[gentoo-mips] is gentoo-mips right for me?

[Tomasz Chmielewski <mangoo@wpkg.org>]

I was wondering if gentoo-mips is a right distribution/tool for me.

Here's the summary what I have and what I want to achieve.

I am interested in porting apps for wrt54 and similar hardware (they 
have Broadcom CPUs). When I connect a 2 GB usb-stick to such a device 
(i.e., to ASUS WL-500g Deluxe or to any other device listed on 
http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware), a small router could turn into 
a really useful, rock-stable (no moving parts like hard-disk, fan etc.), 
cheap, small, quiet, multi-purpose device (domain controller, print 
server, web server etc.).

As compiling software on these devices directly isn't really a good 
idea, at first I thought I'd just cross-compile the software.
However, very often, cross-compiling is not that easy (sometimes 
involves lots of patching, which in my case turned out to be duplicating 
someone's job).

So I searched the web a bit, and came to a conclusion:

I have to run gentoo-mips in qemu on my x86 hardware, compile/port apps 
there, strip the binaries, and move them to these tiny routers.

Is my thinking correct?

Will such compiled software compiled on gentoo-mips run on 
Broadcom-based routers?

Or maybe I just should give up this idea, as it's totally wrong from the 
beginning?

I could check it myself, but as I failed to run the gentoo-mips livecd 
in quemu, I'd like to know if I'm doing something reasonable before I 
invest some time in running gentoo-mips on qemu.


-- 
Tomek
http://wpkg.org
WPKG - software management with Samba
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