[Arm-netbook] parabola arm gnu.linux up and running with xfce4

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

---
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Sat, Jul 2, 2016 at 6:45 PM, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:


> I had a bit more of a look at various distributions today, and it is actually
> rather annoying to try and find details of how *any* of the major
> distributions and their derivatives build their packages from source in bulk
> (apart from in-the-know references to things existing in various distribution
> infrastructures).

 well you made the effort to research it, which is great.

> Anyway, amongst the FSF-endorsed distributions I had a look at Parabola,
> Trisquel, gNewSense and GuixSD. Sorry for omitting any GNU prefixes/suffixes
> and "Linux" from the names. ;-)

 :)

> Parabola
> --------
>
> https://www.parabola.nu/
>
> Parabola is based on Arch Linux and did support mips64el, but it appears to
> only target Intel and ARM at the moment. I don't have much familiarity with
> the Arch tools, but I'm guessing that libretools and abslibre are the key
> components here:
>
> https://wiki.parabola.nu/Category:Libretools
>
> https://projects.parabola.nu/abslibre.git/
>
> Unfortunately, all the documentation assumes that you're running Arch already,

 right.  i solved that by downloading the live-boot CD, running it
under qemu-x86, setting up NFS root-permitted server on my laptop,
using ip_forwarding to let it get internet access, setting up dnsmasq
and then the tun/tap qemu interface could pull everything over.

 i stopped at the bit where it says "install qemu-arm and run that
using pboot" because i was *not* going to be running qemu-arm under
qemu-x86, instead by that time i had a set of files (because of the
NFS root mounted filesystem) on my *laptop* i could install proot
*under debian* where i already have qemu-arm, finished off the install
and it then just worked.

 i was then able to shut down the qemu-x86 live-boot, then was able to
follow the qemu-arm instructions in the remainder of the page because
by that time i had a full set of bootstrapped minimal packages.

 the next 24 hours were spent following the openrc installation
guides....  bye-bye systemd :)

 l.