Hi all,
I know nothing about this sort of stuff so I don't know where to
even start looking. Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Here's the setup: My desktop machine is a new, fast Core i7 980x
processor. It is capable of doing emerge -e @world (including XFCE4,
Gnome and KDE) in around 4 hours. On the other hand my MythTV backend
server is an old PowerPC which takes literally days (2? 3? 4?) to do
the same thing with only fluxbox on the system. While this was OK a
few years ago it's not something I'm enjoying much anymore. (Did I
then?)

So, the question is can I somehow set up an environment on my AMD64
machine where I build PowerPC binary packages using emerge, ssh them
over to the Mac and then emerge them there to get the machine up to
date quickly? What do I read to understand how to do this?

Note that it's fine to build the kernel, ymboot and machine
specific stuff on the Mac as that's very minimal.

Thanks,
Mark

On 08/16/2010 02:29 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
> Hi all,
> I know nothing about this sort of stuff so I don't know where to
> even start looking. Thanks in advance for any pointers.
>
> Here's the setup: My desktop machine is a new, fast Core i7 980x
> processor. It is capable of doing emerge -e @world (including XFCE4,
> Gnome and KDE) in around 4 hours. On the other hand my MythTV backend
> server is an old PowerPC which takes literally days (2? 3? 4?) to do
> the same thing with only fluxbox on the system. While this was OK a
> few years ago it's not something I'm enjoying much anymore. (Did I
> then?)
>
> So, the question is can I somehow set up an environment on my AMD64
> machine where I build PowerPC binary packages using emerge, ssh them
> over to the Mac and then emerge them there to get the machine up to
> date quickly? What do I read to understand how to do this?
>
> Note that it's fine to build the kernel, ymboot and machine
> specific stuff on the Mac as that's very minimal.

You want to get your hands on the crossdev package. There's LOTS of
stuff to know to get this to work right. But people use cross compilers
every day all day.

Mark Knecht writes:

> Here's the setup: My desktop machine is a new, fast Core i7 980x
> processor. It is capable of doing emerge -e @world (including XFCE4,
> Gnome and KDE) in around 4 hours. On the other hand my MythTV backend

Oh my, this is fast.

> server is an old PowerPC which takes literally days (2? 3? 4?) to do
> the same thing with only fluxbox on the system. While this was OK a
> few years ago it's not something I'm enjoying much anymore. (Did I
> then?)
>
> So, the question is can I somehow set up an environment on my AMD64
> machine where I build PowerPC binary packages using emerge, ssh them
> over to the Mac and then emerge them there to get the machine up to
> date quickly? What do I read to understand how to do this?

I don't think this is possible. Maybe with an emulator, but that would
probably also be slow handling instructions for a different CPU.

I would give distcc a try. The configure and linking stuff is still done
on the local machine, but at least (most) of the compiles are done by the
fast machine, so this should safe some time. See the DistCC Cross-
compiling Guide guide[*] for information on how to set this up. It works
fine for me when I use my amd64 machine to create i686 binaries.

Wonko
[*] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/cross-compiling-distcc.xml

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Bill Longman <bill.longman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/16/2010 02:29 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> * *I know nothing about this sort of stuff so I don't know where to
>> even start looking. Thanks in advance for any pointers.
>>
>> * *Here's the setup: My desktop machine is a new, fast Core i7 980x
>> processor. It is capable of doing emerge -e @world (including XFCE4,
>> Gnome and KDE) in around 4 hours. On the other hand my MythTV backend
>> server is an old PowerPC which takes literally days (2? 3? 4?) to do
>> the same thing with only fluxbox on the system. While this was OK a
>> few years ago it's not something I'm enjoying much anymore. (Did I
>> then?)
>>
>> * *So, the question is can I somehow set up an environment on my AMD64
>> machine where I build PowerPC binary packages using emerge, ssh them
>> over to the Mac and then emerge them there to get the machine up to
>> date quickly? What do I read to understand how to do this?
>>
>> * *Note that it's fine to build the kernel, ymboot and machine
>> specific stuff on the Mac as that's very minimal.
>
> You want to get your hands on the crossdev package. There's LOTS of
> stuff to know to get this to work right. But people use cross compilers
> every day all day.
>
>

Thanks Bill. First try points to a depreciated page:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/cross-development.xml

which in turn points to something more recent:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/

A quick read looks promising, other than a statement that says some
combination of tools might not work and no way to tell until you try.

None the less I should be able to play some games and maybe just
compile something very small and see if it runs, etc.

Thanks for the pointer.

Cheers,
Mark