Developers' Blogs: DNAku

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.

Those who read the mailing list will already know about the fwpkgmaker idea. The idea is to make a frontend to writing FrugalBuilds and compiling packages. Of course due to a lack of time (the same lack of time that has delayed the PPC-port ) this idea has been pushed back.

But yesterday I couldn't sleep so I started working on it. Apparently my python skills really need polishsing because it didn't go as smooth as I expected. So I started writing a cli version to polish my skills. At the moment it's just a python script called fwpkgmaker.py.

It already creates the directory for the FB, creates the FB and writes the information to it. It still needs _a lot_ of work, but sadly enough I'll probably won't have time today to work on it. Wish me luck with my exams tomorrow.