November 5, 2007

Hi All…

I’ve started building the seed stages that will eventually become release 2007.1, once the release engineering release their snapshot. Not sure exactly when that will occur, but I expect some time in the next fortnight or so, the builds will start in earnest.

This is the first release where I’ve used the Loongsons to do much of the compiling work. My Qube2 is in bad need of a rebuild, so it may get one this year. My experimental box, zhenghe has already compiled the stage1 and stage2 pre-release tarballs in the last day — a task that would’ve normally taken me several days on the Qube2.

The MIPS4 builds will still need to be done on the Qube2 (since the Loongsons only implement MIPS3), so I anticipate I’ll have MIPS1 builds available ahead of the MIPS4 builds, but hopefully builds for both CPU types will be available for testing by the end of the month.

At the moment I’m off-line as far as IRC and IM contact is concerned — this is because I really need to concentrate on my studies. I’m repeating one telecommunications subject that I failed last year, and things are looking really bad this year — in short, I cannot afford another 3 mark or fail if I’m to continue at uni. (If I drop out, I shall have to discontinue my work with Gentoo … a bit difficult to power a PC when you don’t have a house to call home.) So my priority is definitely with my exam studies for now.

After my exams are over, I’ll certainly be back into the swing of things… I’ve got some preliminary crude images that could form the basis of a LiveUSB image to boot a Lemote Fulong PC, and I’m starting to piece together a newer µClibc-based environment for newer netboot images on Cobalt systems. Since these require much more direct intervention (I build them by hand presently) they have to wait until then.

But for now, things are plodding along nicely, Gentoo-wise. As always, if you need to get in touch, I can be reached via email for now… and I’ll let you all know as things progress. See the front page of my devspace for a progress summary.