DJ my point was I wanted to see if we had the combined knowledge and manpower to do this before we had a 20 page thread about it. If and when things get going a 20 page thread+ML+wiki etc would be in order but I want to try and keep things organized since the first thing we need is a kernel and a bootloader then that is all the should focus on. Anything else is unneeded.

As I said our first step is to see if we can find a platform similar to the Nspire that already has Linux support, if none such device exists much more research will need to be done. I personally don't have the time to do this but I will assist if there is someone willing and knowledgeable enough to take the reigns.

For me PoC would be getting the kernel to spit something out on either the LCD or the rs-232 lines if we can get that then the rest will follow. The hard part is getting the ball rolling/the kernel booting, its mostly down hill from there thanks to the likes of angstrom and similar embedded Linux distros.

What? It'd be like having KOS as an App, if that helps...not sure about the PC thing.

I've put a little thought into Linux on Nspire myself, but never actually tried anything.  Sounds interesting, I'd love to help.

Some quick googling came up with this as a good place to look at getting a bootloader setup. Someone familiar with ndless programming could look into implementing something based on this via an ndless program, assuming we have enough access to the hardware to do so.

http://www.simtec.co.uk/products/SWLINUX/files/booting_article.html

Ok thanks I will look into that, the patch that adds support for that board to the kernel is here http://www.phytec.com/products/linux/bsp-LPC3180.html I have started to look through it to get an idea of where we will want to start. Sadly it seems the patch contains a large amount of useless content and is for a rather old kernel version but its better than nothing, thanks.

Also again sorry for any harshness, but I felt I needed to define what was constructive was in relation to this thread.

Just to get an idea of how many different Arm based Linux machine types there are and why getting Linux on an Arm device is harder than just installing via Live CD on a desktop here is a nice list of all the registered "machine types" most of which are not or may never have been supported by the mainline Linux kernel. http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/developer/machines/

But hopefully one of those is close to what we need, if not we'll have to start from scratch which may not be the end of the world, just means harder work, but it maybe less in the end depending on the situation.

Well sadly its not just the processor, its the memory layout, peripheral chips, LCD, USB controller that we have to worry about, but the more I look into it the more sense starting from scratch seems to make, but that may just be me being tired. Once we have a way to boot things we'll know more.

I think the best way to boot Linux would be to copy the Linux kernel to ram and then execute it.
Linux will then take over the system (I think). As for a rootfs, it will be hard to make the kernel read the the flash, so the best thing would be to copy a little rootfs that contains a base system to ram.

Haret works in a similar way, and I think this is the best way instead of starting a bootloader like uboot.

I've started reading http://www.glomationinc.com/PortingLinuxKernel.pdf which seems to be a good starting place and so far has confirmed what I thought was the case when it comes to kernel side things. We'll want to see if the Nspire is similar enough to any existing machine types to base our work off we'll have to work from scratch but that doesn't seem to be as big of deal as I originally thought. Give this a read if your interested in helping as it seems to have very relevant info.