Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebook

This forum is dedicated to people who consider becoming contributors :
-- Packaging & translating,
-- Support,
-- Spreading Mageia,
-- And many others options you have to help.

Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebook

Postby xboxboy » Sep 24th, '13, 15:08

Hi all.

I'm well aware of how cheap talk is regarding an ARM port of magiea. My reason for asking is given that the Samsung ARM chromebook has been a phenominal success in the retail world, and the existance of Crouton which makes it painless to install various ARM linux ports on it. I myself have an XFCE ubuntu running in chroot on it and it works remarkably well.

So for $300 (I'm in Australia and we get stung for IT stuff) I have got an ultrabook type system, with over 6 hours of battery life, with a fully functioning linux distro operating. I had been thinking about the Dell XPS13 Developer Edition (ubuntu OS) but it's difficult to get hold of and kind of expensive for what it is.

I can imagine that those that have build Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia in i586 & x86_64 probably think our requests for work on an ARM port are crazy. I don't know. I just want to see what I need to do if we are able to get this started. I've spoken, via irc, about the main steps needed to get Mageia ported over to ARM, and it does sound HUGE.

But there's the carrot of a fully functioning ultrabook type laptop to be had, let alone all the other ARM pc's hitting the scene now.

I would imagine there are probably members of Magiea.org with the samsung chromebook.

I have old programing knowledge, and haven't done any real compiling from source (the odd firefox update or video driver) but not in recent times. I just hope we can get some clarity on this issue, or worse case: "An ARM" port is beyond the scope and abilities of the Mageia.org community at this time.
xboxboy
 
Posts: 391
Joined: Jun 2nd, '13, 06:41

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 24th, '13, 19:33

xboxboy wrote:I just hope we can get some clarity on this issue, or worse case: "An ARM" port is beyond the scope and abilities of the Mageia.org community at this time.

What is your real question here? If you want to help with the ARM port, then please do so and get in contact with e.g. Arnaud Patard.
Related, you may also want to check http://blog.hupstream.com/en/author/rtp/

If you want push the ARM port further, nobody will prevent you from doing so.
There's currently only one person working on this, so it might take years to get a working basesystem and a simple desktop compiled and working,

For some informations about the current status, you may want to have a look at:
http://blog.mageia.org/en/2011/06/23/arm-port-preview/
http://archives.mageia.org/zarb-ml/mage ... 16975.html
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby xboxboy » Sep 25th, '13, 13:36

Doktor, I appreciate the reply. I'm glad you put some perspective on it. Years to get a desktop up and working, ouch.
I'll do some more research on what's required at my end regarding this chroot idea, as I've hear AP is hard to get hold of.
xboxboy
 
Posts: 391
Joined: Jun 2nd, '13, 06:41

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby jiml8 » Sep 25th, '13, 15:44

I suggest you visit the linuxfromscratch website to gain some insight into how to build a distro. Then, rather than use the vanilla sources, use the Mageia sources.

If you have the computer horsepower, I think you probably could have a basic Mageia system running in a full week of work. Of coures, this would be a VERY basic system, and it would take a long time to bring up a complete environment...not to mention debugging the assorted annoyances that certainly would crop up with the architectural change.
jiml8
 
Posts: 1253
Joined: Jul 7th, '13, 18:09

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 25th, '13, 18:32

jiml8 wrote:If you have the computer horsepower, I think you probably could have a basic Mageia system running in a full week of work.

A basesystem with CLI and urpmi installed, could be, simply needs a rebuild of the ARM packages that rtp offers on his mirror.
For the rest, you'd need either good coding and cross-compiling skills or you'd need to hunt down masses and masses of patches.

Remember, switching from x86 to ARM is not comparable to say switching from x86 to x86_64, which is rather easy.
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby xboxboy » Sep 26th, '13, 14:43

@Jim: I'm all ears :) Given that the ARM Chromebook is what it is, I wouldn't be seeking a full blown KDE and development environment. I will spend sometime over at linux from scratch. If I can get a simple base system installed (functional CLI with a prossibility of a light weight DE) then I'm serious about giving it a go.

@Doktor: I agree about recompiling for arm being more involved than the conversion to 64 bit. What do you mean regarding a rebuild of the TRP repo? Do you mean a rebuild as in moving to armv7?
xboxboy
 
Posts: 391
Joined: Jun 2nd, '13, 06:41

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 26th, '13, 23:12

xboxboy wrote:What do you mean regarding a rebuild of the TRP repo? Do you mean a rebuild as in moving to armv7?

rtp, that's the nickname of Arnaud Patard, who started the Mageia ARM port, which was armv5 IIRC.
The SRPMS are located on his mirror, as posted previously: http://packages.rtp-net.org/mageia/1/SR ... e/release/
You'd need to rebuild those to get something running, and change the compiler arch via -march=armv7 or something like that.
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby zeebra » Sep 27th, '13, 09:13

Please look into including Scratchbox cross compilation tools in the Mageia distribution, it could provide useful.
Nokia used it to cross compile x86 packages to armel, and there are different toolsets, one to cross compile to arm.

