I have uploaded a native build of GPE for the GP2X. Unlike the previous build, this build has been compiled from source using the OpenEmbedded environment and optimized for the ARM920T.

If you wish to setup your own OpenEmbedded environment you should follow the guide at the GP2X Wiki. The configuration files used are available here. OpenEmbedded will fetch all source code and patches required to build everything.

Included in this build are a full GPE setup, Abiword, Gnumeric, Gaim, Evince and Dillo. You can download the image from here: http://x11.gp2x.de/downloads/gp2x-gpe-20060617.tar.bz2

Update: New release available here.

Here is a very “Alpha” release of the “GPE Palmtop Environment”:http://gpe.handhelds.org/ for the GP2X. There are lots of things still to be worked on and many things are completely broken and don’t work at all.

However, AbiWord, Evince (PDF Reader), GAIM (Instant Messaging) and the Dillo web browser are all functional. You can see some screenshots in the previous post. The download includes a ext2 image, which must be mounted as a loopback device and a static chroot binary. A .gpu script is also included which you should be able to run from the menu and have it set everything up for you.

The .gpu script mounts the ext2 image on /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root and also mounts devfs and proc on /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root/dev/ and /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root/proc/ respectively. It this creates a chroot using the included binary at /mnt/sd/gp2x-gpe/root/ and runs /bin/startgpe/ from within the chroot. It expects the contents to be extracted to /mnd/sd/gp2x-gpe/ and for Orkies “X server”:http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=28653 to be installed in /mnt/sd/x11/

When GPE first launches you will be prompted to create a user, this user is then created with the chroot and you should be able to login and play around!

For better performance, you can format your SD card to ext2 and extract the image there rather than mounting it. You might also want to re-nice gpm for better responsiveness also.

The image is based on an “OpenEmbedded”:http://www.openembedded.org build of “OpenZaurus”:http://www.openzaurus.org/wordpress/ 3.5.4. Ideally the next build will be compiled for the GP2X directly (arm920t or arm9tdmi) using OpenEmbedded. If anyone would like to help then please let me know!

And don’t forget to leave your suggestions as to where to go from here!

Again, this release is VERY BROKEN but it does work. Please don’t blame me if it kills your GP2X (it shouldn’t, but still). You can download the tarball from these sites:

* “http://www.filehosting.cc/download.php?id=5AE693E1″:http://www.filehosting.cc/download.php?id=5AE693E1
* “http://s13.quicksharing.com/v/4103035/gp2x_gpe.tar.bz2.html”:http://s13.quicksharing.com/v/4103035/gp2x_gpe.tar.bz2.html

After attempting build GPE and some other apps using OpenEmbedded for the GP2X, I decided to just take a shot at running OpenZaurus 3.5.4 on the GP2X and see how far I got. I used the “X server”:http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=28653 ported by “Orkie”:http://www.orkiesrealm.co.uk along with an OpenZaurus build extracted to an ext2 formatted SD card. I built a static binary of chroot from coreutils and simply ran:

chroot /mnt/sd /bin/sh

After some configuration changes I was able to start gpe-login and create a user and login! I then attempted to install AbiWord and Dillo2 from the ipkg feed, the result you can see below:

Everything is still a little slow at the moment due to the X server using GPM in repeater mode and GPM seems to hammer the CPU. I renice’d GPM and that improved things a bit.

If your interested in helping out please let me know! You’ll need an ext2 formatted SD card and most likely will also need Linux on the desktop too.