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.