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Kumba
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'll check this. It'll be awhile though, as I haven't merged apache on my cobalt, so the buildtime may take a bit.

Offhand, I woulda thought it'd be a USE flag to enable/disable this, but I'm not too sure. NIS is part of glibc if I'm not mistaken. I'll try to build php and see what it does.


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 26, 2004 9:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Kumba wrote:
I'll check this. It'll be awhile though, as I haven't merged apache on my cobalt, so the buildtime may take a bit.


I really appreciate this. Apache took a lot less time to merge than I expected. Only a few hours. PHP compiled from source was even quicker.

Philip
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Kumba
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 26, 2004 10:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I built apache-1.3.29, php-4.3.4, and its associated deps w/o any problems. Took forever, though. Apache was the quick compile, but having to build mod_php (for apache) and then standard php took longer than expected.

I posted bz2's of the packages here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~kumba/mips/cobalt/tmppkg/

Lemme know how they work.


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 29, 2004 5:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Kumba wrote:
I built apache-1.3.29, php-4.3.4, and its associated deps w/o any problems


Any reason why you used the 1.3 Apache tree? I've got the v2 tree working. Might this explain why I got the weird PHP YP/NIS dependancy?

I won't have a chance to install these until the end of the week as I'm out and about with potential clients.

Philip
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2004 4:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Philip de Lisle wrote:
Kumba wrote:
I built apache-1.3.29, php-4.3.4, and its associated deps w/o any problems


Any reason why you used the 1.3 Apache tree? I've got the v2 tree working. Might this explain why I got the weird PHP YP/NIS dependancy?

I won't have a chance to install these until the end of the week as I'm out and about with potential clients.

Philip


I got those same errors with 1.3.29-r1 :\

I had some fun setting this Qube2 up though :D
Making a 2.4.25 kernel small enough was quite a challenge.. and damn compiling takes forever on that machine. It only has 16 MB of RAM as we speak. I'm planning on bumping it to 128 MB though.

I had to compile every little thing that *could* be a module as a module.

from /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.4

rtc
mips_rtc
ext2
af_packet
netlink_dev
unix
tulip
appletalk
nls_cp437
nls_cp863
nls_iso8859-15
nls_utf8


Just a little question, does the firmware look for
vmlinux.gz or vmlinux_raq-2800.gz ?

I know when you do a netboot it uses the 2nd one but what about booting from the drive? I always end up putting both just to make sure.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2004 8:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Francis85 wrote:
Just a little question, does the firmware look for
vmlinux.gz or vmlinux_raq-2800.gz ?


vmlinux.gz for a disk boot

Philip
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Kumba
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 02, 2004 9:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Okay, some updates. Ya'll are going to like these.

First, Peter Horton seems to have publicly unveiled his bootloader, even though I've sorta had an advanced preview of it for some time. You can found a tarball here which includes binaries in it, which I recommend using for the time being. I'll get around to trying to build an ebuild out of it shortly and testing to see if it'll boot when built with modern gcc/gentoo tools.

The plus side is in the 1.4 release, Peter added a "chain loader" which lets you boot the bootloader from the existing cobalt bootloader so you don't risk nuking your flash chip. If later on down the line, you feel like permanently switching, you can flash the bootloader in. I won't explain the documentation aspects here, there's plenty of documentation inside to explain things.

As for 2.6 sources, mips-sources-2.6.3 has cobalt patches that allow it to bootup and work. Just make sure you have the cobalt profile in use, or if you want to cross-compile them, pass PROFILE_ARCH="cobalt" to the emerge/ebuild command to get it to apply the cobalt patches.

Bootloader + misc info:
http://www.colonel-panic.org/cobalt-mips/

//------------------------


Now as for apache and crew, Not to sure there. I got preoccupied the last few days, so I haven't paid attention to this thread for a bit. I primarily built apache-1.x cause it's what I've always used. Just haven't gotten unlazy enough to bother switching to apache2.

