Hi all.

Over here: http://walhalla.puv.fi/~jd/qt_uclibc/ you can download a Gentoo root file system with uClibC 0.9.29 and Qt/Embedded 4.4.1.

With this, the idea is to create a very small and efficient system for the Efika. Some of the possibilities can be seen here: http://www.cloudcity.tv/ in the "Qt Embedded on Efika" video. (an improved video will be created soon).

Please note that the system in question does not use X11 for graphics, but uses the Linux frame buffer. The radeonfb driver is recommended for now, but in the near future it will hopefully use DirectFB.

To boot the system I recommend a NFS server to host the image, but you could just copy it to the hard drive. In any case, remember to change /etc/fstab to point to the right file systems. [edit] Oh, and delete the root password from /etc/shadow.

On the image, all the Qt stuff is in /usr/local/Trolltech, including the demo's you can see in the video. Try the web browser especially :-)

The image is quite big (234MB compressed, 1GB uncompressed), but it contains a lot of files for development and portage distfiles which should be removed in the final version.

If you're interested in helping with this effort, drop me an email or post a reply. Some of the things still to do include compiling mplayer or VLC or... for playing media (together with Alsa, etc.), get DirectFB to work (which will require a recompile of Qt as well), and scale the image size back as far as possible. Also, SSL support should be compiled in into Qt, but I skipped that for now due to some compilation errors, probably nothing serious.



Johan.

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Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

That is great work Johan. Thank you.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Was this just the demo browser as in the video, or the latest Arora? :)

Either way, it's still pretty neat :D
234MB compressed is pretty impressive. Consider a squashfs filesystem in NAND flash, we have an OS even with development files which will fit in 256MB.. all the more left for user storage!
We should look into the Qt media player demo; using Phonon and the Xine backend or even the default GStreamer, might be an easier task than getting Mplayer to work on Qt Embedded.

At least with GStreamer the modules are pluggable and we can change backends to whatever is the best at the time (hopefully not gstreamer as it includes GLib as a dependency, *spit*)

All in all, absolutely fantastic. I look forward to seeing how this develops..

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Matt Sealey

Hi.


The demo - Arora is in the works :-)
Already did :-)
Thing is, Phonon compiles fine, the demo media player compiles and runs too. I just need time to compile GStreamer with uClibc etc. Or Xine. Mplayer should be no problem either by the way (I remember that I did this before...)


Johan.

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Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Hi.

Anyone care to build a TinyGentoo (http://gentoo-wiki.com/TinyGentoo) with uClibc 0.9.29 for Efika?


Best regards,
Johan

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Hi.

You can find a new version of the image here:
http://walhalla.puv.fi/~jd/qt_uclibc/basic.tar.gz

The image has shrunk in size (now 125MB). Unpacked, it is 855MB, but 474MB of that is /usr/portage. This can be removed to instantly shrink the install by 50%.
Development tools (gcc, distcc, etc.) are still present.

One thing though: the previous image had some issues due to the uClibc latest version (0.9.29) which meant that some tools didn't work anymore (segfaulting).
This has been worked around with in this version by installing the libraries that Qt needs in /root/lib/. In order to start a demo, one would launch it by pointing LD_LIBRARY_PATH to this directory, for instance:
All the Qt stuff is still under /usr/local/Trolltech.
The base system is basically a Gentoo stage 3 embedded.

The uClibc issues can be fixed by compiling the entire base system against the latest uClibc. Not exactly a big deal really, just takes some time.


Furthermore, I've added a video here:
http://www.cloudcity.tv/index.php?optio ... link&id=22
It shows what the other video showed, but should be a bit more clear and smooth.



Johan.

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

For those folks that complained Linux was too slow on the EFIKA (when run with a GUI), this work proves otherwise. There is great benefit for all those people who want to use the EFIKA as a media player/browser/e-mail program, etc. using this code. Almost all the applications here: http://www.qt-apps.org and more can run fast and efficiently on the EFIKA.

If you want a faster EFIKA (for a Project or ???), you can have one now. Why not give it a try and let us know what you think.

Again, nice work, Johan!

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Just finished extracting basic.tar.gz, but I can't find a bootable kernel inside. At least /boot is empty. Is it somewhere else? Or could you post that too?

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

I just used my 2.6.25.11 SuSE kernel and copied the modules across.. but the image is meant to use the FAE kernel (see the Freescale demos below Platform Support, on the front page :) isn't it?

_________________
Matt Sealey

Hi.

a suitable kernel can be found here:
http://walhalla.puv.fi/~jd/qt_uclibc/kernel_efika_v4l


Best regards,
Johan

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

This is almost exactly what I did, but I used the kernel from 10.3 instead, as my other choice was factory, and that was pretty broken the last time I checked it. Once it booted, it is surprisingly fast!

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Hi Peter.

Boot times can be lowered a lot still. I will be working on that as soon as I have another couple of apps running on the system.


Best regards,
Johan

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Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Hello R&B,

Not a complain : just facts. Linux + X + whatever is slow. Linux + direct framebuffer is way faster without any doubts.

I wait for a packed install to give a try.

Will it be as reactive as morphos?

Anyway, good job. :)

MorphOS runs very well on the EFIKA. We did not mean to suggest otherwise. We are looking forward to the next MorphOS release.

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Hi Johan,

Just tried your image on my Efika and it works very well, indeed the Qt browser works much better than eg. Firefox even with unaccelerated framebuffer as it is.

Just one suggestion: perhaps you'd like to add a DHCP client to your image :)