package management and embedded Linux distributions

A while back, when it looked like the Kuro Box would actually go somewhere, I bought the original model. Among other things, this consists of a 200MHz Freescale e300 core (similar to PowerPC 603e) and 64MB of RAM. No serial port even, but through u-boot it has netconsole and netboot support. I had a decrepit version of Debian installed, and Debian's package management tools frustrate me to the point that I was helpless to get the thing upgraded (something about packages mysteriously "being held back").

For a system like this, the real value of a Linux distribution is the frequency of its security updates. There are some embedded distributions I could have messed with, but I have no idea how reliable their updates are, and I really don't want to be responsible for that myself. I started looking for a "normal" Linux distribution to install. (Unfortunately, the number of mainstream Linux distributions with PowerPC support are shrinking...)

I'm really a Fedora guy. Back in university I did some packaging for LinuxPPC and Yellow Dog Linux (both of which were Red Hat variants), and I'm comfortable enough with RPM to bootstrap a system from just about nothing. So I tried the Fedora installer, and when anaconda failed miserably with netconsole, I painfully installed it package by package.

Long story short, yum (the Fedora software installer) requires an absurd amount of RAM... way more than the 64MB my little Kuro has. The simplest yum operation was taking hours, and I could see I was well into swap. So after all that work, the box was still useless. I ran out of play time, unplugged the thing (since I couldn't install any security updates for it), and there it has sat for another 6 months.

Today I ran across a blog post comparing the speed and memory consumption of yum and zypper (OpenSUSE's package software installer). I don't know much about OpenSUSE, but I will be trying it next...