These tools were made for Debian, and Nokia used Debian for the purpose. Debian has both arm and armel port and lots of available packages that can be used in making a Mageia arm port.


Sorry, thats all I have on the topic, but I thought it could be useful.
zeebra
 
Posts: 125
Joined: Sep 7th, '13, 21:20

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 27th, '13, 12:07

Problem are not the tools, but the required manpower. Also, who should test Scratchbox, who should integrate it with Mageia. Who will use it?
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby zeebra » Sep 27th, '13, 20:38

Now that I cannot answer. I could only add info to the quest of xboxboy and Arnaud Patard.
Perhaps others can help in the future. (me? package scratchbox.. hmm..)

I wouldn't know where to start... Perhaps. Where is the info about the base system of Mageia? (yes, I know I can find that out myself, thank you) :mrgreen:
zeebra
 
Posts: 125
Joined: Sep 7th, '13, 21:20

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 28th, '13, 01:55

What info do you need specifically?
There are some related wiki articles, not sure what you want: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Packagers_chroot or maybe https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Default_packages_on_BS
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby xboxboy » Sep 28th, '13, 10:58

Well, at the moment I'm just focusing on getting a chroot environment to even set up on ARM.

I'm flopping around between urmpi.root, rpm and rpmbootstrap to create a bootstrap that works from chromOS
xboxboy
 
Posts: 391
Joined: Jun 2nd, '13, 06:41

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby zeebra » Sep 28th, '13, 15:18

doktor5000 wrote:What info do you need specifically?
There are some related wiki articles, not sure what you want: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Packagers_chroot or maybe https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Default_packages_on_BS


I didn't need that.

What do you do if you want to package something for Mageia which is not normally available in the repos, but should be. Does it need to be voted on? How do you go about that?
zeebra
 
Posts: 125
Joined: Sep 7th, '13, 21:20

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby xboxboy » Sep 28th, '13, 17:37

Ok guys. It's very early days. And my coding is very very Commodore 64 BASIC style.

Here we go: Introducing cromec: ChRomium Os Mageia Environment Chroot

https://github.com/xboxboy/cromec

Early early days: As of TODAY (29/9/13), only the readme is updated and some minor directory work has been commited: IE, nothing works, as nothing is added.

As stated in the read me, we need to create a chroot from Chromium, which only really has a bash shell as I understand. Open to all offers of help and support.
xboxboy
 
Posts: 391
Joined: Jun 2nd, '13, 06:41

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 28th, '13, 23:03

zeebra wrote:What do you do if you want to package something for Mageia which is not normally available in the repos, but should be. Does it need to be voted on? How do you go about that?

Speaking for me, I'll package it myself.
First i'll have a look if there's a src.rpm from another distro and adapt that to Mageia, if there's none, then package it from scratch.

If you want a package to be added, then please file a package request, after searching if it hasn't been reported yet already: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_repor ... ge_request

HINT: A complete chroot / distro port does not count as a package request ...
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby zeebra » Sep 29th, '13, 01:19

I think scratchbox as a package in Mageia would be helpful in the quest of building an eventual arm version of Mageia.
As far as I know, Scratchbox has only been packaged for Debian, and should ofcourse also work as source in Slackware. It has many dependencies though and many toolkits etc. All in all I think the whole thing took about 2-3gb when I installed it.
Last edited by doktor5000 on Sep 29th, '13, 12:50, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: removed fullquote
zeebra
 
Posts: 125
Joined: Sep 7th, '13, 21:20

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 29th, '13, 13:14

Sorry, I fail to understand that logic.

We already have some documentation on getting a chroot built, we have a repo with ARMv5 packages which could be used for that.
Instead you want a separate tool added as a new package (which also needs a maintainer, and is also added work as it has to be integrated with Mageia) which gives no further advantage than what we currently have ...
Why not work on getting the basic chroot built instead?

FWIW, getting scratchbox installed is a piece of cake:
Code: Select all
wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/alien/alien_8.89.tar.gz && tar -xf alien_8.89.tar.gz && cd alien && chmod +x alien.pl
wget http://ftp.br.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/scratchbox2/scratchbox2_2.2.4-1debian1_amd64.deb && ./alien -r --scripts scratchbox2_2.2.4-1debian1_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.br.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/scratchbox2/libsb2_2.2.4-1debian1_amd64.deb && ./alien -r --scripts libsb2_2.2.4-1debian1_amd64.deb
urpmi scratchbox2-2.2.4-2.x86_64.rpm libsb2-2.2.4-2.x86_64.rpm fakeroot


IMHO, if there are already problem getting the basics done, do you think it will be better when working on the chroot and distro porting?
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby zeebra » Sep 29th, '13, 13:22

Slackware used scratchbox to build an arm port of the distro. Just saying.

