[tex-live] tlive on arm ??

Michael A. Peters mpeters at mac.com
Thu Oct 23 13:45:54 CEST 2008


I'm toying with a somewhat geeky idea.
My primary use of my laptop (other than travel) is to work on my book at 
a coffee shop.

The other day - online I found a neat little embedded board called the 
Beagle Board and I got a wild hair brained idea -

Build a Beagle Board system, put a fairly minimal linux on it (IE 
embedded CLFS) - just enough to run texlive and emacs. I assume there 
are CF cards big enough for a minimal system plus enough of a texmf 
(full texmf maybe even, but I wouldn't need a full texmf).

Connect to the beagle from the palm using my nice foldout palm keyboard.

The advantage would be I wouldn't have to strap a laptop case to the 
back of my bicycle just to work at the coffee shop, it looks like 
everything would fit inside a fanny pack.

The disadvantage, I'm not sure how fast the thing would be at running 
pdflatex to generate my book, but 99% of the time I would be in the text 
editor anyway - I only occasionally run a compile to check my TeX syntax 
from time to time (and the real purpose is usually to just take a mental 
break from writing).

I understand checking the typesetting on a Palm is not ideal due to the 
small screen, but for draft working copies, it probably is fine.

The biggest hitch - it seems that there are not TLive 2008 binaries for 
Linux ARM. However, it looks like Debian has them, so I could probably 
steal their binaries and just make sure I have the necessary shared 
libraries.

Does this sound absolutely crazy and way too far fetched of a thing to 
try? Has anyone else done something like this?


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