Howdy,
First off, to start, a sign of appreciation and thanks. Great work, the OS runs reliably, I know this is a big undertaking, and great work so far.
Second, a quick intro, I guess, I think I’ll be involved here a bit. I got an RG35XX first gen when they released. I wasn’t following the scene or anything, I just happened to want to play some old emulated games on the go, and the timing lined up with that model. Loved it, still have it. I upgraded to an -H model this month, because I wanted both analog sticks, and network connectivity. One of the reasons I wanted network connectivity was to SSH into the device and run some software tests on it without having to swap SD cards between my computer and the system.
Anyways, so like I said I wanted to test some software I had written, an I ran into a couple speed bumps that surprised me. I was wondering if they’re worthy of feature requests, or at least some discussion.
First off I couldn’t find any C compiler installed by default. I think this would be good to include as standard for any custom software anyone wants to try to build (along with make, autoconf, etc).
So I tried to install GCC. Downloaded the tarball, SCP’ed it over, extracted it… a new issue arises. The default GCC binaries use symbolic links, and the SD card formatting is ExFAT which doesn’t support symlinks. Possibly something I can work around with aliases and bash functionality, and sort out, but its easier for me to just make an ext4 disk to support symlinks.
So I insert a new SD card, try to run mkfs, and find out there’s no ext support! Not even ext2.
Of course, this is a consumer device and it’s wise to take some of the Apple philosophy to “dumb it down” a bit, if only to take footguns away from the user, but for those of us that want to use the device a bit more classically linux-y, I think it would be good to have these tools installed. I doubt the average user would ever discover them.
Again I want to express thanks for the hard work