Python

why Python?

• because writing is C sucks
• your time is valuable
• once a python zealot, always a python zealot.

Compiling python from source

Supposedly there are patches that will allow you cross compile python. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get it to work. The problem is that the Python build system uses the binary it generates to finish the build process - meaning that in a cross compiling situation you have to build an arm binary *and* a localhost binary (i686-linux-gnu or whatever).

A good starting point is http://www.mail-archive.com/patches@python.org/msg03662.html.

using an existing python binary

Luckily a number of existing linux platforms already support builds for the arm-linux. It is fairly painless to grab a binary from one of these systems and make it work on the chumby. I used the binary from python for maemo project. The Maemo project is the open source effort by Nokia to get linux and associated tools work on their arm based 770 platform.