Stephen Feyrer put forth on 1/6/2011 11:20 AM:
Hi Stan,
Hi Stephen.
# OS: Linux 2.6.12.6-arm1 armv5tejl
Stephen, just curious:
Curiosity should be be encouraged, oddly though, this is best achieved with answers.
Always. :)
- Why are you running a 5 year old kernel? Is it still supported by your distro?
My distro is optware and as far as I can tell isn't maintained on a regular basis. The thing is first you update the kernel, and then you update gcc, then glibc, and then its emacs and binutils and libtools and zlib and openssl and soon everything spirals out of control and you don't know where it all went wrong.
- Given your kernel is 5 years old, why are you intent on running the bleeding edge Dovecot?
In the beginning when I first came to Dovecot, I was told promptly if you've got a problem get the latest version of Dovecot in case your problem has already been fixed. Since then I found a very cross compiler that built Dovecot 1.2.8 for me since then that has worked fine. Just a few days ago my brother decided to update Dovecot with the latest version (which has problems), so I referred to the previous instruction to get the latest version. Also, my cross compiler is now so cross it no longer compiles packages.
I hope this was informative.
Yes, very. So, in summary, I guess one could say that working in the embedded world, with a non x86 platform, and a less than fully supported OS distro, can often be very different, and more difficult, than working in the "normal" x86 world.
Given the difficulties with managing optware, have you considered switching to emdebian? Or is the problem not optware per se, but the package management process for embedded systems in general? It appears that no matter which embedded OS option you choose, there is a lot of manual work involved.
Have you tried a standard distro such as Debian but with a minimal install? I have such Debian Lenny servers with a memory footprint of less than 64MB, including Postfix and Dovecot, and a / filesystem of less than 1GB. Is your arm platform RAM limited or storage limited, or both?
Take a look at Emdebian and regular Debian w/ a minimal install. Both support arm and armel platforms. The standard Debian arm install can be performed via http using either a tiny CD/DVD image or a USB flash drive. The Emdebian install is obviously more complicated, likely similar to optware. Although emdebian has a large developer community backing it.
"Prebuilt toolchains to build for arm, armel, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390 and sparc using a variety of gcc-3.3, gcc-3.4, gcc-4.0, gcc-4.1, gcc-4.2, gcc-4.3 and gcc-4.4 compilers."
http://tuxonomy.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/debian-minimal-install-of-a-base-sy...
Standard Debian (Lenny) doesn't offer Dovecot 2.0, and frankly this is because it's just not stable enough--still too many patches on a regular bases. Via the backports repository you have access to the latest 1.2.x series, or a patch level behind. Currently 1.2.15 is available, and IIRC the latest is 1.2.16. I'm still running 1.2.15 and have had no issues with it, or the 5 prior point releases back to 1.2.11. YMMV.
-- Stan