On 04/02/13 at 11:13am, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: > Nah, I don't need berkdb, I'll do without it. > Did you install emerge/portage on the Pi yet? > Python cannot be cross compiled (it's a hot topic since ages, but very > few people have been successful with that). > So I guess Python would have to be compiled on the Pi itself... the > question is, emerge needs python and python needs emerge?!!?
I recently got a minimal gentoo running on the pi (without running emerge/compiling on the pi), here's what I've learned. Cross compilation is FUN <\sarcasm>. Lots of packages (like python) don't like being cross compiled. A good number of failures occurred because of missing build time dependencies on the host, Some times I had to copy certain files need at build-time from the host to the arm sysroot (mainly for the x11-proto/* packages). For the really adamant packages (like python) I used the method described here [1] to build binary packages using a native arm chroot + qemu-user (a rather interesting way to go about it). However I've not compared the performance (wrt compilation time) to running a full blown arm qemu vm so you may want to try that and see what works better for you. But I reckon any of these methods should be faster than compiling on the pi on a modern CPU. Also note cross-compiling is way faster than this method so I preferred cross-compiling and only resorted to this for packages like python. In the end I got it to boot. Then I decided I wanted to try xbmc, after seeing the long list of dependencies, I went ahead and installed openELEC :D. Which works great BTW (Still trying to find some indian news streams). [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/?part=1&chap=5 (Note that page is a bit dated, app-emulation/qemu-user is masked in the tree. Use app-emulation/qemu instead) -- - Yohan Pereira The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. -- Mark Twain
