Well, at long last it’s built… I’m currently doing some testing of the stage 3 tarball (I’ve already hit a problem with missing /dev entries, which has now been rectified).
Currently, I’m doing some build tests to check that everything is okay, once that is done I’ll release the tarball onto my devspace.
ETA: approximately 1 day, I’ll probably upload after 12:00PM local time (Brisbane Time; that’s 2:00AM GMT).
Hi All,
This is a short one … I’m now in the process of upgrading Catalyst on my Qube2, which shouldn’t take too long… After that, I’ll build a stage2 “seed” stage, then I’ll start the build in earnest.
Estimated time … assuming I have no hiccups … will be approximately one fortnight. The stages will be based on Chris’ 20060123 portage tree snapshot.
This release… I will be concentrating on the stage 3 tarballs. I might provide a stage 1/2 MIPS1 stages, so those with MIPS1, MIPS2 or MIPS32 Little-endian CPUs can build their own systems … although no support for these MIPS1 stages will not be provided.
I’ll keep you all up-to-date on what happens. 🙂
Regards,
Stuart Longland
Yep, I’m guilty of doing this sort of thing… take a 13 year-old piece of kit like an SGI Indy, and chuck Linux 2.6 with KDE 3.5 on it. But how about this…
A group of individuals, with seemingly too much time on their hands, have successfully managed to run Windows XP on as little as 8MHz clock speed and 16MB RAM. See this page for more details.
Now I’m really tempted to get my 386 back out of the garage, and try KDE 3.5 on it. 😉
Update: I tried this the other day. After spoon-feeding the box with floppies (nfsroot didn’t want to work, largely because the eepro driver was looking for my LAN card on IRQ 11 instead of 10), and spending all day watching tar -xjvpf stage3-hardened-x86-2005.1.tar.bz2 run its course, I’ve come to the conclusion I had before I attempted the procedure.
With a speed of just over 4 (bogo)Mil instructions/sec, and numerous 80486+ instructions creeping into the Python and sshd binaries, I’ve decided it’s not worthwhile. I might try kernel 2.4 on it later (it used to run Slackware 8.0 w/ kernel 2.4.18 just fine), but right now it’s my Gentoo-powered footrest.
Yep, I’m sure everybody knows what I’m on about… it’s those annoying people, that ring just as you’re about to take a bite of your hot dinner … or wake you up/disturb you in the middle of the day, to sell you something you’re not interested in.
I’ve endured it for quite some time now. Somebody rings on the landline phone (thankfully they haven’t touched my mobile), and starts their marketing blurb. Sometimes they’ll ask for a “Mr Longland” … and after further probing, maybe I can get a “D G Longland” out of them (being my father’s phone line, he’s listed in the phonebook, and this is where they get the number from). Depending on my mood, I’ll either be highly synical or flippant, or I’ll play dumb.
Each time it happens though, I still can’t help but think … they’re doing it all wrong. Just because a number is in the phone book … that doesn’t instantly give them the right to use it to make an unsolicited commercial phonecall. At the moment for us here in Australia, there are two options:
I thus propose another solution.
Rather than just calling anyone, then having people opt-out of the service… instead… people should opt-in to receiving calls. This is how it’d work.
This has a number of advantages:
Disadvantages:
Maybe if companies took this approach… fewer people would be needlessly disturbed… and they might become more successful as a result. 🙂
Yep… it’s that time again, the time when we’re going from one end of town, to the other, visiting numerous relatives and attending many christmas parties over the silly season.
Stinking hot weather … time with the family… perfect waterfight weather actually.
This also means I’ll be on a somewhat limited internet connection (last year, I had none at all; the phone line was that bad) and so may be partially or completely unavailable. Hopefully nothing will break in my absense, and we’ll be right. 🙂
I’ll try to be online if I can; won’t be as available, but I’ll have logging going on my IRC session on toucan (nick: Redhatter-DGO on FreeNode and AustNET; Redhatter- on irc.oz.org because they’re stingy on nickname lengths). Due to the limited bandwidth, I won’t be doing much with CVS … SSH will be bad enough.
