Porting puppy on MIPS

Under development: PCMCIA, wireless, etc.
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fred
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Porting puppy on MIPS

#1 Post by fred »

Hi!

I'm developing a MIPS-based netbook and would love to see Puppy running on it. I unfortunately do not have the skills to do so. It will be a machine hopefully used in education and I believe their is a strong match between the three (Puppy, Education and my MIPS netbook).

I was curious to how much work was needed, whether anyone would be interested and what was required to make it happen.

Thanks...

Fred

amigo
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#2 Post by amigo »

Lotta work, lotta knowledge -for little thanks.... Even regular Puppy is not ported to 'Puppy' -it's i486-t2-linux with 'Puppiness' on top of it.
I know how to do this and am working on a base distro which I am also going to compile for PPC(iMac and others). I'm also considering ports to other arches, but that depends on me having hardware to develop and test with. I have had one offer of a loaner board for working out an intel Xscale port.
Can you tell me exactly what hardware you are dealing with?

fred
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#3 Post by fred »

Hi!

Thanks for the quick response. The hardware is a Loongson 2F CPU with a SMI502 video chip. One of the particularities of the machine is that it's running out of a USB key. Ram size is 500MB extensible to 1GB.

Depending where you live I can get you a complete machine rapidly or not.

Thanks a lot.

Fred

amigo
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#4 Post by amigo »

Sounds inetersting -something like a gumstix USB device or even smaller maybe. I've seen one that is smaller than your thumb

i'm in Germany, how much of a problem is that? Do you have a link to a page which shows the device you are talking about?
You can P.M. me if you like.

raffy
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best

#5 Post by raffy »

Wish your projet the best. :)

Count me in for the educational aspects...
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

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Lobster
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#6 Post by Lobster »

and would love to see Puppy running on it
Me too.

China now licenses the MIPS processor (in the Godson or Loongson 'Dragon chip') so it can export to the West
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

I take it Fred is in China?

Amigo is to be supported, as he is trying to port to another RISC processor - the ARM

Puppy is mature, flexible and ready for hardware.

Keep us informed. 8)
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#7 Post by amigo »

My package building system makes it really easy to produce packages. It writes a script which is not necessarily arch-specific. Most script work under whatever arch you build. Only when there are arch-specific patches do you even need to have a separate script for a separate arch.
And, I have devised a really easy way to port a whole OS to another arch, without all the complexity of LFS/t2, etc. Basically, if you can get ahold of a Linux system which runs on the architecture, you just need to build 3 packages -twice each- in order to have the new toolchain under a new name or new optimizations. Puppy really should have a Puppy toolchain -not a t2, arch or slackware toolchain. My src2pkg also makes it a snap for even a newbie to build a package which conforms to the packaging standards.

I definitely think that the loongson processors are among those that will reach a large market. I would like to concentrate on porting to processors which are in general use or are going to be. Basically, that means one or more ARM variants, ppc and (one or more) MIPS.

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#8 Post by Lobster »

amigo make sure you have sent Fred a postal address (click on his PM - Private message icon) so he can get hardware to you :)
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fred
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#9 Post by fred »

@Lobster: yes I am in China, and if you remember about 6 months ago I was considering a customized Chinese version of Puppy for educational purpose in Chinese schools.

@Amigo: I got your address. I will be traveling to France on Sunday and will have a machine shipped to you early next week. I'll email you all the details as soon as the machine is sent.

For your reference we're talking about the Gdium, and to answer your question we're building the hardware and the machine will ship with a tailored version of Mandriva Linux. However Dexxon, the company behind the Gdium, has been recruiting people from the Open Source community such as myself and I believe we should have as many distributions running on that machine, or at least the major useful ones in our context.

The project has a lot of very interesting sides and I have really been impressed about how a private company totally unknown from the OSS world is willing to go so far into that direction.

Anyway thanks a lot for the support.

Fred

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#10 Post by amigo »

Nice looking hardware there, with a nice balance between size, speed etc. The concept of having all data on an external drive is not new to me. The last distro I was working on before now, was doing exactly that excpet it was for running from whatever hardware you plugged it into. Doing that for a specific machine will be much easier and can be lots smaller since we won't need so many drivers. I'm looking forward to seeing and working with this. Since it already has mandriva running on it, it should be much easier to get things going with a custom lightweight distro.

fred
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#11 Post by fred »

Hi! I tried to email you but not sure whether it reached you. Did you make any progress since last year? I have been busy like hell and hope all is fine with you.

I also got contacted by someone else interested in the project so it'd be great to have more than one maintainer for this MIPS port.

Let us know when you have time.

Thanks

Fred

amigo
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#12 Post by amigo »

Sorry Fred, my email account was changed to being a gmail account and I had lots of mail 'lost' in the spam folder. I've replied to your email and CC'ed Fred Finster.


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#14 Post by Lobster »

@Lobster: yes I am in China, and if you remember about 6 months ago I was considering a customized Chinese version of Puppy for educational purpose in Chinese schools.
Only just seen this, my apologies :oops:

Puppy is ideal for education.
Like kids we are smaller and faster.
We also have specialized netbook orientated
experience in Puppeee and Fluppy

There is also
We have had a couple of Puppy in hardware
commercial link ups

Can you provide 50 or 100 machines with the latest Dragonchip
to our leading developers and testers?
Gosh I just want a dragonchip because 'Dragonchip inside'
is too cool . . .

The same offer goes for anyone developing an ARM based
mass market netbook.

Lucid 5.2 has high Debian and Ubuntu compatibility.
Making chip transfer far easier.
Transferring to a new chip? Give us the hardware.
We have the geek power.
You might even sponsor Saluki
http://puppysaluki.posterous.com/

Puppy Linux
Ni Hao know how
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Aitch
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#15 Post by Aitch »

Fred

thought this might be useful

http://www.netbooknews.com/12937/2-clas ... in-taipei/

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/20 ... _2010.html

I prefer the look/spec of the Gdium - hope amigo is successful with ArmPuppy port! [he's been toying with this idea for a while, AFAIK]

You'll need to keep an eye on the Apad/Eped devices with dual core Rockchip arm based processor....they run Android, but are selling over here for less than £90 new! [though there may be problems with Apple/google looming...?] [NOTE: avoid the slow 'VIA' VT8505 533MHz ones, the VIAclone chip is a 300mhz, clocked, apparently]

...and the new OLPC 3 by Marvell

http://www.netbooknews.com/12898/olpc-t ... -february/

Hot Market!

Aitch :)

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