
software for which the source is freely available. ArmLinux does not share
this advantage either.

This means you will have to build from source anyway. In this case it will
be no more difficult to build software for RiscBSD than for ArmLinux.

AFAIK NetBSD 1.3 will include a packages system which will automatically
download compile and install a lot of standard Unix packages by simply
cd'ing into a directory and doing:
make ; make install
although this does assume you have an active internet connection at the
time.

I have experience of compiling a lot of software for RiscBSD and in most
cases the setup and installation was very easily done by following the
instructions provided with the sources. The difficulties arose in code
that was heavily dependant on CPU architecture which required new code to
be implemented for the ARM platform.

Mike