Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

Lee Forrest wrote:
> Uclibc isn't stable enough, and my hardware requires a lot of libc6
> software, so I decided to give in and 'upgrade' to glibc2,

glibc2 has several nice features, e.g. binary backward compatibility.
However, like most GNU software, it's big. There's a script called
"mklibs.sh" for Debian, which is supposed to let you remove features
from your libc to reduce size if you don't need them. I tried it, but
it doesn't seem to work with glibc. It does make a _very_ small
uclibc, though. I wonder if there is a way to reduce the size of a new
version of glibc. The old glibcs are already smaller but don't always
work as well. :(

> but instead of installing it on my present system, I'm rebuilding BL3 around 
> it.

You may be interested in taking a glance at BL2. It's based on
Slackware 7.1 (glibc 2.1). But it doesn't have the nice small X setup
of BL3, and the busybox is version 0.60.5 so sometimes new scripts
don't work.

> Now, slowly but surely, I'm either moving files over from BL3-1 or replacing
> them with packages from SW9.0 (the less there requires libncurses so I
> decided
> to pass). 'file' needs libgcc_s.so.1 and libz.so.1.2.3, so I copied those
> over from BL3-1 and it works fine.
>
> I'm well under 5M right now.

Since you are using a 2.4 kernel, you can use a newer glibc if you run
into something that needs it. (Look for the GLIBC_2.3.x unresolved
symbols.)

> Next step is Xvesa and friends.

The BL3 Xvesa is static. It should work with any libc. However, the
libc5 X client programs will need to be upgraded. Glibc-based X
applications will sometimes accept the libc5 libX11, but a few will
not, so it's usually smarter to replace the libc5 X infrastructure
with that from SW7.1 or later.

> As soon as I've recreated BL3 I'll be installing gcc and building an xserver
> for my i810 chip. First try will be the tinyX, and then the regular server
> if
> that doesn't work. It won't be a full X install, just the server.

There's a glibc-based Xi810 binary over here:
http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/rule/XFree86/kdrive/8.0/
It should work unless your glibc is too old or whoever compiled it
made a mistake.

David