New distro coming soon

[Wildheart Baby]

I'm looking forward to giving this a whirl.
Even with an additional 50 meg added to the img file, I think that's still fairly small.
I'll definately look forward to workgroups (should have read this first)

[wicknix]

Get Pokemon Black (hack of Pokemon Red) but i'm having some problems with the controls.
Care to enlighenus to what = what
[/quote]

Ahh sorry i musta missed this post. I uploaded a gnuboy.rc file to my packages page. Just copy it to /root/.gnuboy. Now by default it'll fullscreen and scale x2. So you can just run ' sdlgnuboy /path/to/roms/rom.gbc '. Inside the rc file are mapping for keys... a = A button, s= B button, q = quit, r = reset and enter/space are select/start.

Cheers.

[rigbyrj]

I will look into kaffe and/or jamvm, both of which were a bear to build for arm when i was developing over at jlime.com. Once built however they worked decently. If and when that happens it'll be as an 'addon package' and not included in rc2.

Workgroups will also not be added to rc2. If and when i get around to looking into that it will also come out as an update or patch.

Native language support will also not be in rc2. It's just easier to use world wide english. I will look into that also and if i get to it, that also will be available as an update/patch.

The only reason being, as of right now rc2's .img jumped 50 meg to a 172 meg .img file. I dont want to bloat it up much more by default. Also i had enough to fix/upgrade from rc1 to make my head spin and i want to get rc2 out in a timely manner.

Now i know there are some hackers/tinkerer's out here that will eventually hopefully look into these as well. They did it for the default OS to get root, made patches, etc. Anybody is more than welcome to send patches for these my way. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Also things went well and 3MX-rc2 is slated to be available within the next 2 days.

Cheers.

Thanks Wicknix,

Any effort you can put into it is greatly appreciated.

I had a quick look at Kaffe myself - it took me a little while to find a JRE that will work on MIPS.  But because of the dependencies and uncertainties on how well it would work it seemed like a lost cause.

I have been looking at the Debian MIPS repositories to find out dependencies etc for packages - is that the easiest way of finding out the info?

I have tried to use the scripts that are floating around to make installation packages (I think it's called mkxap) but I struggled to get it to work, despite following the instructions I found.  Would I need to recompile packages pulled from the Debian MIPS repositories before packaging them with mkxap?  I had assumed not.

If you were able to point me in the right direction on how to get the mkxap script (or alternative) to work, and how best to sort the dependencies then I am happy to put some time into trying to sort this myself - and then I could post it up to give something back.

Thanks again.

[wicknix]

Taking things from debian mipsel repositories is perfectly fine and will work so long as you also provide the dependencies. The easiest way is create a directory somewhere on your desktop/laptop. I just have one called 'xap'.

Extract the .deb package/packages inside there. Place the mkxap script in there as well. When you have everything needed just run ./mkxap packagename folder1 folder2 etc to make the .info and .xap.

Example: ./mkxap sdlgnuboy usr share

The same would work for cross compiled apps. Now the correct way would be to package the dependencies seperately, but for testing purposes you could toss everything into one big .xap. If it doesnt work its easily removable via the package installer.

Good luck.

[ace]

Hi wicknix, really looking forward to the new version 

I was wondering if it would be a good idea (in an effort to keep things light) for future versions of 3mx to be lighter by just including the apps that are necessary (like just the apps the original distro came with). 

Additional apps could be made available as downloads, just as they are now from several websites.

thanx for all your great work so far!!

[DaWaN]

Wicknix, really like your distro!!! Please keep it up

I'm going to try the mkxap script, so I can release OpenTTD, it's working fine, very nice little game to play

Hi wicknix, really looking forward to the new version 

I was wondering if it would be a good idea (in an effort to keep things light) for future versions of 3mx to be lighter by just including the apps that are necessary (like just the apps the original distro came with). 

Additional apps could be made available as downloads, just as they are now from several websites.

thanx for all your great work so far!!

I think the original was already a bit bloated, especially the Bon Echo browser which was loaded with add-ons I actually didn't want...

