Tuesday, November 18, 2008

ARM and MID ...

So for those of you playing along at home, we have a newly available ARM port, which has just reached the point of being able to debootstrap itself with a buildd varient (i.e., install build-essential and a few other packages). Now the fun begins with porting stuff.

First up is mono. Mono has a port to ARM and ARMel already, however, this code obviously hasn't been compiled in sometime, as it FTBFS due to glibc 2.8+svn. *grumble*. Oh well, easy fix, and one that will help clear a bunch of other dep-waits and get us that much closer to a usable port.

Monday, November 10, 2008

WiiBuntu (Part 1), Ubuntu Ports MID, and lpia

So here I am, with a wonderful Wii, complete with Twilight Hack and Homebrew Menu installed, wondering if I could do something crazy like run Ubuntu on it. After some trial and error, it appears possible to do a debootstrap of an Ubuntu PowerPC installation and have it work!.

So now that I have a Wii with Ubuntu installed, what am I going to do with it, that is the question I am now pondering. The answer seems obvious, put Ubuntu MID on the sucker, install XWii (Wiimote Pointer Driver), and the WiiX display driver, and turn it into a very pretty multitouch system. Yay :-) So it should just be a matter of 'aptitude install ubuntu-mid'

Sadly, its not quite that easy. Ubuntu-MID currently is only installable on lpia. I can hear the questions now, WTF is lpia. To answer that question, lpia is the Low-Power Intel Architecture, also known as the Intel Atom processor family. For those of you familar with Atom, you might be double-taking, saying Atom is an x86 based processor. Again, your right, lpia is x86 based (you can run it on normal PCs), its essentially i386 Ubuntu with a few optimizations.

The problem breaks down to the way some of the MID's compontents were packaged. The main problem comes in the form that the rules file, instead of properly splitting the packages out, the rules file checks for the lpia architecture, and then changes the configure options to build hildon support (hildon is the nifty library from Nokia that makes MID work). To fix MID on ports (and x86/amd64), each package with this lpia detector switch must be found, and then properly split. Sounds easily enough, right?

Wrong. Most of the packages (such as evince) are CDBS packages. For anyone who knows anything about CDBS, you know it was never meant to split packages :-/. This *will* be fun :-/.

As an added note, OpenOffice.org is broken on PowerPC, double fun, since compiling it will likely take longer than releasing Jaunty will take :-).

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

More notes from the PIE party (Ubuntu bootstrapping howto) ...

So after getting stuck and putting this work aside, I decided to take a second stab at it after meeting up with another Ubuntu developer in real life, and doing additional research. Using the experimental gcc-4.3 branch of Gentoo Hardened as a base, I'm now making extremely good progress bootstrapping amd64-pie, and the results look promising thus far.

For those of us curious, bootstrapping the archive is a straightforward if time intensive project. Essentially the process requires three individual bootstraps, an inital one that you use to build debian package, a chroot from those package, and a final chroot that is the end result.

Right now I'm working on the first part of this bootstrap, which is from a Linux host (without Debian) to generating the inital bootstrap packages. It requires compiling each build-dep from source with the proper configuration arguements, then building the packages with dpkg-buildpackage -d, and installing it, until you have build the entire base system.

From there, you take the debs, place them in a repo, and debootstrap, and then rebuild again, which produces the final result debs. It's straightforward and fasicating work (if a little tedious)
Michael