[texhax] Crosscompilation of TeX

[Karl Berry]

    Is there any special requirement for TeX & Co. in terms of hardware. 

No.

    E.g. the ARM-processor does not contain a floating point unit.

There is actually a long-standing (as in decades old) patch from Knuth
to make the TeX code use only fixed point arithmetic.  I admit I am not
sure whether it's applied in the current distributions.  

In any case, I wouldn't worry about it.  Just get it working and see how
slow it is.  My bet is that it will be plenty fast enough.

    Is there any special needs of software (kernel, libaries etc.) 

Not that I know of.

    I believe that TeTex would be perfect to start with since it runs with 
    Linux already and it claims to be 100% open source.

Yes, teTeX sounds like a good thing to start with.  It has no package
manager, but it does not have a lot of "extras", in the sense that to
actually do anything with TeX, you need pretty much all of what teTeX
provides.

Another option would be to use TeX Live and start with the "minimal"
installation scheme and build up from there.  It all depends on how much
you want to do and how much space you have to work with.

Happy hacking,
karl