WindfluechterNet Blog

Mid of November I already wrote about “Resurrecting m68k” – and went on holidays right after that writing. So, nothing really happened until December. But then things happened rather quickly one after one. First, I got Elgar up and running. Then I upgraded Arrakis and Vivaldi again. And then it was a lucky coincedence that my parents made a short trip to Nuremberg. Back then there were another buildd located in that city: Akire, which was operated by Matthias “smurf” Urlichs. So I mailed him and asked, if Akire still do exists and he answered surprising quickly that it is – but he wanted to take it to the garbage soon.

I asked Smurf if my parents could pick it up and we managed to exchange contact addresses/phone numbers. To all of our surprise the Hotel, where my parents were staying, was just 180m away from Smurfs home! So it was really easy for my parents to pick up the machine, until they continued their trip to visit me in Rostock. That way I had just another machine to upgrade! Whoohoo!

I used most of the time in December to upgrade the machines, migrating to larger disks, setting up everything as someone on debian-68k list popped up to offer a hosting facility in Berlin. That was really perfect timing! I took Elgar from NMMN in Hamburg, where it was hosted until August, and had now a second machine, Akire, where I didn’t know where to host. So the offer made it easy to decide: Elgar & Akire will go to Berlin whereas Kullervo & Crest will move back to NMMN, when those two boxes got upgraded. That way we have some kind of redundancy. Perfect!

Except that we would still need a running Buildd on those machines. During the last few years, I think 4-5 years, the sbuild/buildd suite did change in a great way. Nothing worked any longer as it did. So I concentrated on getting sbuild ready to pick a source and build it. But I got faced with some segfaults of various stuff. After all, it happened to be a somewhat broken kernel that caused all the problems. After upgrading the kernel, schroot suddenly did work and I could continue in setting up sbuild. After some days things got clearer and finally it worked: 6tunnel was the first newly build package by sbuild on m68k on 20. December 2012!

During the next days I tried to get a larger disk (18G) for Spice, another machine, working, so I could use the big disk (36G) for Akire, instead of the old 2 & 4G disks and tried to deploy the sbuild config to Arrakis and Vivaldi. That was about two days ago. The missing part was an updated buildd config. This was addressed by Wouter today (well, actually yesterday in the meantime) and now we have a working buildd again since years! Hooray! :-))

Now we are back on track with the m68k port and will add more buildds, as well native as emulated ones, to come down from that “Needs-Build : 5261” number.

So, very big thanks to all that made this possible: 

• Wouter for configuring the buildd setup on Arrakis
• Aurelien for adding the m68k buildd back to debian-ports.org.
• John Paul Adrian Glaubitz for offering the hosting
• Matthias “smurf” Urlichs for keeping care of Akire all of these years
• NMMN in Hamburg for willing to continue the hosting for Kullervo & Crest
• adb@#debian-68k for donating 4x 32MB PS/2 RAM

and finally, last but not least, a very, very BIG THANKS to Thorsten Glaser who acted all these years as a human buildd and for solving the TLS problem on m68k and keeping the port alive in some kind of one-man-show!