NIS, if I recall, seems to be an integral part of glibc, so if NIS isn't working, it may indicate a bug in glibc itself, or a bug in the way things are setup. Maybe a bug in PHP that only appears on mipsel systems. Dunno really, that one will need some looking into, although I'm gonna have to switch the cobalt over to stage building in a couple days (2004.1 is around the corner).

After 2004.1 is out the door, I'll be able to take a closer look at the issue, cause I got that funny feeling I'm going to be fighting all of my machines to play nice with me and build stages. If someone here manages to trace it down, post here or file a bug on bugs.gentoo.org, and I'll address it.

//------------------------


Francis85: You won't have to worry about the size limitation issue anymore if you use the newer bootloader. It eliminates that, cause with 2.4, I'm beginning to think 2.4.25 is the end of the line for the cobalt, cause it's just getting hideously impossible to crunch that kernel size down much more. Especially if you try and build a netbootable kernel.


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PostPosted: Fri Apr 02, 2004 11:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Heya,
Like everyone else, I'm tired of using outdated software on my Qube2.

I've used CobaltOS, Debian (for abrief time), and I'm currently on NetBSD. But I want to run the newer software and I just don't know the other systems well enough to get away with it.

Anyways, my question is if someone is going to make a bootable CD that will do a net-install of Gentoo (probably a stage 3 or something) over a network?

Thanks for all the time and hard work everyone has put into it so far!
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Kumba
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 02, 2004 5:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

gartnix wrote:
Heya,
Like everyone else, I'm tired of using outdated software on my Qube2.

I've used CobaltOS, Debian (for abrief time), and I'm currently on NetBSD. But I want to run the newer software and I just don't know the other systems well enough to get away with it.

Anyways, my question is if someone is going to make a bootable CD that will do a net-install of Gentoo (probably a stage 3 or something) over a network?

Thanks for all the time and hard work everyone has put into it so far!


That is something probably down the line. Not sure when, but it's a possibility one day. It'd just be a modification of an x86 livecd to contain mipsel GRP packages/stages, among other things.


--Kumba
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2004 1:24 am    Post subject: Where is root? Reply with quote

I'm almost there. I'm also nearly in fits over this. :-)

I have booted my raq2 using the debian-netboot, and after some jiggery-pokery with bzips and tars, got Kumba's stage3-mips4-..0131 installed.

Copied over the kernel from Kumba's kernel directory, loosed the modules tarfile into /lib/modules, and rebooted.

I've got Peter Horton's bootloader working in chain mode, but that can't seem to pass arguments on to the kernel. For some reason, the kernels I have downloaded insist on using /dev/hda5 for root. Fine, no biggie. I repartiton, and make hda5 my root. install, reboot again.

Ahh. the familiar:
Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 03:05

but above it, no matter what i pass to it using the chainloader:
command line: console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/hda5

ack?
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Kumba
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2004 4:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

With the new bootloader, you do something like this:

> mount

> load <kernel>

> execute console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/<whatever>

The above should work off the bat for you. I'm going to mess around with the script feature that the bootloader looks for and see if I can't setup a few example scripts for people. I'll also have a default script with the ebuild that will drop to the bootloader command prompt (if that's possible to do).


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PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2004 7:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Got that one. I've even got a default.boot script picking up the correct kernel and booting it (just for sanity's sake, here's mine:)

#cat default.boot
mount /dev/hda1
load cobalt-kernel-2.4.22.gz
execute console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/hda5

I've even tried changing the root entry to something silly like root=/dev/wocket, and the kernel still doesn't seem to pick it up.

There's also a command called 'arguments' in the bootloader, i've tried using that as well (just add another line: arguments root=/dev/hda5 console=etc) both in the script and the bootloader. nada. yer kernel just loves /dev/hda5.

