ARM is popular enough that there's a precompiled cross-compiler in Debian --- you get lucky there. It's even reasonably recent. But there isn't a MIPS toolchai

ARM is popular enough that there's a precompiled cross-compiler in Debian --- you get lucky there. It's even reasonably recent. But there isn't a MIPS toolchain. Or an m68k toolchain. Or a sparc toolchain. Or an alpha toolchain. Or an SH toolchain. There is a Hitachi H8 toolchain, but it's based on 3.4.6. There's an MSP430 toolchain, but you don't want to use it, as it's achingly old and can brick some modern MSP430 devices. etc. Typically, when working on an embedded device, the very first thing you do is spend far too many frustrating hours trying to beat gcc into shape, and that shouldn't be necessary. The fact that the packages for all these things aren't built and pushed to Debian automatically every time a gcc release is done indicates that something is very wrong somewhere...