On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 06:10:28PM -0500, Dennis Gilmore wrote: > > We have a couple of alpha machines (an AlphaStation XP 1000 and an > > AlphaServer ES40) currently running SuSE 8.1 which would be nice to > > upgrade. Some time ago I remember reading something about a interest in > > porting FC1 to the alpha. Did this end up happening? Is there a FC1/2 > > alpha port? > > not sure on the alpha port but ive just ordered a sun box and im most > likely going to put linux on it, so im intreseted in a sparc port. > perhaps people involved in porting to non x86 based architectures > could give progress reports and tips on areas that need work. I'm reasonably far with the xscale big endian (armv5teb) port. Most things just work, it just takes a lot of time to compile-test things as I only have one 600MHz processor to work with (and crosscompiling is not an option because a lot of packages are simply broken with respect to that, hardcoding CC=gcc, etc.) I had to do quite some backtracking along the way. The one thing that really bit me was that rpm's config.guess believes that there is no such thing as armv5teb-redhat-linux-gnu, instead insisting on armv5teb-unknown-linux-gnu. This causes the compiled version of rpm not to include stuff in /usr/lib/rpm/redhat/, which causes the host triple to be armv5teb-unknown-linux instead of *-linux-gnu, and that subtly breaks a LOT of stuff (such as libtool refusing to build shared libs, which then cascades into a lot of other places.) One thing that's also confusing is packages that depend on themselves. For example, I had a lot of trouble building tzdata without having a copy of tzdata installed -- it seems that its make check checks not the version that is being built, but the version of tzdata that has already been installed. No version of tzdata installed -> make check fails. Manually installing it and then retrying the build -> works. Something I didn't figure out yet is this: some packages that use X end up with compiler flags like such: CPPFLAGS=" -I/usr/X11R6/include -Dlinux -D__arm__ -D__arm32__ -U__arm -Uarm -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=199309L -D_POSIX_SOURCE -D_XOPEN_SOURCE -D_BSD_SOURCE -D_SVID_SOURCE -DFUNCPROTO=15 -DNARROWPROTO -DXVENDORNAME=The X.Org Foundation -DXVENDORNAMESHORT=X.Org " configure then fails with: checking for C compiler default output file name... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables quite simply because "X.Org" and "Foundation" are not valid gcc options. Ho hum. --L
