tdicola:
Dumb question, but has anyone tried installing and using GCC on the yun and an expanded filesystem?I'm guessing the limited memory and CPU will make compiling anything serious impossible, but it should be possible to do simple stuff right?
Seconded on the request for someone to figure this out...
Unix without a native C compiler is pretty limited. The suggestion to cross compile is valid if you're rebuilding the OS, but is very problematic for "normal" people. It only works on one or two specific versions of Linux - No Mac compiling, and definitely no Windows support. The process of building the cross compiler is torturous to say the least. Everyone reports problems.
If there was an easily available, and simple to use cross compiler that shipped with the Arduino IDE then that would be a good start, but currently cross compiling "helloWorld" from scratch is days of work, and would require setting up a VM just of that purpose.
The suggestion that it's impractical to compile natively is bogus. Especially with this upgrade in place, storage is no longer an issue, and 400MHz/64Mb is actually pretty decent (I've compiled GCC on a 16MHz Machine with 4Mb RAM - it took pretty much a whole day, but that was totally OK).
The Linux side of the Yun is currently underused, because there's no easy way to write C programs for it...
This isn't meant to sound ungrateful - I appreciate the progress being made on the Yun. I'm just hoping to get this onto the todo list, as it would radically change the way we could work with the YUN.