OpenBSD

Does anyone know if RPCEmu works on OpenBSD…or will I have to try to find a Linux that works well on my laptop…?

Does anyone know if RPCEmu works on OpenBSD…or will I have to try to find a Linux that works well on my laptop…?

Not aware that anyone has tried on BSD. It’s always a compile it it yourself job on the X build variants anyway.
The only install guidelines we have are these here for Windows and MacOS so if you could make notes when you do try then it would help others.

Well I tried it and got as far as the first compile step (i.e. running cmake) and for some reason cmake couldn’t detect the endiannes of my CPU. I suspect this might be something to do with it being a weird cut-down Centrino (quite a lot of operating systems wont work because it doesn’t have full support for PAE so I’m not sure what else is missing – its an old Sony Vaio designed for Windows XP and the theory was probably “We’ve got a driver for XP and it works so lets use this CPU because it only produces 5W of heat” or something like that…it does have a “Designed for Microsoft Windows XP” sticker so who knows…maybe it actually was?)

Anyway, quite a few of the UNIX-like operating systems I have tried on the computer run into weird problems so I thought I’d go back to Debian.

Now cmake is complaining about missing OpenGL libraries but I’m sure I can fix that one!

Shame I couldn’t report that “OpenBSD Works!” or something like that but sadly I have no good news…

I wonder if FreeBSD might be an alternative…?

But then Debian works flawlessly on the machine so I should probably just stick to what I know…after all its only there so I can boot into RPCEmu! ;—)

Now where did I put my OpenGL libraries…

RPCEmu ‘should’ compile on OpenBSD without issue.

Well I tried it and got as far as the first compile step (i.e. running cmake) and for some reason cmake couldn’t detect the endiannes of my CPU.

Why are you running ‘cmake’? With a copy of the source from here

http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/index.php#downloads

and roughly following the steps here

http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/linuxcompile.html

If you have a compiler installed and a copy of the Allegro 4 libraries and development files installed, it should be as simple as running

 ./configure
 make

If you run into issues, please post the steps you took and the commands you entered and the output of them.

Once again for Debian, why are you running ‘cmake’?

Once again for Debian, why are you running ‘cmake’?

Because the documentation I have with my version of RPCEmu instructed me to do so in order to build Allegro.

Even downloading a new copy of Allegro requires cmake to build.

Using a new copy of Allegro from their website and building with cmake on Debian resulted in no problems and I have run RPCEmu fine on a Debian machine. It seems that the version of Allegro I have that was bundled with my version of RPCEmu is broken somehow but this is easily averted by using a new version of Allegro.

I’m not entirely happy with Debian so might give OpenBSD another try or switch to something else like TinyCore…

Because the documentation I have with my version of RPCEmu instructed me to do so in order to build Allegro.

OK, where did you get your copy of RPCEmu from? (because it appears it has some terrible advice in it)

Even downloading a new copy of Allegro requires cmake to build.

You shouldn’t need to build Allegro for Debian or OpenBSD, just install the library and development headers from the distribution’s repositories (other people build it for you)

e.g. on Debian

apt-get install liballegro4-dev liballegro4.4

e.g. on OpenBSD (note I don’t have openbsd to test this)

pkg-add allegro

Important note: RPCEmu uses the Allegro 4 library, building a copy of ‘the latest’ Allegro 5 won’t help you build RPCEmu

OK, where did you get your copy of RPCEmu from

From RISC OS Open a couple of years ago. The advice and reasoning behind it are sound and if anyone has a copy of the help files included in the bundle I’m sure they would agree.

I have downloaded and built allegro4 and I have also installed it from the repositories and have also gone through half a dozen different operating systems over the past week or so to find one that works well (RPCEmu works well but other aspects of the system are broken in various ways, i.e., wifi or screen resolution).

Debian is the most stable (even though Gnome crashes….but then the laptop is hardly powerful enough to run Gnome anyway). Haiku was one of my favourites but unfortunately doesn’t support the graphics chip so I could only run it in safe mode.

I still have a few more operating systems to try (currently has OpenIndiana on it but runs too slow). Tinycore and Debian are looking like strong favourites though.

If I ever do go back to OpenBSD I will post a progress update here…after instslling Debian I did discover that OpenBSD was chewing through the battery in comparison so maybe it’s not the best option for this machine.

I built a VM this evening and tested OpenBSD support.

There are now some compile instructions on the RPCEmu site here;

http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/openbsdcompile.html

Cool thanks!

After trying a wealth of different operating systems over the past week or so I have narrowed down my choice to either Debian or OpenBSD so its great to know that RPCEmu will work on both! (TinyCore works really well too but it seems to take a long time to load…probably because it is loading the whole OS into the RAM)

Did you manage to test networking at all?

Networking doesn’t work on OpenBSD, nor does the recompiler (the thing that makes it go about 4 times faster).

For RPCEmu Debian is the much better choice.