Comment 2 for bug 605694

So just to correct some slight errors / add a bit more information:

(a) Lemote will probably sell with gNewSense pre-installed soon, but does not at the moment (I own the US reseller for Lemote - not including URL or name as not sure of advertising limitations here, but should be easy to find - and we do preinstall gNewSense, provide US power cord, etc.)

Lemote provides primarily to the Chinese market, so as far as I know preinstalls with China-specific distributions, such as "Lemote Loonux" and "Open Rays", both of which I believe are Debian variants.

(b) I don't know about generic MIPSel on Gentoo, but there are non-mainline loongson2f (the mips64 compatable CPU in the Lemotes) overlays that may be the best current option from a technical point of view for the Lemote machines, such as the yeeloong netbook / laptop / notebook and fuloong mini-desktop. Work is being done to get this work into Gentoo mainline.

(c) NixOS is also pursuing a loongson2f port.

(d) mipsel != loongson2f. Generic mipsel o32 abi stuff (other than linux) will run on loongson2f, but it will be slow and sometimes trigger bugs in earlier loongson2f processors. For best performance and support for all production dates of loongson2f chips, you need to compile everything with certain flags and toolchains, and with n32 abi. See "Current loongson2f linux version / compiler / version flags wisdom?" at http://groups.google.com/group/loongson-dev/browse_thread/thread/b5a981eb8b0d5f95 has more on this.

(e) I think some Debian people are thinking about better loongson2f support; I'll be trying to have conversations about this topic at debconf in a few weeks. Currently there is significant variance from Debian in gNewSense with regards to loongson2f support.

(f) Lemote has already sold loongson2f based machines in the millions of units within China. They seem to be doing quite well. There should be loongson2g machines out later this year or next year, as well as loongson3 (which is much faster than loongson2 and has built-in support for accelerating x86 emulation under qemu); but loongson3 will initially be targeted only at the server market.