• Tag Archives mips
  • Gentoo ebuilds

    Couple of things…

    First, new version of the netrek cow client is out, so I have written a new ebuild for it. This required some work because when the new client came out originally, it had a missing file in the tarball distribution. This was later fixed, but the filename for the new version of the tarball was not something that portage really liked, so some massaging in the ebuild was required. This is now done, and there is now an ebuild of version 3.2.6 of the netrek cow client available at my website: http://inthewings.net/ebuild

    Second, I got emacs to build on the fulong, which required both an ebuild file and a patch for the configure.in file in the tarball because the emacs tarball does not recognize mips64el the way the fulong presents it. Not too bad a patch, but it was also interesting just getting it to work in the first place. That patch is also available in the above website.


  • Rants and Ebuilds

    OK… two things…

    First, I read Slashdot, mainly because it does keep me up on the latest tech news to some extent. That being said, it amazes me sometimes about the questions that some folks ask the readers of Slashdot, because I have seen the comments of users of Slashdot and they are not necessarily the ones that you want advice from.

    Second, I just completed writing an ebuild that works for netrek on gentoo using mips architecture. It is located here.

    It was interesting writing the ebuild this time around, as I was able to fix some bugs that I had in the old one. The above is now a basic template for things that I will do from now on in creating ebuilds.


  • Gentoo on Fulong

    So, a couple of days ago, I decided that it was high time to install a different version of linux on my Lemote Fulong.

    First of all, the Lemote Fulong is a Chinese desktop machine designed for low power with a decent amount of capability. It is a MIPS based machine, using pretty much all of the MIPS architecture that is not patented by various other corporations. As such, it works pretty well in this regard.

    It only runs linux based operating systems, as Microsoft certainly never wrote a version of Windows for the MIPS architecture. The closest they have ever come is by writing Windows NT for the Alpha architecture. So linux it is.

    By default, the Fulong comes with a modified Debian installation installed, and that is maintained by the Lemote corporation. Unfortunately they do not maintain everything as up-to-date as I would like it, so I went searching for other distributions. I found that Stuart Longland had been working on getting gentoo working on the Fulong, so I patiently waited for him to get something going. That day happened last week.

    He had released a kernel for the machine a while ago, but the rest of the distribution was still coming along. Last week he released a liveUSB image of his distribution for use, and I quickly grabbed that and started playing with it.

    His instructions included putting a netboot kernel and the liveUSB image onto a flash key and booting the entire system from the key, but I would rather use the keys as little as possible, so I put the kernel onto a tftp server I have available to boot from instead. From there I was able to bootstrap into the liveUSB image and play around.

    Of course, this wasn’t enough, and I wanted the entire thing installed onto the harddrive of the fulong instead. My first couple of attempts didn’t go so well, and ended up in a mess. Finally I was able to build a distribution on the harddrive that had a working kernel that would boot, and I am now good to go with a full gentoo distribution on the harddrive, and I can now remove the USB key for good from the system.