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I'm not one of your mentors (I am a former GSOC intern and mentor; which |
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explains why I am still on the lists). |
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|
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All of this sounds like wonderful progress. The one thing I have not |
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seen you mention is documentation, quick-starts, and verification that |
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they are really up to date. Spending a week or two on those to polish |
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then up would be a wonderful addition. |
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|
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EBo -- |
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|
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On Aug 7 2022 8:01 PM, cat@××××××××.org wrote: |
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> This week I've spent most of my time getting Gentoo musl to run on my |
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> PinePhone Pro and packaging mauikit apps. I have also done some minor |
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> testing on KDE applications and some other miscellaneous things. |
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> |
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> In my proposal I had initially planned on porting KDE applications and |
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> making them build on Gentoo musl the following two weeks, and then |
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> making sure test suites run the week following that. But I've already |
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> gotten kde-apps-meta installed and the programs are working well for |
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> the most part. Though I haven't enabled every use flag for the KDE |
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> apps and I haven't ran every test suite so there's definitely work to |
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> do left, just not 3 weeks work. So instead I asked Sam if I could |
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> spend some time working on getting Gentoo musl to run on my PinePhone |
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> Pro with Plasma Mobile as a side project. |
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> <!--more--> |
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> |
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> Starting with the PinePhone. The Gentoo install itself was pretty |
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> smooth and I didn't run into any major issues. But I really got stuck |
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> on some other more low level and non-Gentoo bits. |
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> The first issue I ran into was when I installed a new kernel onto it. |
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> Apparently a single developer called Megi does most of the PPP kernel |
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> development so I installed his kernel. Confusingly his development |
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> branch is called "orange-pi-5.x" and it took me some time figuring |
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> that out :D. Anyways, the compilation itself was straight forward, and |
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> the defconfig _almost_ worked well. I stole the bootloader |
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> configuration from PostmarketOS, rsync:ed the kernel + dtbs, and then |
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> changed some relevant parts in the bootloader config. Sadly the phone |
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> did not boot, and there was no output to be seen on the screen :/. |
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> After reading the wiki I found out that I could connect via serial |
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> through the headphone jack. I used an RS232-to-USB adapter and |
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> soldered it onto the internal wires of a 3.5mm cable. For output this |
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> did work, but when connecting TX to also get input, the output just |
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> got messed up and I couldn't read it. I tried to debug this and also |
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> seeked help from others, but ultimately couldn't get it to work. |
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> Luckily the only thing I needed was output because I saw in the |
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> bootlog that EFI stub was missing from the kernel. Enabling that and |
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> generating an initramfs made the phone boot! |
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> |
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> Then I started emerging some packages, and even though I had the |
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> charger plugged in, the phone completely discharged after a while. |
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> After that the phone did not want to boot and I tried all kinds of |
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> things, like booting from SD card, reflashing bootloader, trying |
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> different cables and nothing worked ... It turned out that the |
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> bootloader (Tow-boot) had a bug that made the phone not charge after |
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> the battery as emptied, and I needed to boot it into a special mode |
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> holding a button with a sim card opener. |
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> |
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> After that I set up distcc with cross compilation, and there came the |
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> second issue. "__aarch64_cas4_sync undefined symbol". I asked Sam and |
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> he said it probably was a distcc issue. Because of me not wanting to |
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> run into this again I tried the aarch64-gentoo-linux-musl-emerge |
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> wrapper instead. This worked for the most part, but I had trouble with |
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> copying over my phones configuration to /usr/.../etc/portage. |
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> I then learned about the ROOT, SYSROOT, and PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT |
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> variables. Toghether with sshfs I could easily emerge packages for the |
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> phone on my PC without using something slow like qemu-user, nice! |
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> I emerged a lot of packages like this and noticed that the program |
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> dispatch-conf did not honour the variables. This was easy to fix and I |
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> PR:ed it here https://github.com/gentoo/portage/pull/881. |
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> |
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> I have also created a lot of ebuilds for Mauikit apps, these are cross |
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> platform KDE applications that look great on smaller devices like |
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> phones. https://github.com/gentoo/kde/pull/910/commits. They also work |
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> great on my PC. |
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> |
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> All in all I've spent most my time this week working on the PinePhone, |
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> and the two following weeks I'll do a lot of testing for the KDE |
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> applications. |