Tag: embedded

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The Unofficial Gentoo Linux x86 uClibC stage3s’

Update:
The catalyst spec files are available here:
https://github.com/judepereira/gentoo-development/tree/master/x86/uclibc/catalyst

Following this Gentoo bug:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441976
We have official experimental uClibC for x86 and amd64 stages.
I will not be maintaining these unofficial ones any longer.

The link to the official archives is:
http://mirrors.rit.edu/gentoo/experimental/x86/uclibc/
and
http://mirrors.rit.edu/gentoo/experimental/amd64/uclibc/

The uclibc experimental stages on the gentoo mirrors are all outdated(they go back to years), so here are my stage3s’, which have been updated. They’re very similar to, and in fact can be considered to be the same stages that the Gentoo Community provides, only updated.

As of 27th August 2011, they are now built by catalyst.

The stages are built by catalyst now, and I’m looking for the possibility of hosting them on the Gentoo mirrors.

Follow my tutorial here, to get a basic ideology on working with it

stage3-uclibc-x86-26062012 is affected by bug #423491 sys-apps/findutils-4.4.2-r1 and sys-apps/coreutils-8.14 with sys-libs/uclibc – rpmatch.c:58:1: error: redefinition of ‘rpmatch’ /// /usr/include/stdlib.h:810:28: note: previous definition of ‘rpmatch’ was here

The workaround for it right now is to comment the entire function in stdlib.h and those packages will compile well. Also comment the _wur definition, just above the function rpmatch. This is a crude workaround, and it’ll be fixed when upstream decides what’s the solution.

Files:
26th June, 2012
stage3-uclibc-x86-26062012.tar.bz2
stage3-uclibc-x86-26062012.tar.bz2.md5sum
The above stage was not build by catalyst, as it could not deal with the rpmatch bug. This stage was created manually from the last release.

5th August, 2011
stage3-uclibc-x86-02082011.tar.bz2
stage3-uclibc-x86-02082011.tar.bz2.md5sum

7th July, 2011
stage3-uclibc-x86-07072011.tar.bz2
stage3-uclibc-x86-07072011.tar.bz2.md5

1st June, 2011
stage3-uclibc-x86-01062011.tar.bz2
stage3-uclibc-x86-01062011.tar.bz2.MD5

25th April, 2011
stage3-uclibc-x86-25042011.tar.bz2
stage3-uclibc-x86-25042011.tar.bz2.md5sum

For historic releases, post a comment, as to which one you require and why a specific version.
If you want the stage1 or stage2, drop a comment and I shall have them uploaded.

For those of you who would like to build these stages themselves, here are the spec files for catalyst:
stage1.spec
stage2.spec
stage3.spec

Update:
The catalyst spec files are available here:
https://github.com/judepereira/gentoo-development/tree/master/x86/uclibc/catalyst

In addition, I’ve taken down all the stage files that I used to host here, in favour of the official stages now available from the Gentoo mirrors:

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Hacking your GoFlex Home, #3 Ideas

Well, first off the ability to just add one USB device is a little boring, I’ve been using a Belkin 4 port USB HUB, and the results are good. For cooling the GoFlex, you may want to remove the bottom cover and keep it on a laptop cooling fan or something similar, as the processor does tend to get hot slowly.

Maybe you could throw in a WiFi USB card, and turn your Goflex into a very powerful NAS, something that I’ve done is:

  • Have a DLNA/UPnP Server running, as I have it as my NAS
  • Internet Gateway
  • Torrent Station(I use transmission daemon with the Web UI)
  • FTP Server

There are way more applications of this tiny little plug computer, I’m using it for development.

Also, it’s preferably better to have Gentoo or Arch Linux on a USB stick, as when testing several times by hard power offs and resets, you don’t want the SATA drive spinning up for no reason.

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Hacking your GoFlex Home, #1 Build your KERNEL

It’s been quite sometime that I’ve got my GoFlex Home now, and it’s only recently that I’ve received my RS232 Serial USB UART Adapter.
The pin connections are simple and easy, I’ll post that as well. As I’ve already got Gentoo Linux running on the Marvell SoC, I was still using the Archlinux ARM kernel, for lack of better options. Building the kernel seemed to be a simple task, but apparently, if you have used the Archlinux ARM kernel config as a base to build your own, you won’t see the kernel debug messages, you only see the warnings, and those are few.

To get going:
Download the kernel sources, I’ve got a successful build with vanilla sources(patched with archlinuxarm patches) 3.1.10
After patching the kernel, you can quickly generate the default config, by

# make kirkwood_defconfig

That would generate the default configuration, then you could configure it via menuconfig, and set the required options.
I’ve attached my present kernel configuration, you could use that as a base, as it took me quite a while to get the kernel working right. This kernel does not support an initrd, as I don’t think embedded devices should need one. So, if your kernel says that it can’t mount the VFS, it’s likely that your U-boot is giving it an initrd to use, and that surprisingly, took me quite a while to figure out.

Goodluck hacking your GoFlex :)