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Ned Ludd | 3 Sep 06:57
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Embedded Not a Blog

I like this list more than blogs and I'm in one of those sharing kinda
moods.

So every single day is a new adventure in the embedded world. I learn a
bit more and I share a bit more every day (mostly via IRC vs this list).
It's a fun an exciting time to be apart of Gentoo.

Anyway I geared up for winter and got 4 new embedded boards based mostly
around the sc324XX series (aka OpenMoko CPU) and a stk500(AVR). So
hopefully our handbooks board files will fill up a bit more..

We have a new dev in training on the embedded side named Angelo Arrifano
aka miknix that originated with the linwizard project who will be
joining our team to help out with PDA/CellPhone/GPE/OpenMoko alike
things. He started out as what Gentoo calls an 'AT' for amd64. But it
turns out he was one of the masterminds behind the porting of the
HTC-wizard to linux. So he is much more useful over here. It was during
the porting of the wizard that I noticed his skills and attention to
detail. Often finding and coming up with better fixes than me. So I
quite look fwd to him joining our team soon.

Crossdev is known to have a few problems building recently. Bails out on
headers on pretty much every arch. There are two workarounds for this
that I know of at the moment. One is to hack the ebuild and add
--disable-headers and the other is to simply let crossdev fail. Then
emerge -1O cross-$CHOST/gcc && crossdev -t $CHOST while making sure
nsl/iconv/locales are disabled. I'm sure spanky will fix that soon if he
has not already.

If you still have difficulty. There is http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/
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Ângelo Miguel Arrifano | 3 Sep 17:06
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Re: Embedded Not a Blog

On Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:57:37 -0700
Ned Ludd <solar@...> wrote:

> We have a new dev in training on the embedded side named Angelo Arrifano
> aka miknix that originated with the linwizard project who will be
> joining our team to help out with PDA/CellPhone/GPE/OpenMoko alike
> things. He started out as what Gentoo calls an 'AT' for amd64. But it
> turns out he was one of the masterminds behind the porting of the
> HTC-wizard to linux. So he is much more useful over here. It was during
> the porting of the wizard that I noticed his skills and attention to
> detail. Often finding and coming up with better fixes than me. So I
> quite look fwd to him joining our team soon.
> 

The porting of linux to the HTC-wizard involved a lot of people. I
first joined the project when they already have the most difficult part
done - the Linux booting. Then was time to give focus to each
particular driver and building the userspace image. With the help of
the Vapier emerge cross-compile guide (at the time it was the only
guide available), I managed to get my first x-compiled gentoo root which
I used to build the linwizard userspace image. With crossdev, portage,
a good environment and lots of patience, cross-compiling has proved to
be reliable.
Later, solar entered into scene. He managed to build some more root
images and offered us a chroot on miranda where we could cook linwizard.
Now, with his help, we have a awesome x-compile environment on miranda
that builds stuff with relative minimal effort.

Gentoo is certainly the way to go..
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Christopher Friedt | 3 Sep 19:02
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openmoko overlay?

Is anyone else on this list contributing to the openmoko codebase? Does 
anyone else have a FIC handheld?

I just got a freerunner a couple of days ago and threw om2008.8 on it. 
The QT interface is pretty nice and I'd like to start contributing some 
code, but I'd rather use Gentoo's build system instead of the OE build 
system.

Is anyone aware of an existing overlay ?

Cheers,

Chris
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Marcus Priesch | 3 Sep 21:24
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build / test / target ... embedded system ...

Hi gentoo-embeddeds,

i am a fellow gentoo user since nearly six or seven years now, and i
dont want to switch over to any other distribution out there, especially
when it comes to embedded linux stuff, gentoo for me is *THE* way to go!

however things could be more comfortable when it comes to cross
compiling, but this will evolve with time - i am sure - at least the
last post regarding "openmoko" "speaks out of my heart" (maybe there are
some german guys on this list who understand this phrase better) ;)

anyway, the crosscompiling stuff only hit me once when i wantetd to put
gentoo on a mips arch ... but there was a "denx" image already existing
so it was easier to crosscompile the few packages with this ... however,
gentoo was very helpful alsoin tis case as it had all the magic to cross
compile python for the 160MHz mips cpu ;)))

ok, enough of the introductory stuff ;) - now off to what i really want
to discuss with you ...

as i am mostly doing embedded gentoo on x86 hardware (epia and the like)
i currently have the following setup:

imagine you have lots of identical boxes around the world with only
remote access (ssh) running gentoo and want to have them all up to
date ...

i have 
 - development system chrooted or nfs-root (with all the dev stuff)
 - test system (where i rsync only parts from the dev system -
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Ângelo Miguel Arrifano | 3 Sep 22:44
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Re: openmoko overlay?

