A friendly human over at Reddit recently shared a very fun project that got me thinking. FeatherQuill is basically a Raspberry Pi based laptop that ONLY runs the WordGrinder word processor program. For very long periods of time. No distractions or anything. I instantly fell for this project and came home to start working on creating a cartridge version for the Raspberry Pi. I am currently getting the files together and trying to get this program compiled onto an SD card for use with my Ubuntu based laptop. If that goes well, I could just make a cart with an SD card in it and have the word processor done. 

I've been at this for probably close to an hour, and cannot get the source code for WordGrinder to compile. I get the following error, which I can't find anything that makes sense on. 

make: *** No rule to make target 'src/c/emu/lua-5.1.5/*.[ch]', needed by '.obj/lua'.  Stop.

That is very frustrating, because the makefile even has a place to enter the destination directory. If I could get the damn program to compile, I could probably get it to compile on the SD card I have in my computer and possibly use it as a portable program. I did some research into making a portable linux program and couldn't find anything that makes sense to me. Linux has turned out to be far more complicated than I ever imagined. Even something as seemingly simple as installing a program is a nightmare to me at times. I'm trying to learn it all, but right now I just want to get stuff done. I don't want everything I do to be a multi-hour learning experience. Makes me miss the days before I truly Hated Windows. I am asking around for help on this, and will turn to the developer for help onmaking this a portable program.

I have emailed the creator of the program and will have to wait on that. I played with WordGrinder for a little bit, and found it very pleasant to use. I am set on making a word processing cart with it. I also found a writer who uses the software and is interested in beta testing the WG cart when I get a prototype made. I am working on getting that set up.

I've hit dead ends in the following areas, and need to just start on something else:

WordGrinder (Need to make portable so it can run on any Linux OS)

Making programs portable in general(No idea where to start on this)

Booting from SDIO or SPI interface on the GPIO pins (Need to verify this is possible)

Creating a custom OS for cart loading (Need to do more research and choose an OS)

Making dev carts (need to order hardware)

Many other road blocks.

It's starting to sink in just how much help I'll need for this project. It's a little overwhelming, but I know most of what I am trying to do is possible. I just need to make some big picture decisons and figure out how to get started so I can get to work on everything.