Buildroot, Linkstar, and Alpine

Progress has also been made to get the Hinlink/Linkstar H68K to compile and run under other distributions. Notably:

• We’ve been able to formulate a build recipe for the Linkstar under buildroot;

• The resulting kernel and supporting files will run as-is on the Linkstar, but with limited functionality, as buildroot is a bare-bones “distro” only;

• Those bones though can be combined with some flesh from Alpine Linux to make a “frankenDistro”; namely, the boot code, kernel, and supporting files can be combined, carefully, with Alpine Linux to have a more fully-featured system.

Next Steps:

• Once buildroot is updated to use U-Boot from 2026.04 or later (which has migrated the Linkstar dts files from Linux 6.18.X into it), we’ll submit a pull request to buildroot to incorporate the build recipe into the tree;

• Once Alpine Linux begins using U-Boot 2026.04 in their ARM64 distributions, the Linkstar should be fully supported by that distro. We’ll check that out when the time comes.