Jeremy's Weblog

It is no surprise that Gentoo Prefix works fine on arm-linux given the great work being done in Gentoo Linux by the ARM team (armin76, maekke, et al).

For the Genesi Efika MX (unboxing), I now have a binpkg repo setup (for Gentoo Prefix only). This was mainly a fun proof-of-concept that I did. I went from installing 70 packages in about 18 hours, to about 30 minutes using binpkgs.

What does this mean:
Given the relatively small set of arm users and the highly specific use cases for arm hardware, well, there isn't a very big percentage of users that will keep Ubuntu on their Efika MX when they get it. But, if they do, that means that they can get a complete toolchain and Gentoo Linux userland (including portage package manager) on the host in less than an hour. Of course, they could also get the same packages from the Ubuntu package manager but that isn't as cool

How to install/get working:
Follow this easy guide that I wrote, here. All 70 packages will occupy about 580MB of space. Then you will have the toolchain and portage (emerge) at your disposal to use on your Ubuntu ARM (cortex-a8, armv7) system.

Have fun.

As Dan writes, I too survive work by using Gentoo Prefix.

%% uname -a
HP-UX localhost B.11.31 U 9000/800 HP-UX
%% gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.2.4 (Gentoo 4.2.4-r01.2 p1.1)
%% bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.0.35(1)-release (hppa2.0n-hp-hpux11.31)
%% ls --version
ls (GNU coreutils) 8.1
Packaged by Gentoo (8.1 (p1))

Thanks to haubi for putting effort into the necessary upstream changes/patches for hppa-hpux support!

Markus Duft writes:

I'm preparing to conquer the world (again) . To achieve my goal, I have
prepared a new Gentoo Prefix on Windows Setup, and the according
documentation.

Video demonstrating the installation of Gentoo Prefix/Windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az1RR60s5n4

Grab the latest iso's from: http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/prefix/x86-interix/20090826/

Docs: http://dev.gentoo.org/~mduft/gpx-installation-20090820.pdf (also available on the DVD installer)

If you happen to be on an AIX 5.x host using Gentoo Prefix. Then you might see something like this eventually:

/bin/sh[3]: /home/jolexa/portage/aix-5.3/bin/chmod: arg list too long

This is caused by build systems that use wildcards or even ebuilds that have no issues on a normal GNU/Linux system. To work around this, you need to change the ARG/ENV list size in 4K byte blocks. The default value in AIX 5.x is 6. This is way too small. You will either need root access or kindly ask your system administrator to change this value. To change it, you have two options: use smitty (a curses sys-admin tool on AIX) or do root# chdev -l sys0 -a ncargs=40 on the command line

If you use smitty, you are looking for this:

root# smitty
=> System Environments
    => Change / Show Characteristics of Operating System
         ARG/ENV list size in 4K byte blocks                [40]

40 seems to be a good number. It would be hard to guess the smallest number possible. This is not a problem in AIX 6.1, because the default seems to be '256'

(I write this because I have talked quite a few times about the subject but never offered any use cases for it.)

We have a core group of Gentoo Prefix users in #gentoo-prefix on freenode. I took a poll and gathered up all the use cases for Gentoo Prefix. They are in somewhat of an order:

• Bringing a Gentoo userland to your MacBook (macos/darwin) - without modifying the eye-candy host OS.
• Allowing easy package management on your host where you do not have privileged access.  No more manual ./configure --prefix=~/foo && make && make install
• GNU-ifying your non-GNU host, like Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc. (userland only, of course)
• Providing a similar environment across distros for your simulated build/customer environment.
• Using the familiar Gentoo/Portage on a non familiar OS
• "I use Gentoo Prefix because it is cool" -grobian

For a more detailed use-case analysis on some of the points above, please read here. Otherwise, enjoy!

Gentoo Prefix now supports Itanium Linux and AIX-6.1 (with caveats).

ia64-linux mostly works out of the box. There is one small issue with scanelf which I would like to fix if I ever find the time. ('scanelf(9292): unaligned access to ...' - low priority because everything still appears to work). We previously supported ia64-linux but it was removed because we didn't think anyone used it - and no one responded when we asked. It was added back, by me, to support a work endeavour.

AIX-6.1 - whew..this one was a pain to bootstrap a prefix env. I took the lazy way and put my AIX-5.3 prefix last in my PATH so I had working tools to start with. Now, after I got it all working, there is some sort of hiccup with bash/python(?). Something is causing something to hang when python's workdir is trying to get cleaned up after the emerge. There is a hanging file descriptor out there (.nfs). Again, not easy to debug. (Don't even bother telling me about lsof, I know, I know...). So AIX-6.1 works, but maybe not very well. YMMV

As a side note, we are up to ~2100 packages in the prefix tree thanks to some helpful Prefix users.

So..what does this mean? In a nutshell..Gentoo Prefix works on the OS that runs on an Atari. Cool, eh?

We owe this to the hard work of AlanH, as seen here and here.  As always, we are at #gentoo-prefix and the gentoo-alt mailing list if you are interested.

It has been awhile since I last wrote about the Gentoo Prefix project. I will update the inquiring minds that want to know...

• Gentoo Prefix's irc channel is now #gentoo-prefix. We use to inhabit #gentoo-alt but had some reports that new users were looking for us in -prefix. Also no one involved with the Prefix project had administrative powers over the old channel either. Since we were the only users of the -alt channel, I also had a redirect set up from there to the new channel.
• New style profiles are done. Before I joined the Prefix project, our Linux support needed some love. The old profiles were mimicking the default-linux ones in gentoo-x86 but they didn't do inheritance very well. The new style profiles for Linux inherit the 2008 Gentoo profiles and allow Gentoo Prefix users to exploit the work done by the x86 & amd64 arch teams automatically. The old profiles contained a static multilib mask and other files.  Since Gentoo Prefix is anything but 'default' we chose a new root directory in $PORTDIR/profiles/ called 'prefix' - this seemed to make the most sense. The new profiles are designed to go into the portage tree when appropriate without any major structure changes. Long story short, soon we will be deprecating the default-prefix/ profiles in favor of the new style.
• We set up another rsync mirror. As expected, the load is balanced pretty well now.
• Over 2000 packages in the Prefix tree.  Roughly 15% of the Gentoo portage tree.

I'm excited for this project (still). It seems that we have a new active user or two every week, submitting bug reports, helping out in irc, etc.

Thanks for listening.