How hard is it to start from scratch?

[jdarling]

I have been looking at the Hummingbird A20 (http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Hummingb ... 44926.html). Nice piece of kit for the price, but the seller has pretty much not delivered on their Linux promise (at least from the comments and Google). Also seems that they are hiding bad reviews (noticed 5 the other day, and today there is only 1)

So, before I go out and spend some $$ I thought I'd ask, really, how hard is it to take something like this and reverse engineer Arch to it? There are lots of other A20 systems out there and the driver source for the chips used on the board are available (the NIC as an example).

Basically I'm looking for a new toy and learning experience. Don't want anything verging on impossible but a fun exercise isn't outside my reach. I have experience compiling applications for Linux and compiling/installing drivers, but have never started from ground 0. Always had at least a booting system with network to get started from.

Any feedback greatly appreciated,
- Jeremy

[WarheadsSE]

So this guy: http://www.merrii.com/en/pla_d.asp?id=165

Check with #linux-sunxi on IRC