Post by Luke Kenneth Casson LeightonPost by Paul Boddiehttps://wiki.parabola.nu/MIPS_Installation
Maybe that could be revived in some way for the Ingenic jz4775 (albeit as
mipsel, not mips64el). It appears that the developers just ran out of
hardware.
:)
well i'll have some up and running when i find the time so that's a
problem that can be solved, fortunately.
talk's in half an hour, gotta go.
I had a bit more of a look at various distributions today, and it is actually
rather annoying to try and find details of how *any* of the major
distributions and their derivatives build their packages from source in bulk
(apart from in-the-know references to things existing in various distribution
infrastructures).
Anyway, amongst the FSF-endorsed distributions I had a look at Parabola,
Trisquel, gNewSense and GuixSD. Sorry for omitting any GNU prefixes/suffixes
and "Linux" from the names. ;-)
Parabola
--------
https://www.parabola.nu/
Parabola is based on Arch Linux and did support mips64el, but it appears to
only target Intel and ARM at the moment. I don't have much familiarity with
the Arch tools, but I'm guessing that libretools and abslibre are the key
components here:
https://wiki.parabola.nu/Category:Libretools
https://projects.parabola.nu/abslibre.git/
Unfortunately, all the documentation assumes that you're running Arch already,
and although there seems to be a "pacstrap" tool (like debootstrap, I guess),
it doesn't seem to be as straightforward to get started as with a Debian
installation, although I am a bit spoiled here with some tools I have to
quickly populate Debian chroots. More information on the pacstrap method here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_existing_Linux
I'd want to cross-compile packages, which is apparently done for certain
architectures using distcc:
https://wiki.parabola.nu/Cross-toolchain_and_distcc
But I don't want to have to run a native system to coordinate the build, which
is what this entails.
Trisquel
--------
https://trisquel.info/
Trisquel is based on Ubuntu Linux but Ubuntu doesn't support MIPS
architectures these days. This is somewhat unfortunate because once you start
digging it appears to be possible to find some of the central tools used to
make Trisquel, and development activity appears to remain high:
https://devel.trisquel.info/groups/trisquel
gNewSense
---------
http://www.gnewsense.org/
gNewSense was based on Ubuntu but is now based on Debian - I think gNewSense
and Trisquel may have traded places once upon a time - and although it doesn't
look like much development is taking place, there are signs that another
release may happen at some point. The last release happened this year (after
being over a year in the making) and covers MIPS as well as Intel architecture
flavours:
https://savannah.nongnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8535
After some digging, the tools involved can be found - Savannah seems to be the
real centre of activity - but there appears to be uncertainty about the best
way of filtering and repackaging Debian, meaning that there isn't a
straightforward path to a new release. Anyway, the tools appear to be here:
http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/gnewsense/
Here's a thread about the situation:
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-dev/2016-05/msg00000.html
GuixSD
------
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/
GuixSD is a bit different from other distributions and relies on some kind of
transactional package manager known as Guix. However, it appears to support
mips64el as well as ARM and Intel architecture flavours:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/GNU-Distribution.html
What encouraged me was that after not that many links I found pages talking
about bootstrapping and porting:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Bootstrapping.html#Bootstrapping
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Porting.html#Porting
There may be scary diagrams, but at least the authors feel the need to
document such issues coherently. And the indication that guix knows how to
cross-compile packages is reassuring, although we have to see whether this
will work in practice.
----
So I'm currently looking to see what can be done with Guix and cross-
bootstrapping for mipsel. Maybe I won't get very far, but it will at least
test the feasibility of getting an existing FSF-endorsed distribution onto
mipsel. I'll also see what can be done with Parabola, but I imagine it being
even harder work.
I did hear reports of how great Devuan's build infrastructure is supposed to
be, but I didn't find any documentation for it. Maybe someone here could point
me to an informative reference.
Paul
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