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For the last few weeks I have been playing around with some pretty exotic hardware (and also have been coding in some new languages C++ and C#), mainly Samsung Q1 and Sony Vaio UX-280P and of course trying to install Gentoo Linux on them
Both machines are quite sweet, but share one big problem: driver support for these is quite bad…
For Samsung Q1, the missing piece after all the hassle is the problematic wireless driver (I had some success with Madwifi stuff, but it is not 100% working yet), and latest kernel didn’t fully support the sound card. Fortunately the Alsa guys had got it working so after some digging I had to apply a small patch to the main kernel tree.
For Sony Vaio, things were slightly worser - no sound, no camera, no WWAN and no fingerprint reader…
So far, I have managed to fix the sound output/input, thanks again to the marvelous ALSA guys (backported patch). And also about 1/3 of the camera functionality is working, which means that you can actually see the camera output I found out that there is an almost working camera driver, so I actually only had to extract the microcode (download) from the original windows driver and it worked…

I did it

Kudos to Jumpula from the office who showed me where to get the latest arm toolchain which was able to build this beast

Patch here…

As some of you already know, I received a developer discount code for the N800, but due to busy days I haven’t had much time to look into the development stuff… First I tried out the vmware image containing the SDK, but development like this felt quite slow… So I ditched the vmware stuff and started my quest to get the SDK working natively inside Gentoo

First, you need to install the basic scratchbox stuff… Fortunately there are ebuilds available for all the required packages in the sunrise overlay, so just enable this overlay, sync it and install the following packages:

USE="arm i386" emerge -pv scratchbox \\
scratchbox-devkit-debian scratchbox-devkit-perl \\
scratchbox-devkit-cputransp  scratchbox-devkit-doctools  \\
scratchbox-toolchain-cs2005q3_2-glibc

After the scratchbox base system had been installed, the next thing you had to was to download the Maemo SDK packages and put them into /scratchbox/packages.
Then follow the official installation Howto to set up targets until you reach the section where it talks how to create the virtual packages. This was the part that was quite tricky…
Because Gentoo doesn’t have any debian build stuff I first had to install the “equivs” package. What I did was that I searched for debian’s equivs package and installed it:

fakeroot dpkg --ignore-depends=perl \\
--ignore-depends=debhelper --ignore-depends=make \\
--ignore-depends=dpkg-dev --ignore-depends=devscripts \\
-i equivs_2.0.7_all.deb

Now that I had the equivs package, I cooked up a generate virtuals script which created all the required .debs for me…and saved these in the new directory called tmp.
And finally I could just install all the packages with following command:

fakeroot dpkg -i tmp/*.deb

Yay… Finished… and stumbled upon a buggy compiler…

[SRC] Compiling misc_gui.cpp
/home/amd/code/openttd/src/misc_gui.cpp: In function `void CheatsWndProc(Window*, WindowEvent*)':
/home/amd/code/openttd/src/misc_gui.cpp:1912: error: unrecognizable insn:
(insn:HI 308 304 1258 11 /home/amd/code/openttd/src/variables.h:367 (set (mem/s:SI (plus:SI (mult:SI (subreg:SI (reg:DI 169) 0)
                    (const_int 4 [0x4]))
                (reg/f:SI 160)) [4 _decode_parameters S4 A32])
        (subreg:SI (reg:DI 169) 0)) -1 (nil)
    (expr_list:REG_EQUAL (const_int 0 [0x0])
        (nil)))
/home/amd/code/openttd/src/misc_gui.cpp:1912: internal compiler error: in extract_insn, at recog.c:2083
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
Send email to arm-gnu@codesourcery.com for instructions.

There were also problems with nss-mdns stuff, but I don’t remember exactly which files I had to edit to fix it. Hopefully the future versions of Scratchbox support the nss-mdns library out of the box…

For the past two evenings I have been helping out Gentoo’s Mozilla herd with testing the broken NSPR package and I am not impressed. Although last december Mozilla had agreed to collaborate with distros (story), I personally haven’t seen any difference. As a comment in NSPR ebuild states:

Their build system is royally fucked, as usual

And the latest tarballs which contain CVS dirs… Ah.. too tired… But still, a big “Thanks!” to the Mozilla Foundation for the $500 security bounty check

Boarded ship yesterday at 9o’clock, arrived to Tallinn at midnight and took a 7.45 bus to Kuressaare…

Now I only need to set up set the USB-networking between my n800 and laptop… (…or hack into neighbours access point)