Incidentally, this is fantastic work. I've been thinking about how much of a grind this would be, and your work has taken much of the headache out of the setup. BIG THANKS. :D

PS: Got one of those nifty new 2.6 kernels to share? ;-)
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Kumba
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Okay, the bootloader is in portage under sys-boot/colo. Its official name is COLO, or COablt Linux lOader. It'll get auto installed with your next world update most likely because I added it to the default cobalt profile (it won't affect the current boot setup of a running machine, there are still a few manual steps like copying chain.bin from /usr/lib/colo).

shadowlost: As for 2.6 kernels, yup, you can merge mips-sources-2.6.x in sys-kernel/mips-sources on the cobalt and it'll automatically apply the needed cobalt patches. If you've used crossdev and setup your own mipsel kernel compiler, you'll need to pass PROFILE_ARCH="cobalt" to the emerge/ebuild command to have it apply the cobalt patches (as well as keyword the ebuild). When you use a 2.6 kernel, you can specify the kernel command line in menuconfig to force the root device. Generally, the root device is on /dev/hda5 because /dev/hda1 is going to be /boot, and this will be true for a large majority of people still running these machines, due to /boot needing to be the special ext2 revision 0 format.

A config for a 2.6.4 kernel can be found here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~kumba/mips/cobalt/kernel/cobalt-config-2.6.4

The above config is aimed at a system running udev, so make sure to add devfs into your config (don't use the above one blindly). Once you're satisfied with 2.6, you can transition to udev too if you want. It works great on the cobalts -- only 44 items in /dev :)

When merging the package, do read the output that the ebuild will print when the package finishes merging. It provides valuable advice to heed. If you miss it for whatever reason, run ebuild /usr/portage/sys-boot/colo/colo-1.4.ebuild postinst, and that'll re-print the info.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 06, 2004 2:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Chalk up another success story.

Running 2.6.4/mips-sources, with minor issue. I had to roll my own kernel and use crossdev (Nice tool!), but it worked in the end. :)

I'm currently emerging the world, and expect this to spin merrily away until sometime late tomorrow night. 64 megs of ram makes for one speedy compiling, yessir.

modules are broken (oops/halt), but I cross compiled module-init-tools. I'm waiting for the emerge to get done to see if a native build fixes it.

Also, I did not specify a default command line in the kernel build, and this new kernel is picking up args without issue.

I don't expect to see any further problems, but i'll be back if there are ;-)

Thanks for all the help, Kumba!
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 4:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

(give a quick bit back)

A super-quick guide to cross compiling cobalt binaries on x86 hosts while using distcc.

(UPDATE: 20040502: whee, ACCEPT KEYWORDS is bad. Did you know that? I didn't know that. We're supposed to use /etc/portage/packages.keywords instead, but i still have no idea how that would relate to this setup, so instead i'm going to shake my head sadly.)

1) emerge distcc on cobalt

2) emerge distcc and crossdev on x86

3) run on x86:
Code:

#PROFILE_ARCH="cobalt" crossdev --arch=mipsel

(if your cobalt make.conf has ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~mips", then also use the '-u' / unstable argument to crossdev as well)

4) create symlinks in /home/crossdev/mipsel/bin (x86)
Code:

#cd /home/crossdev/mipsel/bin
cat > makealias
for f in `ls ./mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu-*`; do  ln -sf $f mipsel-linux-`echo $f | cut -d \- -f 5`; done
for f in `ls ./mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu-*`; do  ln -sf $f `echo $f | cut -d \- -f 5`; done
(Control-D)
#./makealias

(This also creates a set of mipsel-linux-* links for local kernel compiles)

4a) You now have a toolchain to use that (so far for me) seems to work (x86)

5) tell distccd to use a listen on a different port (x86)
Quote:

#cat /etc/conf.d/distccd
# Copyright 2003 Gentoo Technologies, Inc
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/sys-
...
# set this option to run distccd with extra parameters
# Default port is 3632. For most people the default is okay.
DISTCCD_OPTS="--port 5552 --listen=10.0.0.110 -a 10.0.1.60/32"

