1. What is this? This is an "almost" full desktop system targeting the lemote yeeloong netbook sporting a loongsoon 2f CPU. ================================================================================ 2. Why are there two images: vanilla and hardened The two are identical in term of what packages they provide, except the hardened image is built using the completely hardened toolchain maintained by the Hardened Gentoo team. The means that all the ELF binaries are ET_DYN (not ET_EXE so their address space is better randomized), have SSP (stack smashing protection against buffer overflows), PIE (position independant executable, also better address space randomization) and FORTIFY_SOURCES=2 (extra hardening of glibc functions). They are also linked relro (relocation read-only) and bind-now to prevent redirection of symbols. Sounds like hardened is a clear winner over vanilla, except that there is a small performance hit. Not anything like i686, but still noticeable. Maybe five to ten percent, but I haven't made a good measure. Also, if you're compiling your own binaries, there may be some exotic breakage with the hardened that you won't get with the vanilla, but again its much rarer than on say i686. There the issue is often poorly written assembly that isn't hardened friendly, but since you're on a mips64el arch, chances are that that assembly hasn't even been ported, so there's nothing there to break! If you're just an ordinary user, choose hardened. The extra security will outweigh the other factors. ================================================================================ 3. What works, what doesn't? Here's a TODO of what needs to be added. Other than these items, its a pretty functional desktop. Open a bug (see below) and ask for more features and I'll do my best. 1) The wireless card is working, but you have to configure it manually. 2) The webcam is not working. 3) The web browser is Dillo which is not the most featureful. This should be improved to epiphany or firefox. 4) There is no video player. ================================================================================ 4. I want it! How do I install it on my Lemote Yeeloong? 1) Prepare the boot image. It is called netboot-yeeloong.img and it should be in the same directory as this README. It can be used from either a tftp server or a pen drive. Put it on a tftp server or pen drive at some /path/to/. Make sure you prepare the drive with a FAT32, EXT2 or EXT3, but *not* EXT4 filesystem. PMON doesn't understand EXT4. 2) Boot into a rescue environment. Turn the lemote on and hit the Del key multiple times. You should see a PMON> prompt appear with possibly some trailing garbage characters, usually repeated G's. If you are booting off the network with a tftp server, then the enter: PMON> ifaddr rtl0 PMON> load tftp:///path/to/netboot-yeeloong.img PMON> g Replace with the ip of the lemote yeeloong and with the ip of your tftp server. If, however, you want to boot off a pen drive, enter: PMON> load /dev/fs/ext2@usb0/path/to/netboot-yeeloong.img PMON> g At this point you'll come up in a ramdisk image with busybox and a few other utilities to get your system ready. Hit enter a couple of times if you don't see a shell prompt right away. 3) Prepare a root partition and mount: a. Using fdisk, prepare at least two partitions: /dev/sda1 - this will be /boot, give it about 128 MB. /dev/sda2 - this will be swap, give it at least 1 GB. /dev/sda3 - this will be root, give it a generous amount, at least 6 GB. /boot only has to hold a kernel or two, so you can get away with less, but the others are minima. I use 4GB for swap and 40GB for root. b. mdev needs to rescan the devices after (re)partioning. You could reboot, but its easier to just do: mdev -s c. Format the partitons: mke2fs /dev/sda1 - do not use EXT4 since PMON doesn't understand it mkswap /dev/sda2 mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3 - use the tried and true EXT4 d. Mount it mkdir -p /mnt/gentoo mkdir -p /mnt/gentoo/boot mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/gentoo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot 4) Download and unpack the tarball images: cd /mnt/gentoo wget http:///gentoo/experimental/mips/desktop-loongson2f/desktop-loongson2f-hardened-.tar.lzma tar xf desktop-loongson2f-.tar.lzma Replace with the FQDN of your favorite Gentoo mirror, replace with the date of the release, and replace hardened with vanilla if you want that image instead. 5) If you changed any of the above values for /dev/sda* then edit the boot.cfg file. It can be found at /mnt/gentoo/boot/boot.cfg. 6) Reboot your yeeloong. PMON should find the kernel, but if it doesn't then enter PMON> load /dev/fs/ext2@wd0/boot/vmlinuz PMON> g console=tty root=/dev/sda1 7) Log in and enjoy! user: gentoo pass: gentoo or user: root pass: root 8) Bug reports to http://bugs.gentoo.org Assign to blueness@gentoo.org and CC mips@gentoo.org Don't be shy! We want to make this a better product!