T2 progress

I mentioned yesterday that I was having a go at doing a compile in T2, with a possible outcome of the next-generation Wary.

It has been a very slow process. Unfortunately, not many people use T2, so many packages fail to compile. Rene, the creator and main T2 developer, does upgrade packages regularly, however they are not (necessarily) actually tested in a complete build. Well, I find that many of them simply don't compile, and then I have to try and figure out why.

The T2 mail-list is normally extremely quiet, but isn't at the moment, as I am flooding it with questions.

Right now, a second build is underway, to test changes that I made on the first go. Looking good so far.

There are still many apps that won't compile, but I will tackle those second time around.

T2 project site:
http://t2-project.org/

T2 mail-list archive:
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.t2.devel

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Comments

t2
Username: aarf
just some questions from the peanut gallery. [code]Unfortunately, not many people use T2[/code] why not? what do they use instead? why doesnt puppy use that instead? or why is t2 better for puppy?

Re T2
Username: BarryK
"T2 is for distro developers. It is not a distro itself. It is for compiling packages from source, then create your own distro. Some puppies are based on packages compiled in T2, such as the old 2.x series, some variants of 4.x, and Wary/Racy. The purpose of compiling from source is mainly to reduce dependencies, and hence size, to a minimum. There is also likely to be speed optimisation. For example, I am avoiding the packages 'icu' and 'llvm' that we are forced to include in all recent pups based on Ubuntu DEBs. They are incredibly enormous packages.

One like Barry - Ren
è Rebe"FeodorF" http://rene.rebe.de/

Re Rene
Username: BarryK
"I didn't know he had a website. Just had a bit of a read through recent blog posts.

Felix von Leitner
Username: FeodorF
" Useful page too http://www.fefe.de/

gtkdialog-splash + rounded corners in Raring-5.6.94
Username: charlie6
"Hi Barry, sorry if being irrelevant to this T2 thread ... My question: please, how to get (such nice shaped...) rounded corners windowboxes using /usr/bin/gtkdialog-splash in raring-5.6.94 ? Here googling accross the web + custom-googling Puppy's forum + scratching my hair (hope there will be some left ..!) did not succeed ... :-( Cheers from Belgium ! Charlie

T2 build #3
Username: BarryK
"Now on the third build. In build #2 I changed a few package versions, so now doing a complete recompile. For example, I rolled xorg-server back from version 1.13 to 1.12.4, as some xf86-video-* drivers would not compile. With 1.13, the XAA architecture has been dropped, which some video drivers use. Unfortunately, some (three, I think, maybe more) still do. Including the SiS driver -- and I know there are a lot of old and not-so-old PCs out there still in use with SiS video. I did a quick google to find out about this dropping of XAA, and it seems maybe some of those xf86-video- drivers will never get updated. Well, one hopes they will. Anyway, I rolled back to 1.12.4, the last version that supports XAA. After all this work, I feel as though I have to follow through and create Wary 6.0. It will be a good base for many years ahead, as it has the very latest glibc (2.17) and gcc (4.7.3). Plus of course many other recent libraries and utilities. Actually, I see on the gcc website that the latest is 4.8.1, but 4.7.3 is the latest "maintained release".

Re rounded corners
Username: BarryK
"Yes, rounded corners on windows without "decorations" (that's what they call the border and title-bar of windows). It comes with the latest JWM automatically, you don't have to do anything. It sure looks much nicer!

Re XAA
Username: FeodorF
" Thank you very much Barry! You will save all of them: apm ark ast chips cirrus cyrix geode glide glint i128 i740 impact imstt neomagic newport nsc nv r128 radeonhd rendition s3 s3virge savage siliconmotion sis sisusb sunffb tdfx tga trident tseng vermilion via voodoo xgi xgixp. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA0NDg

Re XAA
Username: BarryK
"Yes, T2 build #3, they have all compiled, except for xf86-video-intel, which has a problem compiling inside the T2 chroot environment -- I will compile it later, after I built Wary 6.0-pre-alpha.

Racy6 works
Username: BarryK
"OK, I have built Racy6, and it works. However, I discovered that I had accidentally left out the 'xz' package in the T2 build. There may be some packages that would have benefited from that library, so it looks like I will have to do a "build #4" in T2. But, I might upload the pre-alpha of Racy6, as I want to find out what range of old hardware it will run on. Testers will be most welcome to give it a spin. I do want to redesign the PPM, as per yesterday post, might have a go at that first, before uploading Racy6. Oh yes, I also have to compile a kernel specially for it.

Tags: general