• Tag Archives Fulong
  • 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.


  • Speed testing of Fulong

    Reading Ryan Hill’s blog, he did a test to see the merge times needed for a bunch of KDE packages (why people want KDE in the first place is beyond me, but whatever…) Apparently he did these on an SGI O2, and I was curious to see how they compared to the Fulong. The following is my result:

    kiona ~ # for pkg in kdeaddons kdeadmin kdeartwork kdebase kdeedu kdegames kdegraphics kdelibs kdemultimedia kdenetwork kdepim kdetoys kdeutils kdewebdev; do genlop -t $pkg; done
    * kde-base/kdeaddons

    Sat Jan 12 13:12:16 2008 >>> kde-base/kdeaddons-3.5.8
    merge time: 55 minutes and 54 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdeadmin

    Sat Jan 12 01:31:28 2008 >>> kde-base/kdeadmin-3.5.8
    merge time: 18 minutes and 51 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdeartwork

    Fri Jan 11 15:24:05 2008 >>> kde-base/kdeartwork-3.5.8
    merge time: 22 minutes and 38 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdebase

    Fri Jan 11 01:36:48 2008 >>> kde-base/kdebase-3.5.8-r5
    merge time: 4 hours, 59 minutes and 46 seconds.

    Sat Mar 1 17:54:52 2008 >>> kde-base/kdebase-3.5.8-r6
    merge time: 4 hours, 59 minutes and 12 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdeedu

    Sat Jan 12 01:12:37 2008 >>> kde-base/kdeedu-3.5.8
    merge time: 1 hour, 52 minutes and 53 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdegames

    Fri Jan 11 14:37:26 2008 >>> kde-base/kdegames-3.5.8
    merge time: 1 hour and 55 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdegraphics

    Sat Jan 12 04:00:52 2008 >>> kde-base/kdegraphics-3.5.8-r2
    merge time: 2 hours, 29 minutes and 24 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdelibs

    Mon Jan 7 21:44:56 2008 >>> kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.8-r2
    merge time: 3 hours, 56 minutes and 15 seconds.

    Tue Jan 15 12:47:09 2008 >>> kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.8-r2
    merge time: 4 hours, 22 minutes and 31 seconds.

    Fri Feb 22 14:16:42 2008 >>> kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.8-r3
    merge time: 4 hours, 17 minutes and 16 seconds.

    Sat Mar 1 04:58:21 2008 >>> kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.8-r3
    merge time: 4 hours, 17 minutes and 41 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdemultimedia

    Sat Jan 12 05:28:55 2008 >>> kde-base/kdemultimedia-3.5.8-r1
    merge time: 48 minutes and 45 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdenetwork

    Fri Jan 11 23:19:43 2008 >>> kde-base/kdenetwork-3.5.8
    merge time: 3 hours, 25 minutes and 1 second.

    * kde-base/kdepim

    Sat Jan 12 12:16:22 2008 >>> kde-base/kdepim-3.5.8
    merge time: 5 hours, 51 minutes and 46 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdetoys

    Tue Jan 8 02:13:33 2008 >>> kde-base/kdetoys-3.5.8
    merge time: 13 minutes and 19 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdeutils

    Fri Jan 11 18:14:59 2008 >>> kde-base/kdeutils-3.5.8-r1
    merge time: 1 hour, 7 minutes and 58 seconds.

    * kde-base/kdewebdev

    Thu Jan 10 18:10:38 2008 >>> kde-base/kdewebdev-3.5.8
    merge time: 1 hour, 28 minutes and 11 seconds.

    I estimate that I am getting anywhere from 10-100% better performance out the Fulong than he is out of his O2. If I get the Origin 200 back up and running, I’ll see what happens with that as well. Probably won’t bother with the Indy, however, as the numbers would just be stupidly long.


  • 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.