arch/parabola rant

[Josh Branning]

On 27/10/14 09:35, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote:
> On Fri, 08 Aug 2014 17:25:29 +0200
> dimonik, dimonik <dimonik at letiko.com> wrote:
>> What do you mean? Debian is not enough libre? E.g. Novena should run
>> gNewSense?
> 
> Paul Kocialkowski <contact at paulk.fr> wrote:
>> gNewSense doesn't have ARM support as far as I know.
> Parabola could be a good candidate:
> * They have MIPS support already
> * Arch has ARM support trough a separate project, which seems to follow
>   very closely the official arch.
> * Not that much compilation to do: Parbola is in fact an extra
>   repository on top of arch's repository. It replaces some non-free
>   packages and blacklist the ones that can't be replaced.
> 
> Denis.

I got arch linux ARM working on my A13 sunxi tablet btw. It wasn't that
difficult, once I opened it up and found it was already supported by
u-boot sunxi.

Haven't managed to get the touch screen working, or the keyboard in
X.org, but looking at wayland now anyway.

Out of all the GNU/Linux distros with large software repositories, I
think Arch Linux may be one of the easiest to cross compile, and
although the Arch Linux ARM project does not actually do this, it still
may be worth looking at.

I'm trying to get parabola to compile itself, similar to what the
bootstrap-linux and LFS projects do. Then I can get a feel for the
feasibility of different architectures.

Yesterday I hit a problem with this though. It seems glib has a python
dependency (and python is hard to cross compile). The packages and
PKGBUILDs might therefore have to be tuned for different architectures,
with the correct patches, if you're looking for GTK/GNOME on tablets
with parabola.


Josh

> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Replicant mailing list
> Replicant at lists.osuosl.org
> http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant
>