I am pleased to report that the IA-64 system on loan from HP to Agilent that is in my possession is now happily running Debian GNU/Linux natively. This machine arrived in my hands a few weeks ago "for evaluation" without an operating system loaded, and since what I wanted to evaluate was Debian...
This would have been much harder without the help I received from Randolph Chung. He offered encouragement as I struggled to get a working combination of hardware and BIOS version, crafted the chroot environment on top of TurboLinux that we used to do the bootstrapping work, then helped build some of the packages I got frustrated with. I would also like to recognize Ben Collins and Brendan O'Dea for being on IRC at the right times to help me get past my struggles building glibc and perl packages, respectively. Their patience and enthusiasm helped! The current status is that I'm booting a 100% Debian root filesystem, and am finishing up getting the right pieces in place to "start over" building packages that are fit for upload. I have requested a binary-ia64 tree be created, and expect that to happen soon. Package uploads should begin within the next week. It seems completely possible that IA-64 could join the set of supported ports for woody, but a lot of work remains between now and then! Before jumping the hurdle from running in the chroot environment to booting a real Debian filesystem, we had over 600 .deb's built, including everything relevant depended on by the boot-floppies package. There are a few ugly hacks that need to be addressed, and a couple of repeatable internal compiler errors in the very pre-release version of the compiler we're running, but I do not expect it to take very long to get a respectable number of packages built and uploaded. I understand that there has been some progress towards obtaining an IA-64 system for general use by Debian developers. I hope there will be an announcement about that soon. In the meantime, I am *not* able to provide logins for everyone on this machine. Bdale
