sarnold	our next speaker is karltk; he is a computer science student in haugesund norway; he has been working with open source software for four years, is a gentoo developer sincelast summer, and has worked on the linux dreamcast project since its inception
sarnold	please direct your questions and comments to #qc; hopefully spanish will be in #redes, dutch in #taee
sarnold	please welcome karltk :)
karltk	okay, hi gang.
karltk	I'd like to start out with saying that zx80user and lethal here are also part of the linuxdc team.
karltk	so you can probably bug them about details in #qc
karltk	As we all think slides are boring, I've only made one. It's available at http://www.boblycat.org/~karltk/linuxdc/
karltk	the linuxdc project arose a few years ago (I think about two) when me and mrbrown (the only linuxdc developer not currently present) decided it was a shame no linux port existed for the sega dreamcast gaming console.
karltk	we then decided to undertake the project of porting our favourite kernel and accompanying userspace tools to it.
karltk	at the time, there had been a lot of reverse-engineering going on, to understand the innards of the machine. of course, sega itself didn't have any reason to release techspecs to non-commercial developers.
karltk	however, the linuxsh project (linuxsh.sf.net) had done a good job of porting the kernel to the processor type in the dc, and other people had also toyed with modifying that port to run on the dreamcast itself.
karltk	both mrbrown and lethal are part of the linuxsh project. bug them for details on the kernel porting work.
karltk	obviously, there's little or no commercial value in this project.
karltk	so the main motivating factor is pure hack value.
karltk	and as with any projects of this character, there have been numerous suggestions for real-world applications, ranging from clustered computing to a pvr.
karltk	however, the problem with most of these appealing ideas is that the dreamcast itself is fairly underpowered, compared to regular x86 workstations.
karltk	it features a 200MHz SuperH processor and only 16MB of internal RAM.
karltk	Unlike the xbox, there is no internal harddrive, so we really have problems with the memory.
karltk	there does exist an ide adaptor hack for it, so it is technically possible to plug in an IDE device, but nobody sells this commerically, so unless you're an EE geek (or know one), you're lost
karltk	apart from the harddrive, the dc could be used at least as a cheap X terminal: you can get both a keyboard and mouse for it, as well as a VGA adapter.
karltk	all in all, it's now an outdated, but kinda cute embedded system.
karltk	as for the porting work itself. there was a debian port available at ftp.m17n.org (I think it still might be), but it's kinda outdated.
karltk	they had ported both doom and X, so I guess it was "full featured" ;)
karltk	however, given the restrictions of the machine, it would be nicer to have a either a very slim X server or dispense with it altogether.
karltk	the kernel port supports the 2d framebuffer, and that's what we can run X on. however, the DC has a 3d card. It's a powervr2 card, slightly modified for the dc.
karltk	(later on, the pvr2 became kyro, then kyroII)
karltk	there has been discussion back and forth, how to best make its features available. probably through opengl, but on linux, opengl is usually only available alongside X, which is already too huge.
karltk	so we've been looking at the recent developments in mesa to see if it would be possible to a framebuffer-only opengl port.
karltk	however, even with proper 2d and 3d hw accel, it is not likely that the dc would ever be able to play divx (especially not divx 4 and 5), given its slow (by today's standards) processor.
karltk	as the dc doesn't have a harddrive, anything we run on it must initially be booted off the CD-ROM.
karltk	visik7> btw had u try to play a divx with mplayer?
karltk	no, I've not yet taken a real bash at recompiling any of the open-sourced (and "open-sourced" versions) of any divx players for the dc.
karltk	to have any chance of getting a workable framerate, we'd have to do considerable amounts of assembly coding. it's just not been a high priority.
karltk	also, zx80user points out that the sound driver eats too much cpu power currently.
karltk	(so, if anybody has free time on their hands, apply within ;P)
karltk	anyway, back to the booting.
karltk	obviously, unless you're very strange in the head, you don't want to burn out every recompile of your kernel and boot image to cd whenever you've done some kernel hacking.
karltk	fortunately, the dc comes with a serial port, and it's also possible to get a so-called broadband adapter (usually referred to as a NIC by the rest of us).
karltk	so, you can boot a slave program that reads in a binary from the serial port or across the network, and unpacks it memory and calls it.
karltk	there are a few details here which I skip. feel free to ask later, if it's considered interesting.
karltk	visik7> DC doesn't read RW ?
karltk	reportedly, some DCs can read RW cds. Mine cannot.
karltk	Inside, there's a small pot.meter you can tweak the wavelength of the laser. On some models (such as mine), you have to do the tweaking in order for it to even read CD-Rs.
karltk	I've been told that DCs produced after Oct 2000 are not even capable of reading CD-Rs.
karltk	Initially, we used glibc as our c library, but that's positively huge.
