Getting back into Gentoo

Well, after a long hiatus that must have seemed like an eternity for some, I’m starting to dust off my old MIPS boxes and getting things back up and running again.

I’ve shifted positions, and now work at West End as a subcontractor for Jacques Electronics, and so instead of my journey starting from The Gap at 4:30AM to arrive at Laidley at 7:30AM, I jump on the bike and pedal 1.5 hours to West End. The work involves some embedded Linux development on Freescale i.MX27… and for some of my work, I’ve been using a cross-compiled Gentoo environment as a NFS-root, and on the device’s NAND flash.

This means I have a lot more time to do things. Amongst other things, this includes getting Gentoo stagebuilds back on track. One blocker to this progress has been issues compiling gcc 4.4. In short, I get an ICE (internal compiler error) whenever I try, and others have reported the same thing on their systems too. I couldn’t get around it using the compiler on the machines I have available, and my desktop computer was down with dead HDDs, so I couldn’t use that to cross-compile anything either. So the project was stuck at that point.

Fast forward to now… I had some money streaming in from the last project at Laidley. As far as I knew at the time, all that was wrong with my desktop was dead HDDs (it had 4 SCSI HDDs on an Adaptec controller). SATA had improved a great deal since I moved the machine to SCSI (at the time I was fed up with IDE drives dying), so I decided time to move to that. I also decided to upgrade my netbook computer, and my laptop. So about $350 got spent on 3 new HDDs (1 3.5″ 1TB SATA, 1 2.5″ 500GB SATA and 1 2.5″ 250GB IDE) and one PCI SATA controller (Silicon Image SiI3114-based).

The Yeeloong has an odd quirk with the new 500GB HDD I put in it, but luckily, easy enough to work around — in short the PROM doesn’t see the HDD, so I boot grub2-yeeloong off a USB flash drive, and that loads the kernel. Once the kernel is loaded, the system runs fine off the internal HDD, so it’s a minor inconvenience… and could be seen like an “ignition” key required to start the computer.

My other laptop, a P4M 2GHz took to its new HDD no problems, expanding the disk from 40GB to 250GB, the biggest I could get. My desktop however, it turned out there was more dramas to be had. The motherboard (an ASUS CUV4X-D) appears to have developed other faults, and now the machine is unworkable. Scratching around, I managed to scrounge an old Duron 900MHz CPU and motherboard, with 512MB DDR RAM… so into the case that went, along with the new PCI SATA controller and the HDD. Had all sorts of fun and games getting Windows 2000 to install onto the HDD, getting the machine to boot from the HDD, and other issues.

The booting issue was solved when I used the RAID utilities (from a Win2k install on an IDE HDD) to update the firmware. I put together a Windows 2000 Pro CD with SP4 and the RAID drivers and since then, the machine has been happily dual-booting Gentoo and Windows 2000. I also had FreeBSD on there too, but I’ve taken that off for now, might put it back later. The only issue I have is with the video card (which was from the now dead desktop), a HIS Radeon 9200SE. It works fine in 2D only, no 3D acceleration on Linux, and no acceleration at all on Win2K… I did have acceleration going there, so not sure what happened… but 2D is enough for what I do anyway.

As I type this I have successfully built a toolchain for mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu. I have a mips-unknown-linux-gnu toolchain being built, and currently I am cross-compiling (canadian-cross) a version of gcc-4.4.4 for mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu which I intend to install on my Yeeloong to get me past this blocker. I’ll do the same for mips-unknown-linux-gnu once that is done.

With new o32 stages on their way, I can then take another look at n32, and possibly n64 in the more distant future. None of the SGI machines boot properly at present, although 3 out of the 4 turn on, so that’s a start. The fourth (my Octane) I’ll have to have a closer look at, but last time I tried turning it on several months ago, it was dead as a door nail.

I don’t see myself getting on IRC anytime soon… I’m not about when most people are available to talk to me, and for non-realtime discussion, email is a more efficient medium, so I might as well stick to that. At least I have some systems back online however, and some development work will resume once I figure out what the present status is. And next financial year, I think a new desktop computer is in order. 😉