Progress Update
Well… I’ve been busy getting the boxes into shape ready for new stagebuilds and a heap of other activities.
I have Firefox 3.5 going on mipsel… albeit a little shakey. I’ve got 99% of KDE 4.3 going also, again, a few glitches. I have turned my attention for the time being to the SGI machines here, since the kernels on all of them are out of date… and the userland is in a bit of a mess. Particularly on the Indy… which hasn’t been touched in a couple of years (e2fsck complained the disk wasn’t checked in over 1000 days).
The Indy (R4600SC) needs a new kernel, as its current one is too unstable to do anything useful. I remember kernel 2.6 being a royal bitch on this machine, hopefully things have improved. The IP28 is up and running… old kernel and userland, but it’s not quite as bad as the Indy… at least it’s stable. The O2 is similarly suffering an old kernel, but at least parts of its userland are in reasonable shape.
The two Fulongs are also getting an overhaul which is badly needed. The Yeeloong too, is undergoing further work to get things running.
Tonight, I managed to figure out battery monitoring within KDE 4.3… the trick was to unmask the apm USE-flag and re-merge hal with this feature enabled. Now the system displays the battery status as it should… if only I could get NetworkManager working properly, then everything would be sweet there.
I have a couple of tracker bugs relating to this work… bug 282264 is a tracking bug for KDE 4.x related tasks, and bug 282265 pertains to the changes needed for in-tree Lemote system support.
I intend to do a bit of work on both as I run between Brisbane and Laidley using the Yeeloong as a test platform, so hopefully we will have something for public release soon. In addition, I’ll be doing stagebuilds for the Gentoo/MIPS port generally, once my systems are back online.
August 24th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Experience is relative, so I offer this anecdote in full knowledge of that caveat:
It’s my experience (and a lot of other folks) that NetworkManager will never work. It’s too buggy, bloated, etc. Give wicd a try. As long as PyGtk is working on MIPS, you should be all set; it’s all you need. It’s an extremely lightweight wired and wireless network manager; it’s pretty KISS, so it usually can’t go wrong, unless your hardware is extremely buggy. Or if your wireless driver stack isn’t stable.
It’s, like, the best thing since sliced bread. Assuming bread could manage networks, I mean.
August 24th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
I did never get NetworkManager to run, too. Nevertheless, to have it around in my spare time i left it installed.
But then, the last week I decided a full “emerge -e @world”… During that way i moved my manual iwlagn – modules.conf to the right place (stupid error… it has to be in modprobe.d and it has to end at .conf) which disables the N-Draft and HW-Scanning. And now my NetworkManager works.
I do not trust it yet, but i’m happy for now.
August 24th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Well, the thing that is missing, is a GUI into NM via KDE’s solid backend.
KDE recognises it, and has NetworkManager selected for managing the network, but as for how to configure it through KDE? Beats me. Seems silly when it’s 80% there.
I should give wicd a try too… as there will be users who will want that too for the reasons you mention. I had KNetworkManager going on Debian, working nicely actually… hence I kept with it. I like its integration into KDE, which I’d miss with wicd.
Anyway… luckily I know how to configure stuff on the command line.
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
networkmanager-applet-9999 seems to be the Gentoo package for the kde4 networkmanager applet / application. Unless you want two lots of kdelibs on your system. I don’t run any mips systems, (only x86 as my amd64 system is still in pieces). I managed to get that package working with networkmanager, but find I have more stability with just wpa_supplicant for most wireless networks.