karltk	lately, we've started toying with uclibc (www.uclibc.org)
karltk	it's tiny, seems to work, and Erik (the uclibc maintainer) is a very nice guy ;)
karltk	based on that, mrbrown recently put together a new toolchain (a cross-compiler) based on gcc-3.2, binutils-2.13 and uclibc.
karltk	Using this toolchain, we've been cross-compiling userspace packages for the last few weeks, in the hopes of having a demo cd ready for today's presentation.
karltk	However, the nice thing about autumn and europe, is that the various viral strains have managed to migrate from asia by now, and tend to result in week-long periods of bedrest :/
karltk	as I mentioned before, there is already a (partial) port of debian.
karltk	our new port is based off of Gentoo (some of you may have attended yesterday's talks by seemant and nick).
karltk	the reason why we selected gentoo for the new port, is that it's a from-source distro, and the package build scripts are very easy to tweak.
karltk	If you're very luck, cross-compiling to the dreamcast can be as easy as tweaking a few lines in the configuration of portage (the Gentoo package system), and tell it to put the resulting binaries in an alternate root.
karltk	this is not to say that there will be an official Gentoo port to the dreamcast.
karltk	If it had been feasible to self-host the build environment on the dc, it would be easily doable.
karltk	however, if when a package needs to be cross-compiled, one usually has to do various nasty tricks and apply some patches to the build system.
karltk	thus, we cannot verbatim use the Gentoo build scripts, and modifying them upstream to allow for cross-compilation would probably result in a maintenance nightmare for the other archs
karltk	visik7> karltk if I mount a nfs partition can I compile directly from
karltk	DC ?
karltk	visik7: provided you have compiled and self-hosting version of gcc, yes
karltk	some of you may have had the misfortune of visiting our web page (www.linuxdc.org)
karltk	from there, you can see that we seem to be quite dormant, which is fairly accurate.
karltk	development on the linuxdc project has been very irregular :/
karltk	however, as usual, we'll see if can't post some interesting results Real Soon Now :)
karltk	I guess that's mostly what I had in mind. If there are any questions, feel free.
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sarnold	clap clap clap clap :)
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sarnold	clap clap clap clap :)
sarnold	clap clap clap clap :)
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tilde	karltk: yawn.. *applause*
visik7	Java, dotGNU porting ?
visik7	:D
zx80user	clap clap clap clap
karltk	visik7: it would be nice to have a peek at kaffe or japhar, I guess.
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karltk	visik7: but both of those projects are quite dormant as well. additionally, they really don't support java well enough.
Mjesus	clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap
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karltk	thanks for listening.
garoeda	a pitty that the dc doesn't have a hd
karltk	if any of you would like to pester us later, we hang out at #linuxdc on irc.freenode.net
fernand0	thanks to you for the talk
Mjesus	it's very interesting !
exter	hi
botijo	niihau, exter
visik7	it's quite difficult to find a bba (or nic) now
rexlee	thanks to karltk and umeet2002 - this idea is really great
zrb	clap clap
exter	niihau botijo
Arador	clap clap clap clap clap clap
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Mjesus	have you contacted with developers of other consoles about linux porting ?
zrb	clap clap clap clap clap
karltk	Mjesus: mrbrown is also hacking on a port to ps2
karltk	Mjesus: we've not spent time socialising with the xbox guys, because that's x86 anyway ;)
visik7	the official porting of linux to ps2 is quite limited
visik7	2.2 kernel
visik7	no DVD support
Mjesus	thanks!
garoeda	i know a guy that bought an xbox just for running linux on it
Arador	visik7: very interesting, one always wants to run linux everywhere ;)
visik7	anyway the big limit of the console is the memory DC has 16Mb ps2 only 32
Arador	garoeda: they're cheap (microsoft doesn't earn a lot of money with the console itself)
visik7	Arador I bought DC only to run linux on it :D I've no dc games :DDDD
Arador	visik7: you can't add memory?
Arador	visik7: heh
tilde	karltk: here. now. :)
visik7	Arador to the ps2 no
visik7	Arador it's fisically impossible
visik7	Arador on the DC dunno
Arador	visik7: i mean, can't you "hack" the board, or something  like that?
visik7	Arador PS2 no
visik7	Arador DC dunno
visik7	bye karltk and thank
Mjesus	Karl Trygve Kalleberg, excellent !!
Arador	i've a friend who has linux running in his dreamcast, he wanted to see this lecture but he is sleeping :-/
fernand0	he'll read the log
fernand0	hehe
visik7	Arador have u save the log ?
Arador	visik7: yes..this channel, and #redes, the spanish translation
Mjesus	yes, all the log are in the web as soon as possible
visik7	Arador ok he can read it
fernand0	time to leave
fernand0	see you, thank you to all for comming
garoeda	see you later :)
visik7	ok bye see u on freenode :D

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