Topic: Different plan???
With the changes that are about to happen to the Chumby world as we know it in the near future, it got me thinking about what I was going to do (options seem to be: (1) Zurk's offline firmware, (2) the cut-down service Duane (whom I have an immense amount of respect for) is busy setting up or (3) Something else hand crafted).
I really like the fact that the Chumby platform is sufficiently open that I'm free to make any decision I want.
One of the things I really wanted to do when I got the Chumbies (I have 3 Chumby Classics) was put my own apps on it. There were lots of things I really wanted it to do - for instance being an interface for home automation, a status display for MythTV etc... Some of these I cludged together using PHPShow to display dynamically generated images, but they were far from perfect. The biggest hurdle, and the reason I never got anything more than 'hello world' off the ground, was always the requirement to write Adobe Flash applications.... I don't have any of the Adobe software, and the open source alternatives never seemed to work very well.
...so....
...Is perhaps now a good time to invest some serious effort in creating a platform (build environment, replacement control panel you can link your apps with, providing basic alarm facilities etc..., and necessary additional libraries etc..) where it's easy for users to build and deploy apps written in C/C++ (or assembler if you insist!). Not sure what graphical interface you would go for - I think the devices are too underpowered for X, to perhaps something like DirectFB.
To be clear - my aim isn't to allow existing applications to be recompiled for Chumby - it is simply to provide a really easy to use environment for people to develop their own apps that run well on Chumby, and allow them to do so without loosing basic alarm clock functionality.
What would my ideal be?
Perhaps try to get Debian running (obviously you'd need to leave a USB drive in the back of the Chumby). Not with X or anything - I'll stick with framebuffer.... not perfect, but allows for quick and easy messing around without needed a vast amount of embedded Linux knowledge and lots of packages/libraries available (so for instance you can use libcurl in your app if needed).
Failing that how about resurrecting the OpenEmbedded effort? Make a public Amazon EC2 snapshot available with it all installed and working, so people don't have to worry too much about the cross-compile environment. Create an idiots guide to getting the generated rootfs (and maybe Kernel) somewhere bootable by Chumbies....
Or perhaps aim a lot lower.... Create a way for people to easily compile native apps for the current Chumby rootfs (so the equivalent of a native compiler. Perhaps an Amazon snapshot containing qemu emulating an appropriately setup Chumby like filesystem, with gcc and loads of common libraries installed).