26 Nov 08 Using distcc for distributed compiling on an alix 3c2

Since I’ve been working on the alix board for the robot it’s become increasingly useful to just compile software on the board itself rather than on a host machine – with an AMD Geode 500MHz processor, it’s certainly capable.

I generally work on a USB hard drive attached to one of the spare ports whilst I’m testing stuff live, and then I back up the hard drive every so often.

I made some modifications to the cp2102.c kernel module and I wanted to recompile the kernel on the board directly as I had some other modules I needed, such as for the wifi card. 2.6.18 compiled eventually over about 7 hours but after wanting to make further kernel changes, I decided that I didn’t have another 7 hours to wait. I decided to use distcc to compile ‘locally’ but use the processing power of any number of other servers.
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Tags: /etc/hosts, 2.6.18, 3c2, alix, apt-get, build kernel, cc, CC=distcc, compiled, cp2102, distcc, distccd, DISTCC_HOSTS, distributed compiler, g++, gcc, Intel Xeon, kernl module, ld, libc6, libc6-dev, Linux, make, the robot

19 Oct 08 Exim, MySQL, Courier IMAP, Courier POP3 & Spamassassin – vdomain and vuser set up.

There’s a couple of guides out there on how to set up Exim, MySQL, Courier and Spamassassin in a virtual user environment but I thought I’d put together a high level basic guide myself.

My installation is running on debian etch 4.0 stable (2.6.18-6-686)

As this is a vdomain/vuser setup, you will not require a system shell/login for the users you add.

To start off, just install the packages you’ll need with apt-get:

Now if you already have exim4-* installed which is the default, you have two choices. We want to install our own exim version from source but without breaking the repository. The choices are to either just rename exim4 to exim4.old and then create your new exim install, or alternatively create a dummy empty exim4 package remove exim4-* and install your dummy package. This will resolve the dependancies issue in the package manager. Neither method is particularly clean – I have installed a dummy package personally and removed the real exim4 set of packages.
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Tags: courier, courier-authlib-mysql, courier-imap, courier-pop, courier-pop3, exim, exim4, make, make install, MySQL, source, spamassassin, spamc, spamd, tar, vdomain, vuser

16 Sep 08 Adam’s Custom Kernel

I haven’t been doing much custom kernel building lately. I find that the only kernels I change are those on my VM host machines, and/or using apt-get for a general upgrade.

Nevertheless, here’s how I go about building my custom kernels for VM host machines running debian etch, using 2.6.18 of course:

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Tags: Adams Custom Kernel, apt-get, boot, Custom Kernel, debian, grub, kernel upgrade, Linux, make