At least the package would be there for any brave soul to try to port Mageia as well.
Last edited by doktor5000 on Sep 29th, '13, 16:21, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: removed fullquote
zeebra
 
Posts: 125
Joined: Sep 7th, '13, 21:20

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 29th, '13, 16:22

Well, we now have ARMv5 packages, xboxboys github project, and scratchbox for Mageia, as posted above.
The thing is, not the tools are missing, but the contributors.

BTW: Please next time do not use fullquotes, but only use the Reply function. Greatly improves clarity and reading flow ;)
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby zeebra » Oct 2nd, '13, 23:46

doktor5000 wrote:Well, we now have ARMv5 packages, xboxboys github project, and scratchbox for Mageia, as posted above.
The thing is, not the tools are missing, but the contributors.

BTW: Please next time do not use fullquotes, but only use the Reply function. Greatly improves clarity and reading flow ;)


Did you request for Scratchbox 2 to be included in the repositories then? What about toolkits?
I am only familiar with Scratchbox 1. Does Scratchbox 2 come with the appropriate toolkits included? In Sbox 1, you had to add them manually and set up the rather dangerous environment manually as well. In addition it was reliant on binfmt_misc and Qemu. Are those options available in Mandriva by default?

I didn't check, really. I am just asking.

Fiddling with the kernel much lately, I belive binfmt_misc relevant modules are available as modules in Mageia by default. Just from what I can remember without looking into it specifically..

In any case, if tools are easily available, uptake of interested developers is far more likely. It is my belief at this time, anyone wanting to cross compile automatically choose Debian since it has all the toos and full compatibility with those objectives.


I don't know if you agree with me, but I would love to see Mageia become truly multi arch like Debian, and a "competitor" to the richest Linux distroes (like debian). Or one of the core GNU/Linux distroes in general.
zeebra
 
Posts: 125
Joined: Sep 7th, '13, 21:20

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby doktor5000 » Oct 3rd, '13, 16:09

zeebra wrote:Did you request for Scratchbox 2 to be included in the repositories then? What about toolkits?
I am only familiar with Scratchbox 1. Does Scratchbox 2 come with the appropriate toolkits included? In Sbox 1, you had to add them manually and set up the rather dangerous environment manually as well. In addition it was reliant on binfmt_misc and Qemu. Are those options available in Mandriva by default?


Why should I? I don't care about scratchbox, I've shown you a way to build it easily for Mageia and I've shown you how to file a package request.
If you want it, file a package request.

binfmt_misc is a facility of the kernel and just needs to be mounted, like in every other linux distro out there:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentatio ... t_misc.txt

qemu is in the repos.
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby fedya » Nov 12th, '13, 15:01

OpenMandriva already done arm port
armv7hl http://abf-downloads.rosalinux.ru/cooke ... y/armv7hl/
armv7l http://abf-downloads.rosalinux.ru/cooke ... ry/armv7l/

repos
+ working environment with RazorQt
fedya
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Aug 31st, '12, 16:27

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby xboxboy » Jan 29th, '14, 13:10

Ok guys, I got a chroot up and running on the ARM chromebook, it was messy and CLI only, but urpmi worked so installing a system from there is do-able.

I'm needing to refine the bootstrap process (make it more automated as it was all manually downloaded and extracted). Of course all this is being done on a chromebook, so using it's somewhat stripped back system.
xboxboy
 
Posts: 391
Joined: Jun 2nd, '13, 06:41

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby waferhead » Feb 14th, '15, 05:42

Given the new Raspberry Pi 2, (quad core arm7, 1GB RAM, 35 bucks, fits same cases) you could have a whole herd of new users.
Almost usable as a desktop, but it would probably get lost on my desk.

I'm pretty sure ARM5 binaries will run on the arm7, but may not be optimal.
waferhead
 
Posts: 170
Joined: Jun 11th, '11, 06:36

Re: Development of Chroot mageia distro to suit ARM chromebo

Postby waferhead » Dec 28th, '15, 01:52

Raising this back from the dead...
I'm all in to help with an x86 rework on this, got the wife a Acer CB3-111 for her birthday a few months ago that she has yet to turn on.
Seems like a sweet little machine for ~$100 (Acer refurb)
Considering the x86 versions can actually boot from USB if you enable that for developer mode, setting up the chrooted Mageia environment itself from usb should be ~trivial on x86.
The x86 Chromebooks seem to be taking over.
waferhead
 
Posts: 170
Joined: Jun 11th, '11, 06:36

Next

Return to Basic questions about contribution

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests

cron