A few days ago I mentioned my desire to try compiling right on the Zipit. It ought to be possible. It seems like just yesterday I had Linux with X Windows, emacs, gcc and all sorts of goodies running just fine on a junky Cyrix "486" CPU with only 16 MB of RAM. What happened?
Anyhow, just as I was lamenting my failure to debug Bunjalloo in IZ2S the subject of rockbox on z2sid came up once again on the zipit IRC channel. Ah Ha! That's been on my todo list for quite a while now. I knew z2sid came with a working gcc right from the get go. I could start with that project and work my way back to the IZ2S compiler. To make it easier for me I tarred up my pre-patched rockbox 3.9 sources instead of updating the zipit patch to the current release version. Gotta do that someday...
I dumped the sources on a 2GB z2sid SD card I had lying around in my collection and booted it up in my one working uboot zipit. I started up the rockbox configure script, picked the zipit target, and failed because it couldn't find the SDL dev package. Ok. That makes sense. I should be able to get that with apt-get install libsdl-dev. Unfortunately that took a lot longer than I wanted because I forgot you needed to be root to use ewok or wifi-config to get connected. Also the wifi-config scripts all need to be edited to replace eth1with wlan0 in order to work in a uboot zipit. I'm not sure why a zipit needs a user account in addition to root. Everything I want to do on it seems to need root permission, and really! Who cares if somebody hacks into my $10 toy via the free wifi at MacDonalds?
Eventually I got connected and ran apt-get update (twice for good luck) and then apt-get install libsdl-dev. This was taking a while so I set it aside to finish while I went out for some old man hockey and beer time. When I got back it was done, and successfully too! But apparently apt pulled down dependencies for just about every SDL backend out there, including Xlib! WTF! The poor SD card was full up to the limit with only a few measly megabytes leftover for me.
So for giggles I ran make on the rockbox sources and let it go overnight. As expected, it ran out of disk space and failed. Oh well. Maybe I'll try again, with a fresh install of z2sid, compiling my own lean mean SDL with only the framebuffer and salsa backends. That might just leave enough space on the SD card for a rockbox build. If only the zipit uboot was stable enough to work with larger SD cards. I have a bunch, but no luck with anything over 2GB.
But really, I think I need to put zipit compiling on the backburner for a while. If anyone has a bigger SD card and wants to try this, I put up the rockbox sources here.
rockbox-zipit-src.tgz
You'll need to build SDL or get a libsdl-dev package. Then do this.
cd rockboxtrunk/tools
rm bmp2rb
rm convbdf
rm codepages
cd ../build-zipit
cp autoconf.h autoconf.h.save
../tools/configure
Type 205 to select the zipit target. This will configure an IZ2S build target. You don't want that because the battery monitoring code is for the older kernel. So open up the Makefile with nano or vi and remove the -DIZ2S from the EXTRA_DEFINES line. Hopefully the battery monitoring code for the z2lite kernel is good for z2sid. Also, I made the zipit config target use the SIGALTSTACK_THREADS option, but never got it to work so you have to restore the autoconf.h.save with the SDL_THREADS option instead. Then maybe it'll build.
cp autoconf.h.save autoconf.h
make
Cross your fingers. If it succeeds, strip the rockbox.bin file then:
make install.
Maybe strip the codecs in the /usr/local/lib/rockbox dirctory and borrow the /usr/local/bin/rockbox script from z2lite.
Update: I discovered I was using the z2sid version with the enormous j (junk?) file on the root directory so I deleted that and tried again. Still no luck. Turns out it was the /tmp directory running out of space. The /tmp directory has only 1MB, so maybe I'll make a /usr/tmp and export TMPDIR=/usr/tmp to see it that moves things along.
Update 2: That actually got me most of the way through the build. It appears as if only the initial tool building stage needs the extra TMPDIR space to reproduce the bmp2rb, convbdf, and codepages utilities deleted above. Subsequent rockbox builds don't need it. However I hit a snag on the assembler code. I was forced to add -mcpu=xscale to the makefile get any arm assembly instructions above armv4 to build. That got me all the way through the "make install" step. Still didn't work though. The main rockbox executable brings up the GUI and everything looks good until I pick some music to play. Then... "Codec Failure". Oh well. At least that's familiar territory. The SDL codec loading section of the rockbox source code is overly convoluted, and I've had to tweak it a bit before for earlier IZ2S and z2lite builds. I'm not looking forward to repeating that work though...
Meanwhile, since the z2sid compiler seems to work well enough, I decided to build a qemacs for z2sid to make it easier for me to edit and debug the code on the zipit.
qe-z2sid.tgz
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