On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:02:52 -0400
Christopher Friedt <chrisfriedt@...> wrote:

> Is anyone else on this list contributing to the openmoko codebase? Does 
> anyone else have a FIC handheld?
> 
> I just got a freerunner a couple of days ago and threw om2008.8 on it. 
> The QT interface is pretty nice and I'd like to start contributing some 
> code, but I'd rather use Gentoo's build system instead of the OE build 
> system.
> 
> Is anyone aware of an existing overlay ?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Chris
> 

Hello,

Me and Ned Ludd are working on a embedded overlay mostly for PDAs.
The overlay is located here:
http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/embedded/linwizard/overlay/
The overlay includes some fixed ebuilds for cross-compiling base
dependencies. There is also a GPE tree there that should be emergeable.
More recently, we started to work on openmoko ebuilds. It's not finished
yet.

We also provide binary packages for ARMV5TE-JL here:
http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/embedded/linwizard/
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shawnzier | 3 Sep 23:46
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Re: openmoko overlay?

On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 10:44:28PM +0200, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=C2ngelo_Miguel_Arrifano_ wrote:
> On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:02:52 -0400
> Christopher Friedt <chrisfriedt@...> wrote:
> 
> > Is anyone else on this list contributing to the openmoko codebase? Does 
> > anyone else have a FIC handheld?
> > 
> > I just got a freerunner a couple of days ago and threw om2008.8 on it. 
> > The QT interface is pretty nice and I'd like to start contributing some 
> > code, but I'd rather use Gentoo's build system instead of the OE build 
> > system.
> > 
> > Is anyone aware of an existing overlay ?
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Chris
> > 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Me and Ned Ludd are working on a embedded overlay mostly for PDAs.
> The overlay is located here:
> http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/embedded/linwizard/overlay/
> The overlay includes some fixed ebuilds for cross-compiling base
> dependencies. There is also a GPE tree there that should be emergeable.
> More recently, we started to work on openmoko ebuilds. It's not finished
> yet.
> 
> We also provide binary packages for ARMV5TE-JL here:
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Peter Stuge | 4 Sep 00:35
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Re: build / test / target ... embedded system ...

Marcus Priesch wrote:
> i know catalyst is out there, but i doubt it is flexible enough ...
> but i would be fine off if you could teach me different ...

I like catalyst and use stage4 for all targets.

The nice thing about catalyst is 1. it's automated and 2. you can
pick and choose at which files you want to delete.

> i also thought about building bin-pkgs and distributing them on the
> targets ...

I'd like this too. In practice, catalyst uses tbz2s behind the
scenes, so everything doesn't have to be rebuilt every time.

> is it possible to kepp all the .h and doc stuff out of a bin-pkg ?!?!

Right, this is a good question, catalyst just makes tbz2s of the
normal packages and applies cleanup stuff at the end, so the tbz2s
themselves are not very deployable.

//Peter
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Peter Stuge | 4 Sep 01:20
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Re: Embedded Not a Blog

Ned Ludd wrote:
> Random Good links:
> 
> http://www.soekris.com

http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm

//Peter
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Peter Stuge | 4 Sep 01:25
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Re: Embedded Not a Blog

Peter Stuge wrote:
> http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm

Sorry, wanted to mention that they run very well with coreboot, an
open source replacement for the BIOS. You can do many really nice
things for embedded when you can control also the boot firmware.

(Power-to-app in milliseconds, for example.)

//Peter
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Marcus Priesch | 4 Sep 10:41
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Re: build / test / target ... embedded system ...

Hi peter, thanks for your answer ....

On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 00:35 +0200, Peter Stuge wrote:
> Marcus Priesch wrote:
> > i know catalyst is out there, but i doubt it is flexible enough ...
> > but i would be fine off if you could teach me different ...
> 
> I like catalyst and use stage4 for all targets.
> 
> The nice thing about catalyst is 1. it's automated and 2. you can
> pick and choose at which files you want to delete.

yes, but thats exactly what portage and rsync also can handle ;)

> > i also thought about building bin-pkgs and distributing them on the
> > targets ...
> 
> I'd like this too. In practice, catalyst uses tbz2s behind the
> scenes, so everything doesn't have to be rebuilt every time.

yes, but what about after a emerge --sync ?!?! - the problem with
working with "outdated" portage trees is - despite that you dont have
all the bugs fixed - that the .tgz's become unavailable after some
time .... thats why i want to stay "tuned" ...

furthermore updating a 2 year old gentoo system could be very time
consuming .... thats also a reason why i want to stay up to date ... and
i doubt that catalyst really supports this in a better way than plain
portage does ... at least the reusability of the components is no plus
than either ...
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Gmane