Linux on any device

Building GNU GCC cross-compilers can be a somewhat dark art, and can be quite complicated if you are trying to do it for the first time, and especially frustrating if it is something that you need to do in order to reach some very different goal. Numerous tutorials have been written about how to do this (for various versions of GCC, Binutils and glibc/uclibc), as well as a number of tools, the most famous of which is probably Dan Kegel’s crosstool.

Melas is a generic build assistant tool, which can make this procedure quite easy in some scenarios, given the right mls file that describes the procedure. This post explains how to easily make a gcc cross-compiler with Melas using an existing mls definition file.

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Tags: Melas, Tips and TricksNo Comments »

The Midori Browser is an attractive, lightweight web browser utilizing the WebKit backend. For me, the elegance of the Midori/WebKit combo is something impressive; when compiled and installed, the complete browser runs from two files; one shared library (webkit*.so) and one executable (midori). For me, this is truly refreshing after the “mess” that comes when building/installing Firefox.

The downside? Midori and WebKit are both non-stable, rapidly changing softwares and no binary packages are really available for either. Numerous instructions exist for how to compile these, though. Here’s one more to add to that list, but this time using Melas; and you actually get .deb packages that you can then remove and/or upgrade. These instructions, therefore, assume a .deb -based system. This was tested on Ubuntu 7.04, but shouldn’t (hopefully) be much different for any other recent Ubuntu.
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Tags: Melas, Tips and TricksNo Comments »

Although the Igelle NEO images are still a little bit incomplete in terms of features, they have already given me much joy, and in case you’ll want to try them on your NEO, here’s a quick howto;
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Tags: Igelle, Tips and TricksNo Comments »

Igelle works wonderfully under the KVM virtualizer and can easily be trialled under KVM. Especially since Igelle is not yet quite complete, and you might hesitate to install as a complete replacement for your current OS (and rightfully so), the KVM virtual machine makes it easy to try it out without “causing any damage”. For this, you need to first be running any other Linux distribution (for Windows users, you might want to look at other Windows-based virtualization solutions). Here’s how:

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Tags: Igelle, Tips and TricksNo Comments »

In case you might have liked BarPanel, and/or the way it looks and behaves, and would like to apply it as your default Panel to replace the default gnome-panel, it’s quite easy to do. I’ll try to outline here some of the things necessary to do this on a GNOME desktop (for KDE users, I have no idea; I’ll be happy to post if anyone would like to provide info on this);

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Tags: BarPanel, Tips and Tricks3 Comments »

Unlike many “conventional” Linux distributions, Igelle is very easy to compile from scratch. In fact, this is one of the original design objectives of the OS, in order to facilitate portability as well. The build process is supposed to be almost intuitive, but in this post I’ll introduce the current procedure, and would hereby like to encourage people to try it and post feedback.

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Tags: Development, Igelle, Tips and TricksNo Comments »

Producing deb packages for a piece of software does not necessarily have to be as complicated as it sometimes seems to be. By traditional wisdom, making a deb package takes a fair amount of preparation and maintenance work, as described in (among others) the following howto’s:

• How to make deb packages
• Rolling your own Debian packages
• Make your own packages for Debian-based systems

And of course the infamous..

• Debian New Maintainers’ Guide

Based on these, it looks like creating a deb package is very difficult (at least that was my first impression).

However, if following the Debian project’s internal maintenance process is not of importance (as it probably would not be for those who are producing independent packages), creating the deb installers can be done quickly and with less pain using other tools, such as Melas.

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Tags: Development, Melas, Tips and TricksNo Comments »