Support for newer Ubuntus?

[tomas]

Hi and congrats for your work!

I noticed that the packages on the PPA don't include anything after Ubuntu 16.04. Is there anything in particular that's preventing the drivers from working or being built on newer Ubuntu versions (16.10, 17.04, 17.10)? I'd love to try and build the drivers myself but couldn't find any info in the readme.

Thanks again

[thopiekar]

No, currently there are no plans. Sadly something changed to Debians and therefore Ubuntu packaging system, so the dependencies of EMGD need some updates.
Currently I don't have the time to fix the issues around these packages 😞

[tomas]

Bummer... :(

I might have some time myself (eventually) though. Would you point me in the right direction in order to get the packages built?

[thopiekar]

Are you really interested to work on this? Actually, I was about to close this EMGD project just because people are asking about progress, but they are not willing to help out or continue this work.
If you like we can begin with the essentials to get OpenGL working: Mesa and Xorg
For the kernel driver, we can always use an older kernel I guess.

If you are interested I can re-upload the mesa sources again. The issue with it seems to be packaging related - that means: You will need to fix a Makefile to the latest standards set by Debian.
If I recall correctly there was an issue with a debhelper command, which was complaining, that a directory was passed as an argument. This happens because a regular expression is including a subdirectory.

So, if you are interested I can re-upload it for you and you can try to fix it. Whenever possible, I will help, but don't expect a big interest from my side, because my netbook's battery is completely dead.
The only reason I'm keeping it, is, that I would like to use it within a build system. But that is another story.

[tomas]

Yes, please do!

As I said I'm not sure when I'll be able to put time into this, but I also own a few netbooks and would love to keep them up do date.

[thopiekar]

I'm uploading the sources at the moment.

Please focus on the master branch, which contains mesa 7.9. As far as I remember, the binary blobs by Intel were most stable with it.
Here is the last build log:
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/348769185/buildlog_ubuntu-bionic-i386.mesa-7.9_1%3A7.9-201712102304~rev46~ubuntu18.04.1_BUILDING.txt.gz
And the troubling line at the end of the build log.
dpkg-gensymbols: error: cannot read debian/libegl1-mesa-7.9/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa-7.9-egl/egl: Is a directory

Good luck! 👍

[thopiekar]

Hint: Download the latest mesa source package from Ubuntu and look how they updated this section. This might save time :)

[tomas]

Great, thanks. Do you have the build script you used for building the packages? Now that would save me a lot of time. :)

[thopiekar]

Go into the source directory and execute dpkg-buildpackage.

[tomas]

Were you able to upload the mesa source code? I just cloned the repo for a first attempt, but I can't find any traces of it anywhere (they should be inside debian/libegl1-mesa-7.9, right?).

Thanks again

[thopiekar]

Nope, the packaging files (./debian/) are inside the source directory (./). When the binaries are built the files are placed into directories, eg. debian/libegl1-mesa-7.9, which at the end get archived into single files. Eg. libegl1-mesa-7.9.deb.

[tomas]

Quick question: am I supposed to build the packages inside a chroot? I'm having trouble setting everything up (i.e. I'm running a x64 machine but dpkg-buildpackage complains about the linux-headers-686 package not being present).

Is there something else I'm supposed to do? The output I get from dpkg-buildpackage doesn't even look close to the build log you pointed earlier, haha. :)

[thopiekar]

Yes, using a chroot is fine. Also using a VM would work, but is not as lightweight as a chroot.
Take a look at "schroot". It allows to use chroots pretty easy even without gaining root rights!

The log I posted before is the one from launchpad.net's builder. They use a bare minimal chroot and then reinstall all packages as needed for the package to be built. To reproduce the build process from launchpad.net I recommend to take a look at "pbuilder".

Happy easter!

[RomSand]

I'm getting the same error. and as you mention cause of debhelper.

dh_makeshlibs will run dpkg-gensymbols on all shared libraries that it generates shlibs files for. So -X can be used to exclude libraries. Also, libraries in unusual locations that dpkg-gensymbols would not have processed before will be passed to it, a behavior change that can cause some packages to fail to build.

[RomSand]

I could install xorg and mesa from xenial didn't have time to make all tests but it should work...

[deagon88]

I'd be willing to help keep this alive too. Lord knows i have the time. I might need some pointers sometimes though if you are willing thopiekar. I waited 7 years to get my hands on a umid mbook just to stumble on this poulsbo mess intel created. I've got a sagem spiga too (umid mbook m1 clone) I'd really like to keep my quite rare machines going as long as i can. Owners of the Onkyo bx407a4 would benefit too. You still around tomas? Perhaps we could work together. I've been meaning to package all this for the Arch User Repository for about 2 years but never got round to it. If anyone needs bare metal i can leave an ssh server running on one of these netbooks and fill a 64gb pendrive full of different distro chroot's.

P.s. I've definitely benefitted from your work thopiekar and i greatly appreciate what you've done to keep this chipset alive for so long. I've just never really known how i could contribute.