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Hi everyone, |
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I'd like to announce a new initiative within the mips arch team. We are |
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now supporting an xfce4-based desktop system for the lemote yeeloong |
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netbook [1]. The images can be found on the gentoo mirrors, under |
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gentoo/experimental/mips/desktop-loongson2f. The installation |
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instructions can be found at ref [2]. The yeeloong netbook is |
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particularly interesting because it only uses "free" hardware, ie. |
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hardware which doesn't require any proprietary code. It is manufactured |
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by Lemote in China [3], and distributed and promoted in the US by |
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"Freedom Included" [4]. It is how Richard Stallman does his computing [5]. |
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While I'm not sure this is worthy of "subproject" status, it is |
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important for the gentoo community to know that mips devices are |
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currently being manufactured and used in netbooks as well as embedded |
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systems. The gentoo mips team has risen to the challenge of targetting |
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these systems and maintaining natively compiled stage4's for them. Why |
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stage4's? And why a full desktop for the yeeloong? These processors |
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are slow, so the time from a stage3 to a desktop is about three days for |
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the yeeloong. Also, the yeeloong sports a little endian mips64 |
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processor, the loongson2f, and we support three ABIs: o32, n32 and n64, |
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with n32 being the preferred. This significantly increases the time to |
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build glibc and some other core packages. I provide two images, a |
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vanilla and a hardened image. The latter adds full hardening (pie, ssp, |
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_FORTIFY_SOURCES=2, bind now, relro) to the toolchain and userland |
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binaries as we do for amd64 and i686 in hardened gentoo. I have not |
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ported over the hardened kernel, however. |
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I allude above to "other" targetted devices. I am also maintaining some |
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mips uclibc systems (both hardened and vanilla) which are on the gentoo |
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mirrors under experimental/mips/uclibc. But I will speak more of these |
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later as part of an initiative to maintain hardened uclibc systems on |
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"alternative" architectures such as arm, mips, ppc as well as amd64 and |
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i686. |
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Ref. |
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[1] http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.html |
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[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/mips/yeeloong.xml |
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[3] http://lemote.com/en/ |
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[4] http://freedomincluded.com |
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[5] http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html |
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|
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-- |
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Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D. |
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Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened] |
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E-Mail : blueness@g.o |
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GnuPG FP : 8040 5A4D 8709 21B1 1A88 33CE 979C AF40 D045 5535 |
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GnuPG ID : D0455535 |
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