(In my case, the cobalt is .1.60, the x86 build machine 0.110 and port 5552)

6) tell distccd a spanking explicit path: (x86)
Quote:

# cat /etc/init.d/distccd
#!/sbin/runscript
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/sys-
...
ebegin "Starting distccd"
# PATH="/home/crossdev/mipsel/bin:$(gcc-config --get-bin-path):${PATH}" \
PATH="/home/crossdev/mipsel/bin:/bin:/sbin"
/sbin/start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --startas ${DISTCCD_EXEC} \



7) add distcc and makeopts to make.conf (cobalt)
Code:

FEATURES="ccache distcc"
CCACHE_SIZE="300M"
MAKEOPTS="-j8"

(set makeopts -jX to somewhere between (numcpu)+1 to (numcpu*2)+1)

8) make a hosts file for distcc (cobalt)
Quote:

#distcc
distcc 2.13 mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632)
built Apr 5 2004 05:42:12
Copyright (C) 2002, 2003 by Martin Pool
...
Server specification:
A list of servers is taken from the environment variable $DISTCC_HOSTS, or
the file $HOME/.distcc/hosts, or the file /etc/distcc/hosts.
Each host can be given in any of these forms, see the manual for details:
...
preprocessing are run locally. distcc should be used with make's -jN
option to execute in parallel on several machines.

#cat /etc/distcc/hosts
localhost/1 giles:5552/8 xoe:5552/4

(The hosts specification is: machine:port/jobs. set jobs to ~numcpu+2. Put your hosts in order, fastest to slowest, localhost always first)

9) start distccd on the build boxen (x86)

10) try a build from the cobalt. pray. it might actually work.


This so far, has worked for me. Distcc and emerge have been smart enough to failover to a linear, local build (which the localhost/1 entry more or less does in the hosts file). So far, it's been working when emerge comes across a build it can do in parallel. You might have the occasional hiccup, and have to re-emerge the package, or set MAKEOPTS="-j1" emerge -u blahblah. This was done in a fit of impatience when i emerged my first build of glibc.

ugh.

By setting up a different port, you can set that up to be your mipsel-build port across many machines, and leave the default for x86 or whatever.

The above configs reflect the following buildout:
giles: 4xcpu x86 (max jobs 6)
xoe: 2xcpu x86 (max jobs 4)
cobalt: 1xcpu mipsel (jobs 10 in make.conf)

hope this helps ease the grind. ;)

-shadowlost


Last edited by shadowlost on Sat May 29, 2004 11:47 pm; edited 3 times in total
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 26, 2004 11:09 am    Post subject: Yet another success story... Reply with quote

Hi,
After much arguing with the Debian netboot image and the stage 3 tarball, I managed to get my little Gateway Microserver (Qube 2) up and running.

The kernel was cross compiled on my main machine using crossdev (just the basic toolchain, not the full kit unfortunately -- glibc doesn't like me). I'll eventually emerge samba & apache, as I plan to use this box as a dedicated file server for LANs.

I've dropped an old PCI Adaptec SCSI card into the slot, and the box sits on top of an external SCSI CD-ROM tower which is loaded with 4 hard drives (3x 18GB and a 9.1GB). These drives were originally formatted to FAT32, but a bit of data shuffling later, and I've now got them running ReiserFS. (I did try to use XFS, but xfsprogs wouldn't compile). I clocked the transfer rate between drives at around 4MB/sec (~32 Mbps).

So far, it's been a lot more responsive using Gentoo than it was using Debian. Somehow compiling for an RM5200 CPU rather than baselevel MIPS makes a big difference on these boxes.

With the netboot... I found Kumba's image worked, except using the kernel gave me a corrupted display... the output from the serial console was being garbled. In addition to this, Debian's version of 'tar' seems to not like filenames of over 100 characters. I managed after some struggling to get a basic system on, but I was lacking a lot of files, including some critical for PAM (/etc/pam.d/* -- only sshd got extracted), causing fatal errors when I tried to log in using the serial console. I ended up booting into single user mode and extracting the rest of the archive using Gentoo's 'tar'.

