Hi Stan,
On Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:28:16 -0000, Stan Hoeppner <s...@hardwarefreak.com>
wrote:
Stephen Feyrer put forth on 1/6/2011 11:20 AM:
Hi Stan,
Hi Stephen.
# OS: Linux 2.6.12.6-arm1 armv5tejl
Stephen, just curious:
Curiosity should be be encouraged, oddly though, this is best achieved
with answers.
Always. :)
[snip]
I hope this was informative.
Yes, very. So, in summary, I guess one could say that working in the
embedded world, with a non x86 platform, and a less than fully supported
OS distro, can often be very different, and more difficult, than working
in the "normal" x86 world.
Given the difficulties with managing optware, have you considered
switching to emdebian? Or is the problem not optware per se, but the
package management process for embedded systems in general? It appears
that no matter which embedded OS option you choose, there is a lot of
manual work involved.
I had thought of embedded Gentoo, that's only because its the distro on my
desktop machine. Also, the optware distribution targets my (now older)
QNAP NAS. I may be wrong but one of the advantages of optware is that it
retains the vendors original look and feel. Neither do you need to
re-invent functionality.
Have you tried a standard distro such as Debian but with a minimal
install? I have such Debian Lenny servers with a memory footprint of
less than 64MB, including Postfix and Dovecot, and a / filesystem of
less than 1GB. Is your arm platform RAM limited or storage limited, or
both?
The major limit at the moment is the support of things like bin-utils and
libtool and autoconf any one of these could be the cause of my problem. I
have tried to use what is the native cross compile environment on my
desktop to build Dovecot this was more than a year ago, targeting the
current kernel, glibc and other environmental components, much to no avail.
Take a look at Emdebian and regular Debian w/ a minimal install. Both
support arm and armel platforms. The standard Debian arm install can be
performed via http using either a tiny CD/DVD image or a USB flash
drive. The Emdebian install is obviously more complicated, likely
similar to optware. Although emdebian has a large developer community
backing it.
http://www.emdebian.org/
"Prebuilt toolchains to build for arm, armel, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel,
powerpc, s390 and sparc using a variety of gcc-3.3, gcc-3.4, gcc-4.0,
gcc-4.1, gcc-4.2, gcc-4.3 and gcc-4.4 compilers."
http://tuxonomy.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/debian-minimal-install-of-a-base-system-lenny-aka-5-0/
http://www.debian.org
Standard Debian (Lenny) doesn't offer Dovecot 2.0, and frankly this is
because it's just not stable enough--still too many patches on a regular
bases. Via the backports repository you have access to the latest 1.2.x
series, or a patch level behind. Currently 1.2.15 is available, and
IIRC the latest is 1.2.16. I'm still running 1.2.15 and have had no
issues with it, or the 5 prior point releases back to 1.2.11. YMMV.
I will certainly read up on these tools. Thank you for point them out to
me. If Dovecot 2.0 proves too difficult to get working, I'll resort to
1.2.16.
--
Kind regards
Stephen.
