[arch-ports] Arch64 suggestions

[Maluvia]

Hi Seshu,

Since the Arch64 site is currently down, I thought this might be a good opportunity to pop in a few suggestions regarding the Arch64 port, based on my own experiences with it.

1.  It would be *very* helpful to some of us (like me) if you would make both a uniprocessor (UP) as well as an SMP version of the kernel available.
Some uniprocessor boards like mine do not behave well with SMP kernels.
Mine in particular has been very badly broken - unable to compile anything at all.
(Cf. Bug 4851: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4851) 
Linus put a patch in the 2.6.14 kernel to deal with the problem, but I have to wait for someone to compile it and make it available -or- make a UP (no numa) version of the 2.6.13 kernel that I can try out.
Perhaps I am the only one who has had this issue, but as the Arch64 port attracts more users, it may crop with other people as well.

Minor suggestions:
I think the binutils pkg needs to have the search path corrected to match gcc-4.0.2-2.
(i.e. changed from "-unknown-linux-gnu" to "pc-linux-gnu")
I don't know if this is causing any problems or not, but it makes sense that they be consistent.

>From my experience the symlink in glibc is not helpful.
I recently did a clean reinstall - installed glibc first, replaced the lib, usr/lib symlinks with regular lib, usr/lib directories, then installed everything else, and my system seems to be more stable.
I think gcc and X are the only programs that use lib64, and a multilib OS will be using lib32 for 32bit libs anyway.

(Minor nitpick - the ncurses pkg always installs with the permissions messed up, but I found this to be so with the 32bit Arch as well, so it's not an Arch64 issue, but it is annoying to have to go in and fix them all up by hand.)

I realize the move to the new 2.6.14 kernel is going to be a big shift with the initrd, libtool slaying in progress, etc.
Hope it all goes well, and thanks again for all your hard work on this port.

If I can ever manage to get a system working well enough to compile something I will be happy to contribute packages to the project.
Good luck with the next round.

-Maluvia