Soft Float Distro

[Railton Nepomuceno]

Which distribution soft float in cubieboard, i need to compile drivers the digital persona biometric reader 

[Michal Suchanek]

On 23 January 2013 19:28, Railton Nepomuceno <rai...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Which distribution soft float in cubieboard, i need to compile drivers the
> digital persona biometric reader

Debian has armel port.

Just follow any guide for bootstrapping Debian on A10 and replace
armhf and gueabihf with armel and gnueabi.

It is actually supposed to be more stable than hf but gives worse
performance becasue part of the core is completely unused.

HTH

Michal

[Alex Jenner]

On Thursday, January 24, 2013 10:34:34 AM UTC+13, hramrach wrote:

On 23 January 2013 19:28, Railton Nepomuceno <rai...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Which distribution soft float in cubieboard, i need to compile drivers the
> digital persona biometric reader

Debian has armel port.

Just follow any guide for bootstrapping Debian on A10 and replace
armhf and gueabihf with armel and gnueabi.

I've not tried this on the cubieboard, but I do have the HP Touchpad tablet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchPad

The Touchpad is using a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC which supports ARMv7 instruction set with (linux based) webOS operating system. Then on the Touchpad I have installed both debian armel and debian armhf chroot environments. So I think it would be possible to install debian armhf (or ubuntu) on the cubieboard and then install debian armel inside a chroot using debootstrap. That way you should be able to have the best of both worlds - improved performance with armhf and use the armel chroot for compatibility with those soft float applications that you need.

Or perhaps you need a full soft float environment for testing, in which case you can follow the suggestion from Michal and install on cubieboard hardware using armel and gnueabi.

[Michal Suchanek]

You do not need chroot. Debian supports multiarch on arm in Wheezy and
you can install both armel and armhf libraries as needed. Starting
with a stable configuration with only one ABI is simpler, though.

Thanks

Michal

[Vincent]

Hi everybody.

I have exactly the same problem (using DigitalPersona libs) and am looking for an armel distro for ARM boards (A10S, A20 based...).

Your answer is quite interesting hramrach but I fear I misunderstood it.

You meant we can use libraries compiled for ARMEL on ARMHF system? Let's say I'm using an Olimex A10S board with Debian Wheezy ARMHF, should I be able to use the ARMEL libraries provided by DigitalPersona?

Thanks again.

Regards.

[Patrick Wood]

You'll need to install all the debian armel libraries that your application uses, not just you digital persona ones.

[Vincent]

Thanks a lot Patrick Wood :) !

I managed to solve my problem, using ARMEL digitalpersona libs, and staying on an ARMHF debian 7.

Railton Nepomuceno, look at this:

http://devportal.digitalpersona.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=3354

This is my self-solved post :). Hope it will help you.

Regards,

[Vincent]

My bad, maybe copy/past the solution is better than giving a link to a private board :

Hi everyone,

News here: I managed to make the reader work on a ARMHF debian.

What you need: Debian 7+.
Thanks to Multiarch support, I've been able to use the ARMSF (ARMEL) SDK, originally provided by DigitalPersona in UareU 2.2.0.

What to do:

Add the armel architecture in your debian distro:
dpkg --add-architecture armel
apt-get update

Install the armel C libs:
apt-get install libc6:armel libstdc++6:armel libglib2.0-0:armel

"libc6:armel" is enough for DigitalPersona UareU SDK, others are for my personal needs.

You must use the module (.ko file) compiled for armsf (armel). Check it's loaded using "lsmod | grep dpfp".

You should now be able to run the C samples.

In order to run the Java samples, you need to install Java for ARMSF too. Personally, I installed the JDK7 for ARMSF (it works fine even if I'm using Debian ARMHF).

I also had to make the libdpfp* files (provided in /lib/arm in the SDK) available from /usr/lib.

Hope it will help.

Regards.

[RQG]

Hi Vincent,

I'm really curious about how you can run programs built using armhf and the libraries of DigitalPersona? I have a lot of libraries to QT, SDL and Java SE based in armhf and just install multiarch was not an usefull solution. Actually, I believed that change all other libraries of system in favor of only one device should be the last option. Is it really DigitalPersona does not have a release for armhf?