Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57 AT fastmail.fm>]

On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:09:37 -0600
Javier Vasquez <j.e.vasquez.v AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have pretty old piii machines which don't reach 800mhz (x86_32), and
> I'm planning to build a core 2 duo box @ more than 1ghz (x86_64).  The
> thing is that I due to the building times on those old machines, it
> was pretty hard to use any source based distribution.  And now I'm
> thinking maybe this has already been solved through cross-compilation
> of some sort, building all the stuff on x86_64.  Problem is the
> difference in architectures, :-(...
> 
> If possible, then the other thing would be how to migrate the
> cross-compiled image of some sort, from the x86_64 machine to the
> x86_32 ones...

x86_32 is close enough to x86_64 that you can make a pure 32-bit chroot on 
your 64-bit machine, the only part of the 64-bit side which needs to be 
compatible is the kernel. I use this for a few 32-bit-only applications.

To begin with, once you have your x86_64 machine up & running I suggest 
grabbing one of the smgl-tarballs from 
http://dbg.download.sourcemage.org/image/official/ . Unpack it and, assuming 
$root == the place you unpacked it, issue the following command as root:

linux32 chroot $root

This has sorcery and a base system already set up. You can cast spells and 
sync the filesystem with your x86_32 machine... either using rsync or what 
might be better is to copy the binary caches from /var/cache/sorcery in the 
chroot to your old machine.

A different way would be to set up a 32-bit distcc server (the easy way would 
be in a 32-bit chroot), and to configure the old machine to use it. Distcc 
can be a great help, I installed Gentoo on a 400MHz machine with a 1.5GHz 
distcc server quite painlessly a few years ago.

-- 
Ethan Grammatikidis

Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.