[WBEL-devel] amd64 port

[Ryan Finnie]

Greetings,

Long time listener, first time caller, etc...  I've been running i386 RC2
on a VM since it came out.  A couple days ago I got a Athlon 64 3200+
system, and was looking around for what I could put on it.  I love gentoo,
but there are still some nice little quirks in the amd64 port.  Mandrake
doesn't seem to be out yet, and RHEL and SuSE cost a good deal of $$$.  So
my next thought was "White Box!"

>From reading the devel list, it looks like the idea of WBEL for amd64
and/or ia64 has been mentioned, but the discussion faded away.  I've
downloaded the SRPMS for i386 RC2, and are going to go through with trying
to make a production-quality amd64 port.  This port will be a port of WBEL
RC2, not RHEL, since John has already done a great deal of work on the
RHEL->WBEL transition, and it would be foolish to duplicate that effort.
Here's my gameplan:

1. Install amd64 taroon, full install
2. Download i386 RC2 SRPMS
3. Weed out non-amd64 SRPMS and add amd64-specific SRPMS
4. Build WBEL RC2 on top of taroon
5. Install WBEL RC2
6. Build WBEL RC2 on top of itself
7. Install WBEL RC2
8. Build and release ISOs
9. When amd64 RC2 port is as good as i386 RC2 port, get John to sign RPMS
for an "official" release.

I'm currently at step 4, compiling "binutils" as I type.  And of course
there are already 4 RPMS that have failed build, but selective
installing/recompiling will fix that (such as ant needing an updated
version of xerces-j, etc).  FYI, acpid-1.0.2-2.src.rpm was pulled over
from RHEL since it's not in the i386 distro, but is in amd64.  In
addition, the following packages are in i386, but not in amd64, and hence
will not be in my amd64 port:

apmd
compat-glibc
dev86
Glide3
hwcrypto
kernel-pcmcia-cs
kon2
lilo
lm_sensors
ltrace
memprof
mkbootdisk
pstack
pxe

Thank you to John (and everybody else who has worked on WBEL) who have
given me the base to begin off of, and I hope to be contributing a port
soon enough :)

RF