Gentoo Desktop for the Lemote Yeeloong,

[Anthony G. Basile]

Hi everyone,

I've mostly been lurking on this list, but I'd like to let you know
about a new initiative by the Gentoo mips team. We are now supporting
an xfce4-based desktop system for the yeeloong. The images can be found
on any gentoo mirrors, under
gentoo/experimental/mips/desktop-loongson2f, and the installation
instructions can be found at

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/mips/yeeloong.xml

Normally a Gentoo installation starts from a stage3 tarball with only
the bare essentials and you build the system as you want. This is ideal
because you get maximum flexibility. But building on the yeeloong is
slow and it takes a few days to get to the images I'm providing. So we
sacrifice some flexibility for convenience.

There are two images provided, one called "vanilla" and the other called
"hardened". The hardened image adds many hardening features to the
toolchain and userland binaries (pie, ssp, _FORTIFY_SOURCES=2, bind now,
relro) as we do in hardened gentoo for amd64 and i686. Both images
support three ABIs, o32, n32 and n64 with n32 being preferred. For
general purpose, we recommend the hardened image because the added
security outweighs any disadvantages.

Its not perfect yet. We have yet to get video working. Also the
current browser is dillo which is not the most popular browser.

If you have a chance, try it out and let us know. You can file bugs or
feature requests at https://bugs.gentoo.org/. Assign the bugs to
blue...@gentoo.org and CC: mi...@gentoo.org.


Anthony G. Basile
Gentoo Developer

[ri...@happyleptic.org]

-[ Sun, Sep 09, 2012 at 11:49:33AM -0400, Anthony G. Basile ]----

> Its not perfect yet. We have yet to get video working. Also the
> current browser is dillo which is not the most popular browser.

X11, Mesa and Firefox were made to works by Zhang Le and others some
years ago on their overlay. What caused the regression ?

[Matt Turner]

Frankly, hacky work and never getting the patches upstream.

X11 works: the xorg-server-9999 ebuild in the Loongson overlay applies
3 patches that make X work. Mesa also works, although there's no 3D
driver for any relevant hardware. Firefox -- no clue. Haven't tried
it.

[Anthony G. Basile]

I'm going to return to the question of the browser next, and I can post
what the problems are. I should say that these images were created as
cleanly as possible. Everything has gone upstream, no ugly hacks. I
should add that I did get video working, but I'm not happy with how I
did it, so its not in there. When I clean things up, I'll get that in
too. I want Gentoo fully supporting the yeeloong, so users can have
quality assurance.

[ri...@happyleptic.org]

-[ Sun, Sep 09, 2012 at 01:21:10PM -0700, Matt Turner ]----

> On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 11:24 AM, <ri...@happyleptic.org> wrote:
> > X11, Mesa and Firefox were made to works by Zhang Le and others some
> > years ago on their overlay. What caused the regression ?
>
> Frankly, hacky work and never getting the patches upstream.

When a new arch is out you want it to work as fast as possible and so
it's understandable that someone would follow shortest path to fix.
Once the dust settle some of the patches are reported (IIRC the patches
for siliconmotion drivers and the fix for X11 16bpp reached upstream,
and certainly many others too), and some others are not deemed good
enough or require a lot of work or a different approach, and the
original hacker may not feel compelled to spend more time on the issue
since its original concern was not to make project X or Y better but to
have a working hardware. Also, some projects does not move as fast as
others and the hacker may have moved to another matter when eventually
feedback come. All this to say that quick fixing things is very useful
to "the community" and Zhang Le for instance certainly made life a lot
easier for many lemote early users when he came with a working Gentoo
image many years ago.

Anyway, I perfectly understand why, for instance, mozilla would not
apply a hacky patch specific to some variant of mips in their source
tree ; I also understand that, with time, unmaintained non glamorous
patches can get stripped out of a distro, but that's nonetheless a
regression.
Again, If you need some manpower from a gentoo on mips newby, feel free
to ask.

Kindly,

[Matt Turner]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 12:50 AM, <ri...@happyleptic.org> wrote:
> Again, If you need some manpower from a gentoo on mips newby, feel free
> to ask.

Yes, definitely!

The easiest way is to join #gentoo-mips on Freenode.

[eduardo avariano]

Venezuela'm buen día para comprar un mes Lemote 8089_B Yeeloong ya que estoy tratando de instalar gentoo y no ha tenido éxito si se pudiera explicar con más detalle cómo hacerlo sola y poder instalar debian pero e escuchado que gentoo es mejor gracias a su atención.

[eduardo avariano]