Re: Directions for starting with the BSD flavor of Debian
Hi, Petr and other bsd people.
On Aug 26 2009, Petr Salinger wrote:
> >So, in light of this, I would like to know what would be a good starting
> >point for working with the kfreebsd-amd64 port of Debian (and, depending
> >on the circumstances, I may even adopt it as my main OS).
>
> Start with this http://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD
That's very nice.
I was looking for an opportunity to finally see what all this
virtualization thing with qemu was all about.
Previously, I had only used "native" virtualization with other computers
that had support for the virtualization flags, but the computer where I
do most of my work doesn't have those things (I use a Pentium D and it's
the fastest desktop to which I have access---and I won't be able to
update to anything newer in the near future).
Testing kFreeBSD was an excellent excuse for playing with qemu. :-) The
next step will be to use kqemu to see if things can be made a little bit
faster (not really sure if the patch present in the archives apply on
top of Linus' git tree).
> links "Install guide" and "QEMU install tutorial".
> Use the old hacked FreeBSD installer, the kernel in the latest
> http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/install-cd/
> should be fine also for kfreebsd-i386. Just do not upgrade it for now
> ...
Well, I just got the disc image from 20090117 and I am proceeding to a
dist-upgrade right now (I just selected the -686 kernel and the -i686
support for libc).
Hummm, honestly, I have never wished that the packages actually had more
shared data (say, more things arch: all).
Anyway, just so that it becomes documented for future installers, I had
some problems with dpkg spitting errors because tar version 1.22 was
using utime and I got the message that utime was a "function not
implemented").
I could not do anything else other than unpacking back tar 1.20, so that
I could continue installing the system.
Then, after that, I could proceed with a dist-upgrade (I'm doing that
right now).
> >Are there any live CDs? Is unstable too unstable for regular use?
> Currently not, the GING is really outdated.
I think that creating one would be a very, very good point so that we
could see further testing/adoption of kFreeBSD. I will investigate how
we could implement one.
Not only that, but working with a non-mainstream architecture is fun. :-)
> >Is unstable too unstable for regular use?
> Not so much, we also started to populate into testing.
Right. I see that we have bsd with a good amount of packages already
built (and I would be willing to donate some time for a buildd).
> >I will start compiling my own packages with the BSD port, just to see
> >which results I get
>
> According to links from
> http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito@ime.usp.br
> it looks like only avr-evtd needs your attention.
Right. This is a Linux specific package (actually a hardware dependent
package), but since it only uses a connection to the serial port,
"cleaning" the sources would be a very good thing.
This is, BTW, the reason that I left it as arch: any, after all (so that
I could see were things would break).
Of course, I'm participating of popcon and I'm installing the bsdstats
script, to make this platform a little bit more popular. :-)
Thank you very much, Rogério Brito.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org
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