FreeBSD or any other still supported os on Bubba 2?

[axm]

My little toy that still just runs. Makes me wonder if excito would have had more success with worse hardware ...

This summer I planned to reinstall a clean Debian on it only to discover Debian abandoned the powerpc architecture after jessie. So I have been looking around for operating systems which will still support this for some time. I decided to give FreeBSD a try, but have been hitting walls trying to find out if it will boot at all (it's complicated, I have been buggering the FreeBSD forum, see https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/moun ... -pc.67323/ for the current state).

Has anybody had any success running other operating systems, *BSD or other?

(There is an old thread which is basically the same thing, but I decided against reviving it: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2401&hilit=bsd&sid= ... 3e53aa7ddd )

[Gordon]

I assume you did not look inside the development forum?

[axm]

I _thought_ I did. But when I do now I think I was mistaken, seems there are at least Gentoo users out there I was not aware of. Thanks.

[beatgr]

Gentoo Linux discussion page.

Ethernet plus WiFi Bridge Router and Firewall (April 22, 2018)
Set up your Gentoo Linux box as a 802.11 (WiFi) bridge router, with firewall.

If you have a WiFi (802.11) adaptor and two Ethernet adaptors fitted to your Gentoo box, you can configure it as a bridging router and firewall.
“... these instructions were originally prepared for the Excito B3, an ARM-based mini-server.”
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Ethernet_p ... d_Firewall

[axm]

Don't get the specific relevance for bubba 2. I was looking more at viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5958

[beatgr]

I would send a note to Sakaki, so this can be addressed in custom B2 profile.
Development Section of Excito Forums
http://www.forum.excito.com/viewtopic.p ... 8&start=15

“At some point in the future I hope to roll out a custom profile for the B2 (as I have for the B3 and RPi3) so that distributing these kinds of mask (and USE-flag) changes can be automated.” -sakaki

**I retired my B2 in 2016, before these recent developments.
Currently using Excito B3 — acquired from “netdiskountsdeals” on eBay (nice price) with a WD Red 3TB.
Using the Sakaki & Gordon’s Gentoo image for B3.**
http://www.forum.excito.com/viewtopic.p ... 599#p28599

greg

[sakaki]

Hi -

I've just released version 1.5.0 of the Gentoo live USB for the B2 - please see my post here.

This bootable image has a custom (17.0-based) profile, uses a 4.9.72 LTS kernel, and has weekly-autobuild binhost backing for the installed packages (which are up-to-date against the Gentoo tree on 3 September 2018, as shipped).

Nice to see there are still some B2 users out there ^-^

hth,

sakaki

[axm]

Thanks, can't wait to test it, sadly I have some other things to do first...

[axm]

I finally got around to it - your work is much appreciated . It has been about 20 years I tried Gentoo last - so I was curious as well. Sadly, it seems Haskell support is almost nonexistent in Gentoo, which is a deal breaker for me .

Getting Haskell to run on ppc is becoming more and more painful. This is not specific to Gentoo, the last ppc-Debian and FreeBSD are no real exceptions. Debian worked ok-ish while it lasted, now my hack starts to cause Segmentation faults. FreeBSD would probably not be much better.

I might have to reevaluate my "hardware is still good!" approach just to limit the exotic stuff I have to deal with .

[Gordon]

Hmmm?

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Haskell

[axm]

At least with this distribution, lang/ghc is masked and failed to emerge (with a non obvious error message to me - which I failed to persist - not a oom error ). It was a pretty old version anyway - but I could have lived with that. Furthermore, I consider stack a must for me - which also failed to install (there is an old version of slack in the repository which I did not try but should be abandoned by slack for a long time).

Remember: this is about ppc which seems to make a huge difference.

Do you think I should push farther in this direction and it *should* all be working just out of the box? I would be happy to hear about other users with that setup and working ...

[Gordon]

What version are you trying to build?

According to the listing HERE version 7.10.3 has a (experimental) ppc target and version 7.8.4 should not be masked at all on ppc. It looks you can even simply fetch prebuilt binaries for these versions by specifying USE=binary

[axm]

Not sure which version, I expected 7.8.

emerge lang/ghc

I rememembered now: the dependencies could not be resolved. I guessed that was related to it being marked (output of emerge -s).