Selecting a distro for a 32-bit application

[jfloren]

I'm hoping to resurrect the Hellaphone project (Inferno OS on smartphones, worked on it on an Android phone back in 2012) on Pinephone. One unfortunate caveat of Inferno is that it is currently cannot compile as a 64-bit binary (386 and armhf only, not amd64 or arm64). According to the postmarketOS IRC channel, pmOS doesn't support multiarch, so that seems to be already off the table.

I'm looking for a Linux distro I can use for testing/developing this rather weird application. I would like to be able to compile *on the device*. I don't care about any UI because Hellaphone uses the framebuffer for its own UI, I just need to be able to interface with wifi / sms / audio / calls via either command-line tools or daemons or /dev.

UBPorts seems like a reasonable option but in reading their forums a little, they seem kind of hostile to the idea of people treating it like "just a Linux box". Would perhaps Manjaro be more appropriate? I'd appreciate any thoughts.

[wibble]

This gentoo forum thread might help, if that's the right word. It probably isn't what you want to hear if I understand it right, but it might include some alternatives.

[jfloren]

This gentoo forum thread might help, if that's the right word. It probably isn't what you want to hear if I understand it right, but it might include some alternatives.

Right, the problem is finding a distro which ships cross compilers because I do *not* want to build the GCC toolchain myself, or ask others who are interested to do the same!

[tophneal]

I thought I read something about a distro running a 64bit kernel with a 32bit userspace on the forum somewhere, maybe it was the a64 section? Otherwise, the below may or may not be helpful with armhf/armv7 compatibility.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1090351/...untu-16-04

That's probably the OOTB Debian for the PBP. It uses a 64bit kernel and an armhf user space.