Developers' Blogs: DNAku

Been a while since I've blogged here.
So what have I been up to lately? To be honest, not much.
The only really interesting thing I've done lately is porting pacman to other OS's.
Me and deltalima ported it OS X and OpenBSD.

Now the "why" part.
Proof-of-concept, disliking of native package management tools on OpenBSD, disliking of the alternative package managers for OS X (Fink, Portage, DarwinPorts), love for pacman, etc.

And surprisingly enough, I've already met some OS X and *BSD users who seem really interested in the idea of running pacman on it.

I don't have any big plans, it just started as a small project to have an alternative package manager on my server instead of the (IMO) primitive pkg_add.

So are there any advantages for Frugalware?
I don't know, maybe, maybe not. At least I got to know the pacman code and might start hacking on it more. But at least I got a cool package manager now on the other OS's that I use.

As most of you will know if you read my previous post, I went to FOSDEM this weekend.
One of the things I did there was attend an AppArmor presentation.

"AppArmor is an application security tool designed to provide a highly secure yet easy to use security framework for your applications. AppArmor proactively protects the operating system and applications from external or internal threats, even zero-day attacks, by enforcing good behavior and preventing even unknown application flaws from being exploited. AppArmor security policies, called "profiles", completely define what system resources individual applications can access, and with what privileges."

At the moment it's only available in Suse, but the developer that gave the presentation wants to see it ported to other distros. So after the presentation I talked to him about this. It's mostly a matter of init scripts and their locations.

So today I made a darcs repo for apparmor so that crazy and me can port it to Frugalware.

I just noticed that the ODW program also opened again.
Like with the other programs I immediately added a proposal about Frugalware to it.

ODW-proposal

I worked a bit on the ppc port today, but I've mostly been configuring my iBook.
Next week will be the last week that I'll have to work really hard on my thesis, so after that I have a week vacation, which means I'll have time again.

By the way, I'll be going to FOSDEM next weekend.
If there are any frugalware users who are going to be there, let me know something.
In case you see this person during FOSDEM, just tell him how much you love Frugalware.

Genesi opened the HDB and OSW Developer Programs.
Of course I immediatly registered myself for both program.
Let's hope we're as lucky as with the EFIKA Developer Program.

HDB proposal
OSW proposal

I subscribed myself in the EFIKA Developer Program some days ago.
And yesterday I got an email from genesi:

Your PPCZone Project proposal entitled Frugalware Linux was approved today.

That means that we'll be getting an EFIKA donated from Genesi.

So what's an EFIKA?
The EFIKA is a really small mainboard with (yep, you guessed it right) a PowerPC cpu.

So what are the specs?

• Freescale MPC5200B PowerPC SoC up to 466MHz
• 128MB DDR RAM (configurable from 32MB to 512MB )
• 44-pin IDE connector
• 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet
• 2x USB ports
• 1x RS232 Serial port
• Stereo Audio out, Microphone and Line-input
• PCI/AGP riser slot

So what am I supposed to do with it?

According to my EFIKA Project Page I'll have to make sure that Frugalware works out of the box on it.

The development of the cli version of fwpkgcreator (also known as fwpkgmaker) is going well. Because I expanded fwpkgmaker I haven't had any time to work on the gui version. I first want to finish the cli version.

But it's nearly finished, I just need to implement a few more small things and squash some bugs. I'll probably release a prerelease this weekend. You'll be able to download it from my repo.

Other than that I haven't really been able to work on the PPC-port again. Once I'm on schedule again with my schoolwork I should have time again (I guess this weekend). While we're on the subject I'd like to point out these benchmarks from ars techica.
Comparison if the iMac Core Duo with the iMac G5 and the PowerMac G5 Quad.
[powerpc-fanboy]Just look at the power of that PowerMac, compiling packages would go really fast. I really hope will Apple continue sell this mac for quite some time before replacing it with one of those dirty intel based macs. (or at least till I have enough money to buy one)[/powerpc-fanboy]
If anyone with a Quad G5 running Linux is reading this blog, then please consider giving me ssh access to it

As a sidenote, I'm wondering how long it will take before they got Linux running on the intel-based macs. (since it uses EFI instead of BIOS)

I finally managed to compile glibc-2.6.3 on PowerPC with gcc-4.0.2.
First there seemed to be a problem with the kernel-headers. Because of a small glitch in the kernel-headers FrugalBuild I was using the headers for i386.

After that it was just a matter of googling for a patch to fix each compile error I ran into. Some patches weren't easy to find, but once I noticed that a one of those errors had already been fixed in the cvs, I just got a cvs snapshot and made the final patch that way. In the end I had 4 patches for ppc and it compiles perfectly now.

And because glibc compiled with gcc 4.0.2 I was able to successfully build pacman-2.9.99.7. I also managed to compile Yaboot thanks to some CLFS patch. Next on the list is powerpc-utils.

I managed to fix my PowerPC system. Well, I didn't really fix it, I just installed all the fpms I already had on another partition. (Luckily pacman has a -r option)
That means I'm able to push and up changes to the -current tree again. The repository isn't that big at the moment but it's growing.
I hope to have a decently filled repo in 2 weeks, which I think is possible.

I was going to push everything I have at the moment to the -current tree. I noticed that ssh wasn't exactly behaving like it should. But instead of fixing it, I somehow managed to cripple my entire system .

So I can't continue with it until I've fixed my ppc system. I hope I'll have it fixed as soon as possible. I'll probably just reinstall everything to another partition to have a clean system.
I'll keep you up to date.

Tomorrow my last exams, after that I should have time again to work on the PPC-port. So what have I done the last few days? I continued working on fwpkgcreator (and also studied of course ). The cli version is nearly finished, just a few more things I want to implement. You can view the changes on darcsweb.

And if you're interested in trying it, you can always get it by doing
darcs get http://darcs.frugalware.org/repos/fwpkgcreator
and then just executing the install script. Beware: depending on the moment of the day, it may or may not work. After installing it you can start the cli version by typing either fwpkgmaker or fwpkgcreator --cli.
I already used it this afternoon to write the FrugalBuild of PearPC. It's not perfect, but it makes me write FB's faster (which is actually quite logical because you have to type less).

That brings me to the next subject. The PearPC developers finally released version 0.4 of PearPC. This is the first version that compiles with ggc-4. So I compiled it as soon as I could and added it to the current-extra repository.

Why is this so important to me? Well, the newest version can emulate both G3 and G4 PPC chips. That way I'll be able to test fw-ppc on more than one PowerPC architecture. If people want it to be tested on a G5, they'll have to donate me a G5. As a matter of fact, if you have any Mac (or Pegasos) hardware that you don't need anymore, you can always donate it to me. Macs starting from the G3 will be used as buildmachines, pre-G3 (and 68k) macs will just be added to my collection because trying to put linux on one of those is a hell.

PegasosPPC hardware is also welcome of course. The kernel needs a slightly different configuration to work on a Pegasos machine, but because I have none at the moment I can't test it.
I think that's about everything I needed to say.