[KneeOn]

Wicknix, really like your distro!!! Please keep it up

I'm going to try the mkxap script, so I can release OpenTTD, it's working fine, very nice little game to play

Hi wicknix, really looking forward to the new version 

I was wondering if it would be a good idea (in an effort to keep things light) for future versions of 3mx to be lighter by just including the apps that are necessary (like just the apps the original distro came with). 

Additional apps could be made available as downloads, just as they are now from several websites.

thanx for all your great work so far!!

I think the original was already a bit bloated, especially the Bon Echo browser which was loaded with add-ons I actually didn't want...

I thought you needed TTD to actually run the game in the first place... ut if i am wrong then i am very happy because i watned to play simutrans which i enjoyed emmensly but TTD is the same concept. i wish you luck

[Teh-Mega-Hax]

hi guys my first post ,

wow is all i can say. it seems that you are almost a linux god from my eyes !

thanks for releasing such great work.

me and my friend are stumped at how fast you produced this, we have been at this type of project for a couple of month now and never managed to get anything concrete.

 we worked for a small linux style software company for 3 years and are willing to write some code for you if you wish. not much experiance in writing for MIPS processors but cant be harder than ARM! yeah if you need some help with anything just email me or PM me on here....also well done again for this... im sure this will  help all other users of this small architecture

[Wildheart Baby]

I was wondering if it would be a good idea (in an effort to keep things light) for future versions of 3mx to be lighter by just including the apps that are necessary (like just the apps the original distro came with).

This is a brand new all singing all dancing distro, out of the original apps installed on my CnM, I used, the wireless connection app, the web browser, the installer, file manager and once xip word.

From my point of view dumping most of the original apps for ones which work properly, like the media player for vlc etc. can only be a good thing.

Plus, even at 172 meg there is more than enough space for anything else you may want to stick on there with the extended storage and sd card slot.

[wicknix]

While i do like input about what people want, here's my reasoning why 3MX is what it is. It started off as something for myself, as the default OS 'sucked' badly. I then decided it'd be a good idea to share it. While i did take some requests into consideration i have to think of what the masses (and myself) would want. The masses (and i mean this in a nice way) aren't linux smart. They dont want to install this, find this patch, read 5 forums from different countries etc just to make their minibook useable. They just want to install and have everything ready to go, which is pretty much what 3MX is, a preloaded, preconfigured OS. It still isn't perfect, and probably will never be, but (and not being biased) i feel its the best choice out there currently. Not everybody will like every application i have installed, but for 1 that doesn't 20 more are happy its there. 

Cheers.

[Teh-Mega-Hax]

Hi again, i know its a bit short notice compared to you superb "unfinished" release, would you ever consider creating another but for the developers side etc. theres no harm in saying no to it but i think it would be healthy due to the support you have at the minute and the support of when this becomes widely known.

it sounds like it could really take off. your the first one that i know of that has successfully rewritten a linux distro and brought out something in gold....
its a marvelous job and i'm sure some keen developers (me!) would love to view it.... obviously credit where its due of course...you are the Father of Mini laptops in mainstream developing from where i'm standing....

well thanks anyway

[wicknix]

you are the Father of Mini laptops in mainstream developing from where i'm standing....

Honestly i've done nothing out of the ordinary. Just took the basic default OS, stripped it down a little and built on top of it. Alot of the applications came from debian's mipsel repositories, in rc2 a few were borrowed from xenium, and a few were built by me using OE (openembedded.com). Ideally my ultimate goal is to produce a completely new OS built with OE ( just like jlime, maemo, openmoko, angstrom, etc ) and have a package feed like those also. That takes a very long time (took me around 1 year to get jlime mongo's userland and 700+ packages built). This was/is a quick toss together for the time being to hopefully make these machines a bit more useable in the meantime.

Now the development edition... hmmm.. it could be done. Would take me awhile, but could be done. I'll keep that in mind, and time permitting possibly get one set up. The idea is great, going about making it is the hard part however. Now if i get a machine configuration set up perfectly in OE i will upload it to OE to include in the latest releases. Then it would be simply install and set up OE and anybody could easily cross compile for these mipsel machines.

Cheers.