Month: February 2008

I’ve been working on my RPMs for this OS but today I was told that I have been using a very old version. So I have downloaded the latest version that came with it’s own problems. BSL v0.2 is based on a LFS 6.2 and this is out of date. This means that a lot of the dependences needed to be updated before I could start to build RPM5. After 10 hours of various attempts I finally got it to work on my Sunblade 100 running Ubuntu 7.10.

This brings me nicely onto my Sparc64 build. My Sunblade 100 has a 500Mhz Sun UltraSPARC IIe 64bit processor and with a lack of Sparc based linux OS I’ve decided to make a port of BSL for Sparc. It is possible to develop them at the same time because of the learning I will have to do and the speed of which some of the software compiles at. Hopefully BSL v0.3 will be available for both x86 and Sparc64 with RPM package manager to allow easy installation of software.

I’m working on version 0.3 at the moment at it is going to take a while due to the compiling times and getting the configuration right. The main differences between version 0.2 and version 0.3 the introduction of the RPM package manager and all the software is being made from the latest stable version. I am making this from my 0.2 build where I have the RPM package manager installed. I download the source and build it into an RPM file before installing it onto the system. This is taking a while because I have to make a spec file for the RPM package manager to make the package from and I am new to this.

With a package manager in place it will be much easier to add and remove programs to the system and to upgrade to the latest. The software is made on my desktop which is the fastest machine I have access to and can then be installed on my server and other computers. Before I had to compile it on the slower computers too and this would take much longer.