[PLUG] Advisability of changing shell redirect

[Tim Wescott]

I'm winding up on an embedded project that will use the Texas 
Instruments LM3S811 embedded ARM processor.  Some searching around on 
the web shows me that there isn't much support to be found for the 
gnu-arm tool set any more -- all of the web pages with dates are several 
years old, and the ones without dates are all for building the tools 
with the old versions.

Whenever this situation is mentioned at all, links point to commercial 
sites, including Codesourcery, which does an "open source" gnu tool set 
-- but they sure don't publish their source very openly!!!

So, I cave.  I download their binary distribution of their "Codesourcery 
lite", and I run it.  I get the following message:

tim at servo:~/Downloads$ ./arm-2009q3-67-arm-none-linux-gnueabi.bin
The installer has detected that your system uses the dash shell
as /bin/sh.  This shell is not supported by the installer.
You can work around this problem by changing /bin/sh to be a
symbolic link to a supported shell such as bash.
For example, on Ubuntu systems, execute this shell command:
   % sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow dash
   Install as /bin/sh? No
Please refer to the Getting Started guide for more information,
or contact CodeSourcery Support for assistance.
tim at servo:~/Downloads$

Do I want to touch this?  Is this going to screw up _other_ software 
that may be looking for 'sh' to be a Dash shell command?  Or am I fairly 
safe playing with it?

And do I want to just change the link manually, or do I want to use 
dpgk-reconfigure as they suggest?

Ooooh, I'm soooo confused.  This is violating my implicit contract with 
Ubuntu "Good training wheels" Linux.

(I am, frankly, far more comfortable with the idea of doing my own 
build, if only there were _real_ source available.  Grr.  Grump.)

-- 
Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
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Cell:  503-349-8432
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