The downloads/binaries directory contains prebuilt binary images, created by
running sources/more/buildall.sh in the most recent Aboriginal Linux source
tarball.  The source packages for these binaries are mirrored at
"http://aboriginal.impactlinux.com/mirror".

Two types of tarballs are available at the top level of this directory:

system-image-$ARCH.tar.bz2

  Prepackaged bootable system images image for each target, which boot and
  run under QEMU and allow you to natively compile additional packages within
  the emulated development environment.  (Just wget the source tarball at the
  shell prompt and build it more or less as you would on any other Linux host.)

  This tarball includes a squashfs formatted root filesystem image containing a
  minimal native development environment, a Linux kernel configured for use
  with the emulator QEMU, and a wrapper script to invoke the emulator on them.

  The run-emulator.sh wrapper script should produce a shell prompt, with
  the emulator's stdin/stdout connected to the emulated system's
  /dev/console.  See the screenshots page for examples.

  The dev-environment.sh script is a wrapper around run-emulator.sh which
  provides a better development environment, primarily by mounting a 2 gigabyte
  writeable ext2 image on /home, and ensuring QEMU allocates at least
  256 megabytes of memory for the emulated system.

  If both distccd and a compatible $ARCH-cc cross compiler are in the $PATH,
  dev-environment.sh will automatically set up distcc to call out through the
  virtual network to the host's $ARCH-cc, to move the heavy lifting of
  compilation outside the emulator, and also take advantage of SMP.  (Doing
  so does not require the package being built to be cross compile aware.
  As far as the emulated build environment is concerned, it's still performing
  simple single-context native builds.)

  The native-build.sh script is a wrapper around dev-environment.sh which
  launches an automated build (driven by a control image) instead of an
  interactive shell prompt.

cross-compiler-$ARCH.tar.bz2

  C and C++ Cross compilers, which create target binaries for each
  architecture, linked against uClibc (and uClibc++ for C++ source).

  To use, extract this tarball anywhere and add its "bin" subdirectory to
  your $PATH.  Then use the appropriate $ARCH-gcc as your target compiler,
  or run dev-environment.sh to use distcc acceleration for native builds.

  These compiler binaries are built for an i686 host and statically linked
  against uClibc, for maximum portability between PC Linux distributions.
  They include uClibc++ (to support C++), and multi-threading support.

==============================================================================

Several other types of tarballs are available in the extras subdirectory:

simple-root-filesystem-$ARCH.tar.bz2

  Native Linux root filesystem for a given target, suitable for chrooting into
  (on appropriate hardware) or packaging up into a bootable system image.  It
  contains busybox, uClibc, and a few configuration files including a
  simple boot script (usr/sbin/init.sh).

  This is the minimum necessary to boot to a reasonably polished shell prompt.

native-compiler-$ARCH.tar.bz2

  Statically linked version of the native compiler from root-filesystem,
  which you can extract and run on an appropriate target the same way you
  can extract and run the cross-compiler on the host.

  You don't need this when using Aboriginal Linux's system images, which provide
  their own native compiler.  This is provided for use with existing target
  filesystems.

root-filesystem-$ARCH.tar.bz2

  Combination of simple-root-filesystem and native-compiler into a single
  filesystem.  This is what the system images use for their minimal native
  development environment root filesystem.

busybox-$ARCH

  This is a prebuilt static busybox binary for the given target, implementing
  numerous standard command line utilities.

  To use, copy it to a target system (perhaps via wget), set the executable
  bit, and create the appropriate symlinks to it.

  Run ./busybox-$ARCH to see the list of supported commands.  It provides
  the default configuration ("make defconfig") of busybox.

dropbearmulti-$ARCH

  This is a prebuilt static dropbear binary for the given target, implementing
  an ssh server, ssh client, and associated utilities such as scp.

  To use, copy it to a target system (perhaps via wget), set the executable
  bit, and create the appropriate symlinks to it.

  Run ./dropbearmulti-$ARCH to see the list of supporte commands.

strace-$ARCH

  This is a prebuilt static strace binary for the given target, providing a
  debugging tool listing all the system calls made by another program.

  To use, copy it to a target system (perhaps via wget) and set the executable
  bit.