{"id":19,"date":"2012-09-08T14:22:41","date_gmt":"2012-09-08T14:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blueness\/?p=19"},"modified":"2012-09-08T14:22:41","modified_gmt":"2012-09-08T14:22:41","slug":"a-gentoo-desktop-for-the-lemote-yeeloong-a-little-endian-mips64-netbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blueness\/2012\/09\/08\/a-gentoo-desktop-for-the-lemote-yeeloong-a-little-endian-mips64-netbook\/","title":{"rendered":"A Gentoo Desktop for the Lemote Yeeloong, a little endian mips64 netbook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi everyone,<\/p>\n

I’d like to announce a new initiative within the mips arch team. We are now supporting an xfce4-based desktop system for the Lemote Yeeloong netbook<\/a>.\u00a0 The images can be found on any gentoo mirrors, under gentoo\/experimental\/mips\/desktop-loongson2f.\u00a0 The installation instructions can be found here<\/a>.\u00a0 The yeeloong netbook is particularly interesting because it only uses “free” hardware, ie. hardware which doesn’t require any proprietary code.\u00a0 It is manufactured by Lemote in China<\/a>, and distributed and promoted in the US by “Freedom Included<\/a>“.\u00a0 It is how Richard Stallman does his computing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’m blogging because I thought it was important for Planet Gentoo to know that mips devices are currently being manufactured and used in netbooks as well as embedded systems.\u00a0 The gentoo mips team has risen to the challenge of targetting these systems and maintaining natively compiled stage4’s for them.\u00a0 Why stage4’s?\u00a0 And why a full desktop for the yeeloong?\u00a0 These processors are slow, so the time from a stage3 to a desktop is about three days for the yeeloong.\u00a0 Also, the yeeloong sports a little endian mips64 processor, the loongson2f, and we support three ABIs: o32, n32 and n64, with n32 being the preferred.\u00a0 This significantly increases the time to build glibc and other core packages.\u00a0 I provide two images, a vanilla one and a hardened one.\u00a0 The latter adds full hardening (pie, ssp, _FORTIFY_SOURCES=2, bind now, relro) to the toolchain and userland binaries as we do for amd64 and i686 in hardened gentoo.\u00a0 I have not ported over the hardened kernel, however.<\/p>\n

I allude above to “other” targetted devices.\u00a0 I am also maintaining some mips uclibc systems (both hardened and vanilla) which are on the gentoo mirrors under experimental\/mips\/uclibc.\u00a0 But I will speak more of these later as part of an initiative to maintain hardened uclibc systems on “alternative” architectures such as arm, mips, ppc as well as amd64 and i686.<\/p>\n

You can read the full installation instructions<\/a>, but here’s a quick summary, since it doesn’t follow the usual Gentoo method of starting from a stage3:<\/p>\n