Gentoo on mips-RTD1261

harakiri · n00b Joined: 26 Jun 2008 Posts: 1

I 'm trying to deploy Gentoo on my brand new Emtec Movie-Cube R700.
The Movie-Cube is a mips little endian based Realtek rtd1261 processor machine.
Out of the box, it comes with a real lyold version of Busybox (1.1.3). Sadly, the manufacturer keeps the machine closed source, although they are not allowed to.
Anyway, that as an intro, I 'm trying to install Gentoo on it from a stage3 tarball in a chroot environment.
I downloaded and tried several tarballs (2008 for mipsel4 and mipsel1, 2007 for mipsel4) created for the Cobalts from http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter/mips/cobalt/
Chrooting to it after an unpack works, but only to a certain degree: common command like rm, du, find, ... exit with an error "Unknown error 4294967207"
I googled for this and stumbled upon very little information about. There 's 1 topic on this forum that handles about it but it won 't solve my case I fear.
A more or less workaround for the problem is to remove the affected binaries and create symlinks to busybox for them. Sadly enough, busybox is too limited and several tools like emerge depend on commands with flags like "find -uname", which don 't work with the busybox version.
Now, I know there 's no people around here with Gentoo experience on this type of machine and I must be the first one ever to try and install Gentoo on it.
So my modest question is: can somebody put me in the right direction to solve this? Stuff like sshd work, I probably need to recompile the binutils. Could I have more luck crosscompiling? Any advice on compiler flags I should set?

Thanks in advance
Tom

P.S.: Although I know my way around Linux (got my own distro), I 'm not a programmer, merely at most a userland scripter, so be kind ;-)

Redhatter · Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 11:49 am Post subject:

That problem is caused by the kernel being too old... some system calls got changed between 2.6.1x and 2.6.21, which caused libraries built against the newer kernel headers to break when they were used on an older kernel.

Not a hell of a lot I can do for you unfortunately, as I wouldn't have a clue where to start in terms of upgrading the kernel on one of those devices.
_________________
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.

armanox · n00b Joined: 03 Jan 2008 Posts: 36 Location: Baltimore, MD

Wouldn't there be a way for him to just build the libraries and whatnot against the old kernel for it to work then? And can we give him an old kernel to use?

Redhatter · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 3:14 am Post subject:

There is... but it's not trivial as it'll involve setting up cross-compilers, and using compatible kernel headers with the kernel he's running.

We don't support these devices for a very good reason -- it's a lot of muck-around to get them working/doing useful things. The stages are provided as a starting point for such investigations, but when used on unsupported platforms, it is assumed you know what you are doing and how to achieve your goals.

Unfortunately the limited staff resources means we don't have the time to babysit a newbie while they struggle to coerce a consumer device into doing things the manufacturer never intended. I know that sounds extremely harsh, but that's how it is -- my advice is to get familiar with MIPS on a system that is supported (an R5k O2 would be a good choice), then apply the knowledge you pick up there to the new device.
_________________
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.