Hi
My original idea was porting some old Qtopia apps to Qt4, and building other google-found Qt utilities. The memory resources used by Qt4 and its speed compared to old versions impressed me. Porting the old Qtopia apps would make the Z a kinda Super X PDA Mini Laptop... yes, I know, sometimes I am like a teenager
Well, I needed Qt4 but it wasn't in the repositories, so...
I've been trying to build the latest Qt4 for pdaXrom for the last two or three weeks. Something that I thought that was going to be a simple cross compiling turned out to be very tricky.
The first problem was Qt itself, it builds a series of tools that are used later in the build process itself , that makes cross compiling really hairy (I would have to tweak their build process, so no way...)
So I went to on Zaurus compiling... The Z is very slow (I have a SL-C3200 and it's speed is that of a 200 Mhz Pentium) And the build takes ages. I launch the build, and I get an error several hours later (Civil says the whole process should take about 50 hours).
A byproduct of this attempt is I've assembled together several parts and "constructed" (not written) a kind of SL-C3200 toy emulator based on qemu that goes well ONLY if you want to do native builds (thanks guys, I took most of my tools from you). The only not so good news are it is not much quicker than the Z running in my laptop (an Intel core duo @ 2Ghz ). BTW the emulated RAM can be as much as 256M, so this speeds the build a little bit, and I don't wear my Z microdrive.
The errors I had in this native build are:
-- Related to the precompiled headers. I think is related to the old version of GCC I am using (gcc 3.4.6). I disabled them when invoking the configure script., and solved that problem.
-- Some errors related to include files and symbol definitions. I've been tweaking one by one, you have to think I launch the build and I have the errors back many hours later, so it goes very slowly. I thought it was related to the qmake spec file I was using to build Qt, but Civil remarked that the glic version included in pdaXrom it's very old (glibc 2.2.5). But more important, he pointed out that, even after succeeding he's found several errors that makes the library unusable (thanks man, you've saved me many hours of trial and error)
And now my questions:
-- Does anybody know if there is any plan to introduce an newer compiler in pdaxrom? (I've seen a bug report about this)
-- Is it possible to build a newer glibc? mind that this point may need a rebuild of the repositories.
Before I finish a remark:
In my crappy-good-for-nothing-but-at-least-it-compiles emulator I am mixing some pdaxrom and some openzaurus, and they work very well together. Won't make sense to make pdaxrom a kinda usability-oriented angstrom flavour? those guys have a really slick distro (technically speaking), but not as friendly as pdaxrom.
Of course, thanks again.
E