The answer to this netboot issue may be to look into improving the netboot image to allow telnet access (ala, the Debian way -- let's face it, we're using NFS & DHCP for bootup, not exactly the most secure method). I did try to use Debian's version, but in.telnetd had other ideas... I'm thinking of using either the built in one for Busybox, or to get utelnetd going.

I'll keep you posted how I go...
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PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2004 4:59 am    Post subject: Another success. Reply with quote

Well add another raq-2 to the success list.

This is my first gentoo install so getting up to speed was kinda rough...not to mention conglomerating all the docs to get an install setup and working.

Colo works great in chain mode. I don't have it scripted yet but I'll do that shortly. I don't have the cajones to flash it yet though. An oddity is that it (colo-1.9) doesn't seem to fall into the boot-shell from any keyboard input on the console. I have to by-hand select it from the LCD menu, and then mount/load/execute to bring the system up. Otherwise it seems to just keep cycling itself.

Here's a quick rundown of what I did, in hopes that it'll help someone else out.

1 - Follow the netboot instructions linked earlier in this thread
2 - Setup a 100M REVISION 0 partition as HDA1. (mke2fs -r 0 /dev/hda1) This became my /boot.
3 - Setup swap on hda2, and use the rest as hda3, ext3.
4 - I used stage 3 for the install
5 - Tried to follow the instructions as they're laid out on the mips-install page
6 - Removed excess (virtual consoles) from /etc/inittab and fixed ttyS0.
7 - I used rc-config and removed consolefont and fixed/added the rest
8 - Grabbed the 2.6.6 config from Kumba's directory, unmasked 2.6.6 and built the kernel using his config. I did change the "Kernel Hacking --> Default kernel string" to say root=/dev/hda3. I also moved most modules into the kernel. Start the compile and go do something else for 2.5 hours.
9 - Emerged shadow to fix broken console login.
10 - Emerged udev
11 - mkdir /sys
12 - NOTE - Doing an emerge -u portage will cause gcc/glibc and perhaps other packages (I went to bed and my serial console was kinda hosed-up so I couldn't see the output well) to be rebuilt so be prepared, if you do this, for a long long wait. I figure it took between 20-24 hours to finish.

I may have missed something but essentially #6 and #8 --> #12 are worth noting if it even helps one person out.

Thanks Kumba for the work and the online help.

Now, has anybody done work with the LCD and panel buttons?

sedawkgrep


Last edited by sedawkgrep on Wed May 19, 2004 5:42 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2004 5:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

With the buttons, buttond is the tool you want. It's part of the sys-apps/lcdutils package.

Unfortunately, all you can specify is the messages to appear on the bottom line. The basic menu is hard-coded into the binary.

To set it up...

/etc/conf.d/local.start:
Code:
# Start buttond
buttond [i]messages to scroll on LCD[/i] &


/etc/conf.d/local.stop:
Code:
# Stop buttond
killall buttond

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PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2004 11:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just tried it really quickly and putlcd does allow you to use both lines:

putlcd LINE1 LINE1

putlcd "this goes on top" "this goes on bottom"

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PostPosted: Wed May 19, 2004 4:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

buttond displays the date and whatever text I supply...

But the buttons don't work for me. (raq-2)

Anybody else experience this? I know the buttons do work - I used them to netboot and navigate colo....
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PostPosted: Thu May 20, 2004 10:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hold down SELECT for a few seconds... it should pop up with:
Code:
  Admin Menu 
< EXIT MENU  >


or something to that effect... Scrolling left/right should reveal a HALT and RESET menu item.
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PostPosted: Sat May 22, 2004 1:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ahh that works - good deal.
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PostPosted: Mon May 24, 2004 6:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'll admit I haven't messed around with the lcdutils package in quite some time, so I had to check for myself what buttonsd did. I guess that rules buttonsd out as a useful utility. Maybe if I get time this summer, I'll study how buttonsd works, and see if I can't write soem kind of quagmire in C and see if I can't make something that listens for button input and performs various actions based upon the commands given. I believe the CobaltO2 stuff did something similar (letting you select the IP, etc..), but I dunno.

