Hello,
it has been a while since I posted an update to this list. One of the
reasons is that I have moved to China. This is a big change, but also
a big chance. I still need to find my bearings and employment, but now
I also had to time to meet up with Wolfgang from Qi Hardware and
Loongson.
Updates
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Qi Hardware is a project to do copyleft hardware, meaning that all the
schematics and software are open sourced. One of their platforms is
the Nanonote, which is a small PDA-form factor device running on a
Ingenic X-burst processor. This is a MIPS-compatible processor and has
proven to be able to run Linux. The current model provides too little
memory to host a full Fedora distribution, but later models will use
an improved Ingenic processor. We are investigating if it is possible
to port our distribution to this next processor/platform.
I also had the opportunity to meet up with the people at Loongson as
they are based in Beijing. We had a very open minded talk about our
Fedora vision and what the vision of Loongson is. They have offered us
some machines to aid us in our port and hope we can collaborate on
other levels in the future by providing a stable distribution and
build the Fedora brand in China.
This leaves us with talking about the actual distribution. We had
several test builds (F11 and F12) since we started around March and
are now focusing on getting out F13 first. We hope this won't be a
lengthy process. Currently this is still done on a single machine, but
we will have a rootfs with the F13 build toolchain for the other
machines to speed up the rest of the process. As you can see, we are
working on our build infrastructure and streamlining our build
process. When the test release is done, we will be submitting our
patches.
Questions
---
We still have an issue to which we would like your advice. We are
currently building our distribution as N32 for MIPS Little Endian
(mipsel), but this is not reflected in our package naming. Maybe over
time we could consider creating packages for the other ABIs, like O32
and N64, or even creating a Big Endian release. We would need to be
able to indicate this in our generated packages. Just let us hear what
your take on this is. Feel free to forward this message to people you
think can help us in making a good decision.
We would also like to know how people are using the current release
and if they had any good (or maybe even bad) experience with it.
Looking forward to this.
Kind regards,
Gerard and the MIPS team
--
Gerard Braad β εζεΎ·
Project-lead Fedora-MIPS
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:gbraad