Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> Message from Steven
> ===================
> Sindi wrote:
> > Are there uclibc programs in BL3 other than busybox and Xvesa?
>
> The entire BL3 foundation is statically compiled uClibc.
> You can delete the /lib directory and BL3 will still
> boot and provide the foundation utilities.

Is it possible to compile busybox, Xvesa and links dynamically against 
uclibc and save space, or would the uclibc.so library take up more room 
than saved by a dynamic compilation?
> > Can links be compiled against uclibc?
>
> It already is.  The links in BL3 is statically compiled
> uClibc.  It needs no libraries and should work on BL2
> or any other version of Linux.

But not the links2 for BL3 because of X.

> > is it impossible to compile rxvt and xinit against
> > uclibc?  xli?  mgp? jwm
>
> The problem is not uClibc, the fishhook is recompiling X
> (which is very very big) to work on uClibc.  I spent many
> days (weeks?) compiling and recompiling (which takes a
> very long time on an old PC).  Finally, I got X to fully
> compile, but when I tested it, I got errors.  I suspect
> at the heart of the problem is the provided uClibc root
> filesystem, which expects a 2.4 kernel.  I tried compiling
> my own set of uClibc libraries for a 2.2 kernel, but that
> failed as well.  So I threw in the towel.

If you did manage to compile Xvesa against uclibc, people would still need 
libc to use other X's.

There are more programs available for X than svgalib.  I don't know of 
anything like MGP for svgalib.  Someone wrote a perl program to produce a 
powerpoint slideshow from an Openoffice Impress format.  The only linux 
CAD programs I could find require X (and usually much more).

I compiled Kermit on a 486 laptop with 12MB memory.
X would take a great deal longer.

Sindi

> Cheers,
> Steven