Buildroot again

Over the years I have looked at Buildroot a few times:
http://buildroot.uclibc.org/

Those few occasions, when I chose a selection of packages, it would fail partway through compiling. I did once come across a web page that had a collection of .config files that work, but I can't find that now.
And, the way it is setup, a fail meant starting from the beginning again.

The other main problem is that Buildroot does not create any development files (compiler, header files, etc.) in the target. That was a show-stopper for me, but I am now wondering whether it would be possible to write a script that extracts all needed dev files out of the Buildroot build environment.

Anyway, I have decided to play with it again. Often, my mind goes back to the "good old days" when we created really tiny puppies.
I want to play around with building tiny systems.

Just having fun!

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Comments

"...tiny systems."
Username: Sage
Love that music! After looking at DWW yesterday, decided to test LXLE, new on their listings. Sounded good, but a 1.5Gb .iso. Ran it up, full of video bugs and doing less than half a Wary or Racy in twice as much capacity demand and half as slow. Why do they bother?! When you've got a winning formula, milk it. [Shame about Rarin', though - never will be a worthy successor to Precise even if some folks get it to work properly. Not worth your precious intellectual effort? ARM is a better long term prospect based on the extensive publicity and high sales in Europe and Asia.] Keep up the good work.

Buildroot worked
Username: BarryK
"I did a test build, with Midori, it compiled everything. The 'rootfs.tar', when compressed with xz is only 32MB, but I don't think that I have included everything for a viable runtime. It has X.org with Xfbdev only.

also see:-
Username: Sage
"Pidora ! pidora.ca

Wary 6.x
Username: BarryK
"Total change of direction... I am now compiling the latest T2, maybe this will become Wary 6.0. I have configured for a i486 CPU, which I know is very conservative. Also, no devtmpfs or kmod, using the old module-init-tools and udev 167. Very recent gcc, libc. Kernel will be latest 3.2.x -- I reckon will go for this kernel for Wary, as rerwin has been very successful compiling modem drivers for it. Perhaps if this comes to fruition, Wary will have a new lease of life. We will see how far I stick with this one...

f2fs back-ports
Username: BarryK
"Ah, this is good. I want f2fs on the 3.2.x kernel: https://github.com/nowcomputing/f2fs-backports I need to enhance the installed apps to use f2fs, that's on the to-do list. And it will be great if all the pup builds have f2fs-enabled kernels.

A wise decision
Username: mavrothal
"Wary 6.x Yes! I'm sure quad+ cores/4+ GB RAM owners will be "devastated" that their machine will not run yet another 10 fempto-seconds faster, but an updated T2 with a recent long-term-support kernel, looks like a true puppy. Compact, diverse, competent, secure, up-to-date and capable to revive the millions of dying P4/M/Duos, while still a couple of fempto-seconds faster in the i7/8GB and latter machines.

and something else to shrink with
Username: scsijon
"aboriginal (a micro cross-compiling ?system) are considering changing to musl-libc, apparently it's a wopping 100k in size compiled. I wonder if it's worth you having a look at, even if just for quirky as I suspect pet packages may need rebuilding for full blown use. I built a aboriginal-i486.pet for people to play with and with goingnuts help I am planning a puppy. going back to musl-libc and to quote them: Say it like “mussel” or “muscle” Provides the standard C/POSIX library and extensions Licensed under permissive MIT license Use it on Linux x86, x86_64, ARM, MIPS, Microblaze, PowerPC Use it for the next generation of Linux-based devices

Chinese language
Username: don570
" Check if Chinese language appears in Start menu. Install an icake pet package http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=82937 [IMG]http://i1176.photobucket.com/albums/x323/don570/screenshot-bug-fontsraring_zps15c73329.png[/IMG]

Question for BK
Username: Dewbie
"[b]BarryK wrote:[/b] [i]Very recent gcc, libc. Kernel will be latest 3.2.x -- I reckon will go for this kernel for Wary[/i] Does this mean no more ISA support?

ISA
Username: BarryK
"ISA support will be retained.

Chinese in Raring
Username: don570
" I was able to get the Chinese characters to show in Raring start menu by adding some code by Barry in the pinstall.sh script of the language pack made by icake. [code]I added to pinstall.sh I got from Barry Kauler momanager puts in pinstall.sh when a language pack is created #120924 DejaVu font no good for non-Latin languages... #see also similar code in /usr/local/petget/hacks-postinstall.sh. LANGPACKLANG=zh case $LANGPACKLANG in zh*|ja*|ko*) #chinese, japanese, korean sed -i -e 's%DejaVu Sans%Sans%' ./etc/xdg/templates/_root_* if [ -d ./root/.jwm ];then sed -i -e 's%DejaVu Sans%Sans%' ./root/.jwm/themes/*-jwmrc sed -i -e 's%DejaVu Sans%Sans%' ./root/.jwm/jwmrc-theme fi [ -d ./etc/xdg/openbox ] && sed -i -e 's%DejaVu Sans%Sans%' ./etc/xdg/openbox/*.xml [ -d ./root/.config/openbox ] && sed -i -e 's%DejaVu Sans%Sans%' ./root/.config/openbox/*.xml GTKRCFILE="$(find ./usr/share/themes -type f -name gtkrc | tr '\n' ' ')" for ONEGTKRC in $GTKRCFILE do sed -i -e 's%DejaVu Sans%Sans%' $ONEGTKRC done if [ -d ./root/.mozilla ];then MOZFILE="$(find ./root/.mozilla -type f -name prefs.js -o -name '*.css' | tr '\n' ' ')" for ONEMOZ in $MOZFILE do sed -i -e 's%DejaVu Sans%Sans%' $ONEMOZ done fi ;; esac [/code]

Re Chinese langpack
Username: BarryK
"They didn't use MoManager? Hmmm, it would have been better if they had done.

Buildroot, uclibc
Username: Nathan F
"I've played around with buildroot and uClibc a good bit, to immense frustration and an occasional bit of fun. I have a less than favorable impression of buildroot, and also of some other build tools I've tried (like crosstool-ng) based on how often build failures occur and certain other "features" like the ripping out of development material. What eventually did work for me (sort of) was doing a CLFS (Cross Linux From Scratch) build based on uClibc. I followed the experimental embedded book, but then used the resulting cross compiler to build a native uClibc toolchain and system. I managed to build the full Linux From Scratch book with uClibc substituted for Glibc, with some caveats. Certain packages failed entirely and had to be replaced. Man-db was one. I wound up writing a custom manpage viewer just using groff and less. Also, quite a few packages will compile with uClibc but then segfault. I built quite a few packages on top of it anyway, but eventually abandoned the effort as the resulting system was not very useful. My other complaint is that so far none of the uClibc based systems have a very functional or featureful Xorg. That's the showstopper for me. My overall impression - not ready for a production system. I've started checking out Musl, but haven't had success getting my cross compiler to do anything useful yet.

buildroot devpack
Username: scsijon
"sent a querry to peterK over missing dev files and a few other queeries. his reply included: --- We used to have that (BR2_HAVE_DEVFILES), but it has been deprecated for a while and has recently been completely removed. --- He did not seem interested in bringing it back. I've pointed it out that that may be in breach of the gpl since buildroot actually builds packages.

Tags: general