As my APCs are being held to ransom, until I get an invoice for UK customs duty and taxes (by post!!) and am then able to pay it (online?)..  I decided to add another flavour of cross-compiler to the ones I already have installed.

This one comes from the self-contained OpenELEC environment which is used to create a Linux + XBMC installation for the Raspberry Pi..     It includes the ‘armv6zk-openelec-linux-gnueabi‘ compiler environment, and ‘installation’ is a straightforward – if a bit messy – case of copying the appropriate files and directories to my main X86_64 setup.    The only slight complication is to replace some of the shell script versions of the OpenELEC-centric compiler files with the equivalent ‘softlinks’ to the appropriate gcc executables..     I checked these links – and the file / directory locations – against the existing ones for a similar toolchain (arnv5l-redhat…) that I had been using for compiling kernels for the Dreamplug.

I tested this by (re)compiling kernel 3.2.24 for the raspberry Pi, and everything appears to work correctly…    All I need now is the actual APC (and UART connector/converter) to try it all out on!

I am – of course – making the giant assumption that it will be possible to get some sort of Linux kernel to compile and run on the APC – albeit with limited functionality due to certain drivers being apparently unavailable in open-source format..   At least the CPU itself is the same as the Raspberry Pi…