openSUSE has icecc as ready to use binary packages with cross compilers for many platforms. It should be possible to use EFIKA as master and use a Pegasos and an x86 machine as backends. See http://en.opensuse.org/Icecream

Disclaimer: I just found it, and did not test it (yet)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Then OE is not what you are looking for :) (and as far i can tell until someone decides to build a package for the distro you are using, containing all that you mention, you have to either build them your self or use a tool to build them and move them around by hand)

For this you need to 'complain' to the Debian dev's.
It's been a mystery to me too, why X stuff gets installed

Well, OE has a steap learing curve but IMHO it outperforms all of the embedded build systems i have used (and believe me i have used a lot)
As for 'plug and play' if you find something that works and does not have a full distro behind it or a 5 digit price tag, let me know,I would be interested in trying it out also. :)

Indeed, Peter, I know SuSE has it, I also know even you are having trouble building kernels with the factory tree this week :D

I'm sticking with Debian until I can do better. It just installs and there's not a lot of learning curve, I've been using Debian since they ported it to 68k Amigas and it came on an Amiga Format cover disk..

How about a use case - I like how Ubuntu do their use cases for everything in their Wiki, so how about this;
See, all it needs is a compiler package and icecc. That is all I am looking for.. installing Gentoo makes it hard to get the Virtual Machine up and running (it took me 12 hours to compile because I am still using my laptop.. that is before I even rebooted the system to try making the crosscompiler..). I'm not willing to soak up my days building a system which cripples my desktop system. I'm not happy that I'd need to run the Efika installer and then build compilers on it, even after I set up icecc to do it, to speed up the rest of the process.

It just seems like a lot of work, something which would cost a lot of people a lot of time. The Efika is not really your average embedded board - it will run a desktop Linux distro, it's not like a Gumstix where you are stuck for something that comes on CD or USB key to boot on it. Why throw away that advantage? And why force developers to use a specific distro? If they have to pick one it may as well be commercial, like MontaVista or YellowDog, which may offer more embedded support for a board, but why throw away the advantage of 'free' software that way?

What I personally would like to see is;

1) a package for every distro on x86 we care about - it contains the compiler/tools required

2) a package for the Efika which turns on the cross-compiling and distribution client, and one which makes the Efika act as a server in case you have 40 Efikas laying on a desk on the network.

3) a prebaked virtualpc and vmware image of 1) so that we don't even have to get people to install things, they can download it to every desktop they have, and offload it site-wide.

4) when we ship install keys or cds for the Efika, they are already turned on with 2) to compile using 1) and 3).

Really.. plug and play. Buy an Efika, buy 40 Efikas, drop them somewhere, start compiling.. no "which distro actually works", no "hang on I need to build my own compiler FIRST" stuff.

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Matt Sealey