Any volunteers wanna offer ideas, like if such a utility already exists for other LCD-based applications?


--Kumba
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Joined: 20 Sep 2003
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Location: Brisbane, QLD, Australia

PostPosted: Mon May 24, 2004 1:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The idea I had would be to create a buttond implementation where instead of everything being hard coded, it allowed you to define the menus through a configuration file.

IMHO XML would make it reasonably easy to do something like this:
Code:
<buttond>
  <section name="Administration">
    <section name="Network Interfaces">
      <section name="eth0">
        <item name="DHCP Release/Renew">
          kill `cat /var/run/dhcpcd-eth0.pid`
          dhcpcd eth0
        </item>
        <section name="Static Configuration">
          <item name="IP Number" type="ipv4addr">
            ifconfig eth0 inet $ADDR
          </item>
          <item name="Netmask" type="ipv4addr">
            ifconfig eth0 netmask $ADDR
          </item>
          <item name="Broadcast" type="ipv4addr">
            ifconfig eth0 broadcast $ADDR
          </item>
          <item name="Default Gateway" type="ipv4addr">
            route add -net 0.0.0.0/0 gw $ADDR
          </item>
        </section>
      </section>
      <!-- similar for eth1 -->
    </section>
    <section name="Shutdown">
      <item name="Halt">
        /sbin/halt
      </item>
      <item name="Reboot">
        /sbin/reboot
      </item>
    </section>
  </section>
</buttond>


The item tag could behave a number of ways to allow for yes/no answers, entering IPV4 addresses... (perhaps IPV6 as well -- but the screen will be small for this), text/numeric entry (tedious), menus, etc. The contents of the item tag could be the script that is run when the item is selected. Variables would be set (e.g. $ADDR in that example, for yes/no selections... $SELECT could be set.).

A useful feature (at least for me) would be for it to display stats such as its current IP, traffic levels, disk usage, etc... scrolled on the rear panel. I did have a hack using a perl script and putlcd which did exactly this....but I was not able to make use of the buttons.

Another useful idea would be to simplify the API used, to say allow for scripts to be programmed in Perl/Python...etc. Either that, or create a sort of "dialog" clone which uses the LCD panel and would allow Bash scripts and the like to make full use of the panel. This actually might prove to be a better idea than the one above (or could be used to implement the above idea).

Just some thoughts...

UPDATE: With my rather limited C knowledge, I managed to hack up buttond to create two new utilities.... asklcd_yesno -- which as the name suggests, gives you a yes/no prompt, and asklcd_menu, which gives you a menu prompt. Both are intended to be very simple.... they pop up the menu, and on selection, asklcd_yesno will return an exit status of either 0 (yes) or 1 (no). asklcd_menu spits out the selected item on STDOUT.

This is just the beginning, I'll see what I can do here, but my time at the moment is limited with university study. (I've got exams & assignments looming up :roll:).

Is there anyone currently maintaining the lcdutils package?
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I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere...

Gentoo/MIPS Cobalt developer, Mozilla herd member.
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hobbes27
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 11 Apr 2003
Posts: 87
Location: Germany

PostPosted: Thu May 27, 2004 7:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Im not new to gentoo but to the raq2.
I think i miss a straight documentation how to install gentoo on the cobalt-maschine. As i understood, i need the debian-mips-cdrom to boot from. Or i have to implement the netboot-functionality. But i simply don't know how to interact with the cobalt-bootmanager to change the boot-medium :-/. Can somebody give me a hint where to find a documentation about that?
If i connect the serial cable to get the bootmessages, how do i have to configure the other side (x86-gentoo)?

Sorry if the questions are a bit stupid...
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