René Rebe

After answering where to get and how to build the k-drive, TinyX a few tines on the xorg mailing list I figured it is about the tine to let Google now about it more verbosely:

Keith Packard’s k-drive based, TinyX was merged into the mainline xorg-server package, so it is as easy as downloading the latest, greatest X.org release and configure the xorg-server package with something like:

--enable-kdrive --disable-dri --disable-xorg --disable-xorgcfg

along with the other options like –prefix et al. as appropriate.

If you want all this in an automated way, with cross compile support you can also take a look into the T2 SDE Project which among others supports exactly this: Cross compiling X.org, including the tinier k-drive variant, even with alternative C libraries such as uClibC and dietllibC. To check it out and give it a try the T2 Rescue target provides tiny ISO images, pre-built for at least x86 and x86-64 (other like powerpc and sparc are easily buildable from the T2 source as well).

I started with 1.9GB of plublic photo images, and the collection grew to 4.6 GB online in this blog, now. The Wordpress pixgallery plugin was rewritten by about 50% in the meantime, including many bug fixes, new features and utilizing our in-house ExactImage software library for the image DSP (digital signal processing) - mostly for improved speed and less server load :-)

One of the recently added photo collection, also known as streams, is the State of Play, Performance - Event, Berlin held by Susan’s sister: Sabine Klaus as well as Ridade Al Daghestani, Arnar Lindal Halldorsson and Alexandra Ross.

As the photos can not yet be commented (I guess I finally have to rewrite the other half of the PixGallery code, …), please feel free to leave comments about the event here in this post.

… now running on Intel 686 CPU.

No joke - from the Gentoo weekly newsletter “16 April 2007″:

Gentoo Linux first distribution to run on Apple TV. … Our distribution was chosen due to the fact that it is one of the more portable Linux distributions and, as such, is often one of the first to be ported to new devices.

Now while it’s nice for all of us that the Mactel Linux folks got Linux booted on this “yet more closed and crippled” Apple device, I wonder what part of Gentoo should have played a role in that. After all those people just reverese-engineered and trial’n error enough to get a normal i386 linux kernel loaded. Nothing Gentoo would have helped in. So this statement boils down to:

Gentoo was “ported” to yet another i386 based device.

Congratulations.

And if you want to port - for example even cross compile - “with style”, a tip from my side: T2 SDE:

Running on i386 since its roots in 1998, Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC since 200x whatever, the first to run on AVR32, and running on any other 32bit and above silicon (ARM, Blackfin, MIPS, HPPA, SuperH to name some more), and comming with strong cross compile support out of the box. And best of all (aside that it’s free under the GPL as well): Gaining more out-of-the-box (Board Support Package) embedded vendor support every day.

Now that was something one should write more news about :-)