Status Report: Debian NetWinder Project (July 17th)

[Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>]

Hello,

I though I'd summarize what progress we have made in the past month on
the Debian NetWinder porting project.  For more info on the project,
check out:

  http://master.debian.org/~jim/netwinder.html

Overall, I think we've made pretty good progress considering that none
of the Debian developers actually have their hands on their own
machine yet.  A number of developers have ordered them (including
myself) - Corel should be shipping fairly soon (I hope).

We have a Debian development environment setup on the machine that
Alan DeKok and Corel have kindly set aside for us to use in Ottawa.
The current machine should be pretty close to the final shipping
product.

We were delayed slightly due to the fact that the ARM ELF file format
changed, and the machine needed to be replaced with an updated one.

On that machine, we have constructed a chroot environment in which we
have dpkg and a number of Debian packages installed.

The initial set of packages were constructed from the binaries that
Corel has supplied.  We will be replacing these packages with real
Debian packages built from source.

Many of the core packages (ie. gcc, binutils, libc6) cannot be built
from source -- because Corel has not been able to release source for
these yet.  Hopefully we will have some released source which we can
use in the next few weeks.

Here is the current set of debian packages we have installed:

Packages built from Corel binaries for which we don't have source:

  binutils g++ gcc gdb libc6 libc6-dev libstdc++2.8 libstdc++2.8-dev ldso

Packages built from Corel binaries, but which could be built from
source (we will replace these shortly):

  bash cpio diff gawk m4 make netbase netstd patch perl perl-base shellutils
  strace tar textutils util-linux vim

Packages built from source:

  less mawk ncurses-base ncurses-term ncurses3.4 ncurses3.4-dbg
  ncurses3.4-dev ncurses3.4-pic ncurses-bin* sed* fileutils*
  debianutils* dpkg*  (* denotes packages with binaries which were
                         installed manually)

Binary-all packages (we don't have to rebuild these, as they work
for all architectures):

  adduser autoconf automake base-files debhelper debmake libtool
  mirror

These lists of packages will probably grow dramatically over the next
few weeks.

We haven't attempted to do anything with the install process, kernel,
gcc/g++/egcs/binutils or libc yet, as none of us have a machine
locally to experiment with.  Corel has released kernel source (but it
needs an a.out environment to build it in).

There are currently 28 people subscribed to the mailing list who have
expressed interest in helping out in some capacity.

Cheers,

 - Jim


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