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2010-02-26
This is a continuation to the post about Ubuntu 9.10 in SmartQ 5. I keep getting a constant flood of emails that remind me that I should upload my patches, so here they are :)
Before giving more details I would want to recommend against using Karmic in your SmartQ 5. Installing Ubuntu’s previous version (Jaunty) is straightforward and it performs faster than Karmic.
When I asked in #ubuntu-arm about the performance regression I got no answer. I suspect that default compilation flags are responsible, most likely related to VFP. Slowness is most noticeable and annoying in interpreted languages, like Perl. So, unless some of the new features included in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) are important to you, don’t bother trying.
Anyway, if you are still eager to install Karmic, here is the modified mountall package.
Patches are required because Karmic expects a modern kernel. There are people trying to port SmartQ source and drivers to a recent kernel, which would be the propper way of fixing this issue.
My quick and dirty hack to the mountall package is able to boot with older kernels. It was not meant to be published, but here it is by popular demand. Keep in mind that it is only a workaround and not a proper solution, the contents of /etc/fstab seems to be ignored during boot, other programs may fail or require patches too, and there could be more hidden issues. Fell free to share your fixes.
2009-11-30
I ran a quick test of latest Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktops in the SmartQ5, nothing serious, just installing and launching some applications for curiosity’s sake. KDE 4 feels slower than GNOME, but admittedly, both of them are too bloated for the hardware. Nevertheless, it was fun to play with a full desktop in such a small device.
2009-11-06
This is a cross toolchain for ARM that uses Ubuntu 9.10 compilers and libraries, so it (hopefully) maintains compatibility with the native compiler for ARM. Precompiled binaries for i386 and the complete source code with its build script are here:
http://zenvoid.org/software/cross-compiler/
It works for me but not warranties, remember to run the DejaGnu test suite if required for your project. Tests results and patches are appreciated.
2009-02-09
I was thinking about an automated method for rebuilding a subset of Ubuntu‘s packages. There are reasons for this, like optimized compiler flags for a particular software device or porting to alternative architectures. In particular, it would be interesting to provide a wider hardware support to Mer linux distribution.
So, my experiment started with a flexible script in Ruby that can be used to do the folowing:
At this point, with the help of reprepro, all required source packages can be automatically fetched and uploaded to a custom repository. It should be theoretically possible to compile everything by doing the following:
Manual interaction is expected to fix dependency loops and packages that need to be compiled within the real (not emulated) architecture. That’s the theory, and this is practice and conclusions:
Before starting the massive compilation, it would be better to wait until Jaunty is released. Jaunty is in development in this moment and its repository is broken, there are dependencies that can’t be compiled because the sources do not exist or the version in the repository is not compatible.
A dependency hell was somewhat expected, but I have to admit that I was surprised. In order to compile a minimal system, there are 43 required source packages. Including their dependencies, 626 source packages need to be compiled; among them, several different versions of the programming languages python, tcl, openjdk, mono, ruby; apache, emacs, kde 4, gnome and xorg, just to be able to boot and login into a shell. Not funny. Debian will probably have the same issue.
I suddently became interested in the base system used in fremantle, some packages could be imported into Mer to override some componentes of Ubuntu base system, but it should be done with care, nobody wants to bring back Maemo reduced funcionality. Very hard work ahead.
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roberto@zenvoid.org