looking for mipsel live-cd (or something that boots gentoo)

zaai · Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2004 Posts: 175

Hi,
I'm trying to build Gentoo on a mipsel machine, so I'm looking for a mipsel live-cd.
Sofar I only found the regular mips live-cd (Big Endian).

Alternatively, I can setup a cross-compile toolchain but I've never done this before and the task seems rather daunting. I also don't have weeks to figure it all out.

If someone has a simple howto for crosscompiling a Gentoo environment then I would be happy to try it out. I did find several guides to cross compiling but again, those all require modifying scripts to fit the Gentoo directory structure. I'm not that familiar with Gentoo.
The closest I could find to crosscompiling Gentoo is the 'crossdev' package but that fails with:

Redhatter · Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 11:35 am Post subject:

What sort of machine are you installing Gentoo on?... MIPS machines come in all shapes and sizes, right from the humble IP12 Iris Indigo -- which was SGI's big break into the workstation market, through IP22 Indy/Indigo 2/Challenge S, IP26 Indigo 2 Power, IP28 Indigo 2 Extereme... the IP30 Octane & IP32 O2... and there have been many since. A couple (e.g. the Iris Indigo, Fuel & Tezro) don't run Linux at all (allthough people are working on that), and even the ones that do -- they all require special kernel & userlands to run.

The only supported mipsel-arch platform on Gentoo at the moment is the Cobalt servers (Qube 2, Raq 2, and OEM-branded clones like Seagate NasRAQ & Gateway Microserver). These are Little Endian MIPS IV (QED RM5231 to be exact) -- so if your machine is also MIPS IV, then you might be able to cheat and use a Cobalt userland. If it's a MIPS III however (e.g. R4[046]00-class, or the Toshiba R5900 CPU in the PlayStation 2) you're out of luck. The only thing I can suggest is looking into the buildroot utility on the µClibc website, then cludge a Gentoo userland on top of that.
_________________
Stuart Longland (a.k.a Redhatter, VK4MSL)
I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere...

Gentoo/MIPS Cobalt developer, Mozilla herd member.

zaai · Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2004 Posts: 175

Eh sorry, should have mentioned that.
The box is a broadcom 'Swarm', running MIPS-III
http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/index.php/Swarm

Although by default it runs Big Endian, the intention is to use it to build a mipsel Gentoo system.
It is supposed to be supported by Linux (kernel) and it runs with Debian.
_________________
* most bugs can be reduced to either dependency or state *

Athlon64 X2 4800+ on Asus M2N SLI deluxe with 4GB Dual channel
video nVidia GForce 7300 GS 512MB (snail); xorg-7.2
kernel 2.6.24-gentoo-r3

Redhatter · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 12:13 am Post subject:

Unfortunately you're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Looking around, there's a MIPS III Big Endian stage, and MIPS IV in both Little and Big endian, but there's no MIPS III Little Endian stages anywhere.
IIRC these boxes come with some version of MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux, so you might be able to coax portage onto that and kludge something there, but otherwise there's no clean way to do this.

This is the way I'd approach it.

1. Get the board running some version of Linux -- Debian, Hard Hat, µClinux... whatever.
2. Compile and install portage by hand (the ebuild might be useful here)
3. Put together a chroot environment (called the seed). The buildroot utility on the µClibc website may help here.
4. Configure portage for the little endian MIPS III target
5. Emerge catalyst
6. Use catalyst to produce a few stages that you can use to build up a proper Gentoo system.

Kumba would be the authority as he had to do something similar to get Cobalt servers running. At the time, the only distributions that supported them was Cobalt OS (ancient Linux distro based on Red Hat 5.0 -- purely for use on Cobalt servers) and Debian (even then, it was not an official port).
_________________
Stuart Longland (a.k.a Redhatter, VK4MSL)
I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere...

Gentoo/MIPS Cobalt developer, Mozilla herd member.

zaai · Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2004 Posts: 175

Thanks Redhatter,
So the first step is to get gcc, uclibc and portage running in a chroot environment.
Looks like good advice. I'll give it a try.
_________________
* most bugs can be reduced to either dependency or state *

Athlon64 X2 4800+ on Asus M2N SLI deluxe with 4GB Dual channel
video nVidia GForce 7300 GS 512MB (snail); xorg-7.2
kernel 2.6.24-gentoo-r3