Hi there,
In a long and tedious journey through LFS helper systems, cross-compiler
environments and building netbooting old green boxes off bootp, I
finally managed to put together a working up-to-date gentoo running on
the SGI Octane. And yes, all the packages are the latest and greatest.
It has all the hardware working (even audio!), runs on kernel 4.12 and
even runs Xorg - IF you downgrade xorg to a 2012-ish version using raw
force.
Here's the tarball:
https://rephlex.de/blog/2019/05/10/gentoo-octane-a-modern-gnu-linux-system-for-the-sgi-octane-workstation/
Enjoy!
Maybe somebody working on gentoo/MIPS could use this to build a proper
gentoo release (?), and maybe this is even useful for other MIPS machines.
Of course, the kernel sources are included - and boy, they contain some
assorted patches to support all the funny hardware!
------ Slightly OT below this line ------
You read that right, I hat xorg running, but in an old version. The only
thing that keeps us from having a *current* version of xorg running on
the octane's impact card is is the fact that xorg changed its module API
around 2010-2012.
If someone could help modifying the xf86-video-impact module init
functions to work under a current version of xorg, we could make impact
great again (the head of current work on this matter is here:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/rephlex/xf86-video-impact)
Regards,
--
Florian 'rephlex' Panzer
https://rephlex.de
