[arch-ports] [i586 Port] Problems with installer CD and broken/missing packages

[Alexander Baldeck]

Hey list,

only recently I got a old surplus laptop which is powered by a AMD K6-2+ 
which means I
couldn't just simply run Arch-i686 on it. So it was obvious that it was 
time to try the i586
port. Anyway I ran into several problems I'd like to point out here 
since there is no bugtracker
right now, is there?

Installer CD:

The iso I downloaded was: 
http://genesis.blogdns.net/packages/i586/iso/arch_i586-2005-04-11.iso

1) the modules lack proper dependencies so one needs to probe network 
modules manually for PCMCIA
2) 8390.ko lacks symbols obviously because crc32.ko cannot be probed 
first since it does not exist
3) the both above made it impossible for me to use my PCMCIA network 
card and furthermore to use FTP
     as the install media at all, since this laptop has no network card 
built-in there was no way to get decent
     versions from the start
4) the packages cause Pacman to display the strangest warning I've seen 
so far. something about a syntax
     error on line 11 probably in the .PKGINFO
5) syslog-ng depends on libol for runtime. libol cannot be resolved cos 
it's not referenced in the package
     set on the cd

Anyhow I made it to do a forced manual install the hard way (pacman -Ad 
*.pkg.tar.gz) for base/.


Package repository:

First try was on: http://genesis.blogdns.net/packages/i586/repo/current

1) Pacman badly requires modification of it's defaults in pacman.* and 
makepkg.conf for i586
2) autoconf is broken, the autom4te binary is missing which made it 
impossible for me to build coreutils
     (there may be more packages around that it breaks)
3) pcmcia-cs is missing, which I again manually built with crunching my 
teeth :)


I started my own repository therefore and plan to contribute to address 
a lot of the mentioned issues as soon
as the problems I heard about on IRC are solved.

My partitial current can be found here:
    http://archppc.kleiner-weise.de/archlinux/current/os/i586/

Keep in mind that it cannot be used as a current replacement yet but I 
plan to in the future. Also I updated gcc,
binutils and glibc plus applied libtoolslaying to some of the packages.


Cheers!

-kth5