Re: [gentoo-soc] Gentoo musl Support Expansion for Qt/KDE Week 8

[EBo]

When you get the draft of step-by-step doc, sit down and do a clean 
install and follow the step-by-step to verify that it works as 
documented.  Maybe if you have someone that can beta test things, they 
can verify the final docs.

Anyway, that is all I meant.

   EBo --


On Aug 8 2022 6:58 AM, cat@××××××××.org wrote:
> Yes! I have week 12 fully dedicated to writing documentation actually.
> I have written some notes but I'll also use my daily blogs to remind
> me of what to write about :)
>
> What do you mean by "and verification that they are really up to
> date", like so the older docs are really up to date? For the PinePhone
> Pro in particular I'd like to do something like this
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PinePhone but with a lot more
> information.
>
>
>
> Aug 8, 2022, 02:33 by ebo@×××××××.com:
>
>> I'm not one of your mentors (I am a former GSOC intern and mentor;
>> which explains why I am still on the lists).
>>
>> All of this sounds like wonderful progress.  The one thing I have not
>> seen you mention is documentation, quick-starts, and verification that
>> they are really up to date.  Spending a week or two on those to polish
>> then up would be a wonderful addition.
>>
>>  EBo --
>>
>> On Aug 7 2022 8:01 PM, cat@××××××××.org wrote:
>>
>>> This week I've spent most of my time getting Gentoo musl to run on my
>>> PinePhone Pro and packaging mauikit apps. I have also done some minor
>>> testing on KDE applications and some other miscellaneous things.
>>>
>>> In my proposal I had initially planned on porting KDE applications
>>> and
>>> making them build on Gentoo musl the following two weeks, and then
>>> making sure test suites run the week following that. But I've already
>>> gotten kde-apps-meta installed and the programs are working well for
>>> the most part. Though I haven't enabled every use flag for the KDE
>>> apps and I haven't ran every test suite so there's definitely work to
>>> do left, just not 3 weeks work. So instead I asked Sam if I could
>>> spend some time working on getting Gentoo musl to run on my PinePhone
>>> Pro with Plasma Mobile as a side project.
>>> <!--more-->
>>>
>>> Starting with the PinePhone. The Gentoo install itself was pretty
>>> smooth and I didn't run into any major issues. But I really got stuck
>>> on some other more low level and non-Gentoo bits.
>>> The first issue I ran into was when I installed a new kernel onto it.
>>> Apparently a single developer called Megi does most of the PPP kernel
>>> development so I installed his kernel. Confusingly his development
>>> branch is called "orange-pi-5.x" and it took me some time figuring
>>> that out :D. Anyways, the compilation itself was straight forward,
>>> and
>>> the defconfig _almost_ worked well. I stole the bootloader
>>> configuration from PostmarketOS, rsync:ed the kernel + dtbs, and then
>>> changed some relevant parts in the bootloader config. Sadly the phone
>>> did not boot, and there was no output to be seen on the screen :/.
>>> After reading the wiki I found out that I could connect via serial
>>> through the headphone jack. I used an RS232-to-USB adapter and
>>> soldered it onto the internal wires of a 3.5mm cable. For output this
>>> did work, but when connecting TX to also get input, the output just
>>> got messed up and I couldn't read it. I tried to debug this and also
>>> seeked help from others, but ultimately couldn't get it to work.
>>> Luckily the only thing I needed was output because I saw in the
>>> bootlog that EFI stub was missing from the kernel. Enabling that and
>>> generating an initramfs made the phone boot!
>>>
>>> Then I started emerging some packages, and even though I had the
>>> charger plugged in, the phone completely discharged after a while.
>>> After that the phone did not want to boot and I tried all kinds of
>>> things, like booting from SD card, reflashing bootloader, trying
>>> different cables and nothing worked ... It turned out that the
>>> bootloader (Tow-boot) had a bug that made the phone not charge after
>>> the battery as emptied, and I needed to boot it into a special mode
>>> holding a button with a sim card opener.
>>>
>>> After that I set up distcc with cross compilation, and there came the
>>> second issue. "__aarch64_cas4_sync undefined symbol". I asked Sam and
>>> he said it probably was a distcc issue. Because of me not wanting to
>>> run into this again I tried the aarch64-gentoo-linux-musl-emerge
>>> wrapper instead. This worked for the most part, but I had trouble
>>> with
>>> copying over my phones configuration to /usr/.../etc/portage.
>>> I then learned about the ROOT, SYSROOT, and PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT
>>> variables. Toghether with sshfs I could easily emerge packages for
>>> the
>>> phone on my PC without using something slow like qemu-user, nice!
>>> I emerged a lot of packages like this and noticed that the program
>>> dispatch-conf did not honour the variables. This was easy to fix and
>>> I
>>> PR:ed it here https://github.com/gentoo/portage/pull/881.
>>>
>>> I have also created a lot of ebuilds for Mauikit apps, these are
>>> cross
>>> platform KDE applications that look great on smaller devices like
>>> phones. https://github.com/gentoo/kde/pull/910/commits. They also
>>> work
>>> great on my PC.
>>>
>>> All in all I've spent most my time this week working on the
>>> PinePhone,
>>> and the two following weeks I'll do a lot of testing for the KDE
>>> applications.
>>>