Well… if you looked at the number of commits I’ve done lately, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve been resting on my laurels for the past month. In some ways, this is true… but I’ll soon be doing a bumper crop of updates.
KDE 3.5.7 Keywording
I’ve been using this release of KDE for a good few months now. I’ve given it a run on my Octane, everything seems to work alright there… and I’ve been using it on a daily basis on both Loongson machines — and thus can be fairly confident it won’t break anything.
Avahi to earn ~mips badge
Again, I’ve been using this package on MIPS for a very long time, since mid-last year. Everything seems to work. Along with this, will be dbus-1.0 and nss-mdns.
Re-keywording of Gnome
This hasn’t been discussed yet, and as such no decision has been made, but I have been working towards getting Gnome installed on my O2. Some packages failed tests, some failed to compile completely … but nonetheless, there’s now the beginnings of a useful Gnome desktop. (Well, as useful as Gnome is likely to be… I’m a long-time KDE user myself, having switched to it during my SuSE 5.3 days. Prior to this, I used FVWM.) I’d like feedback from present MIPS users, about whether there’s any demand for this desktop.
Other packages presently in testing
I’ve started looking into other packages for ~mips candidates. Namely, I’m concentrating my efforts on packages that turn an otherwise useless MIPS box into a useful workstation. That is, desktop type applications such as KOffice, mplayer, xine, Amarok, Gimp, Inkscape … etc. Some of these, I’ve been using for a while… others I’m only just starting to build now. (e.g. I’m building Amarok, since I prefer it to Audacious, and in my experience, it handles Sun Audio better than mplayer or Audacious presently does)
On this matter, I’d love feedback on what people actually use their MIPS boxes for, and how Gentoo/MIPS can be better tailored for their needs. If you’re using Gentoo/MIPS for something productive, either as a hobby project or for something more serious, I’d also be interested to hear about it… since this will help in planning what needs to happen with respect to this port.
Lemote Loongson Support
Still, no word from trustees… but I figure any legal hurdles are well and truly gone now. I’m starting to look into how to produce media for these systems.
The biggest hurdle thus far, has been µClibc — or namely, it’s dynamic library loader (ld.so). The Lemote systems use a page size of 16KB — this was the default when I first started using the boxes, and as far as I can tell, they do not like using 4KB page sizes, the kernel dies a rather horrible death. Unfortunately, µCLibc, in it’s infinite wisdom, assumes a page size of 4KB. Thus when it tries to dynamically load libraries, one gets hit by a “can’t map <foo.so>” message.
So where does this leave me? By the sounds of things, the netboot images will probably wind up being either a hybrid statically-linked µClibc busybox with dynamically-linked glibc filesystem tools, or will be a completely dynamically linked glibc affair, depending on which winds up being smaller.
Thankfully I can kinda get away with using more space — I don’t have the size restrictions on the platforms I support. CoLo on Cobalt will load kernels of almost any size, as will PMON2000 on Loongson, but still, I cringe at the idea.
Apart from netboot images… there are a few other steps to be done here:
- Keywording of the ATI Radeon driver — this can probably happen straight away. It won’t break the SGI boxes, since they don’t use the Radeon driver, and I know it works out-of-the-box on Loongson.
- Patch X.org — There’s some patches needed to the core components of X.org for it to work on Loongson. These need to be tested on SGI systems to ensure they don’t break things. It’s quite likely they’ll wind up in X.org CVS in the next few months, but it’d be worthwhile locating and fixing any bugs that occur ahead of time.
- Inclusion of patches into mips-sources — At the moment, I’m waiting around for a 2.6.21 or 2.6.22 ebuild to show up so I can try out the patchset I have here, the holdups being IP28 and IP30 support. Once I can get the Lemote patchset into a form that cleanly applies to mips-sources, we’ll then look at formally including them in the ebuild.
- Handbook updates — to be done once formal approval has been granted and the other steps are complete.
So, lots of work to do… and all of this whilst getting into my studies (e.g. there’s one piece of Allen Bradley ladder-logic code that’s just screaming for me to pick through it for a uni subject) and looking for industrial experience. Hopefully university studies won’t burn me out like they have for the last 12 months.
As always… you know where to find me if you wish to get in touch.
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