Preface Unless you have a new, high-powered, ARM system with which to build, the fastest and most practical way to build software for armel (early ARM CPU versions) is to cross-compile on an x86_64 machine (Debian and offshoots call this the amd64 architecture, even for non-AMD CPUs).
The cross-compilation toolchains builtin to most modern Linux distributions do not support older versions of GCC. This article describes setting up a virtual ARM environment for doing armel (ARMv5) compilation using docker containers
Around 2011 Android devices based on the WonderMedia 8xxx-series SoC (ARM v5) were being sold as netbooks. This article describes how to get Devuan Jessie running from SD card on one such: a Craig CLP281 Netbook.