Anyways, that is all from this part of the world. Gentoo/MIPS handbook is still under review; I’ll try and make a static version of it available in my devspace shortly in case (heaven forbid) our server goes down (like it did yesterday; after a nasty storm took out our electricity for 4 hours). Other than that… Merry Christmas; see you on Boxing Day, if not before. 🙂
Hi All…
For those of you who have any last-minute updates for the MIPS handbook, please speak up now. I have sent up patches so that the docs team have a head start on implementing the changes (particularly for any translations that may exist). I hope to have the shiny new handbook in place shortly.
The impatient ones may read it on my own server here.
Regards,
Stuart Longland
Hi All,
It has been discovered that the latest 2005.1 stages appear to be missing critical /dev entries. To work around the issue… execute the following commands before exiting the chroot environment:
# cd /dev
# /sbin/MAKEDEV generic-mipsel
This should create the necessary device nodes. I shall look at rectifying the issue ASAP. Stay tuned.
Hi All…
I have just started work at improving the netboot images for the Cobalt port. Here you’ll find my latest netboot images. What has changed, is that instead of distributing the raw kernel, these are now distributed as a tarball (uncompressed — bzipping them actually made them larger) complete with CoLo, default.colo startup script, and symbolic links for most MIPS-based Cobalt systems.
To use. On the server, download the .tar file (and optionally run it through gpg, sha1sum and md5sum to verify you downloaded it right). Then unpack it on your server by running: tar -C / -xvf nfsroot-...cobalt.tar.
Then, when booting the Cobalt server… hold down left & right arrow buttons. You should see “Net Booting” appear on the display, followed shortly after by a prompt asking if you want to enable the Console. “Console ON” should be already selected, just press ENTER here.
You’ll then be asked where to boot from. Scroll down two places, and you should see “Network Boot (NFS)”. Select it and press ENTER. You should see “Loading Gentoo/MIPS” on the LCD panel, and the serial console should display the bootup progress. You’ll finally arrive at the “Press ENTER to enable this console” prompt that you should all be familiar with.
If, however, you need kernel parameters for your machine (such as Cobalt 2700 users, who need to disable serial console and start telnet) — select the Boot Shell method, and boot in the traditional way. The kernel image is named kernel.gz.
I’ll be updating the Handbook shortly to reflect this. I have an open bug covering the revamp of documentation. My draft handbook is viewable in the usual place, and feedback is encouraged. A lot has changed in the Linux/MIPS world since the docs were last overhauled, and so I aim to bring the docs up-to-date.
I shall keep you all posted as the work progresses.
I’ve been using screen for a little while now. It’s a brilliant little package, but it does have some shortcomings. One being, you can only be viewing one app at a time… and it takes a little getting used to.
Anyway, I happened to mention this in #humbug (irc.oz.org)… and how it’d be nice to have an ncurses workalike that used gpm and/or keystrokes, to move text windows around. Much like having a bunch of xterms on a console. One of the people pointed me to twin a text-based window manager.
(the Text WINdow Manager in action, with elinks running locally, and irssi running within a ssh session)
I’m an instant convert… now to see if this can be loaded onto dev.gentoo.org. 🙂
Those of you who have been watching the Atomic Linux forums, will have noticed this…
Now, I don’t know who this “Eren” character is… or what I’ve susposedly done to deserve this. It’s sad that there are people who merely get their jollies by simply defacing websites. I have no complaints with hackers in general — whitehats do provide a useful service, in that they try to find holes and fix them — it’s the malicious variety of hacker (the blackhat) that I hate.
I’m currently reloading phpBB (latest version), so hopefully the damage won’t be huge — but it does look like we’ve lost most of our threads.
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