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
