To install, as root, type:

rpm -ivh http://software.freivald.com/centos/software.freivald.com-1.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
yum update fontconfig fontconfig-devel qt4 qt4-devel qt4-doc qt4-postgresql qt4-odbc qt4-sqlite qt-creator

Also, I’ve updated the qt-creator package to 1.3.1-1.  The issue with the package was that on the 64-bit environment, qt-creator continues to look into /usr/lib/qtcreator for it’s plugins instead of /usr/lib64/qtcreator.  I added a link from /usr/lib/qtcreator to /usr/lib64/qtcreator in the x86_64 arch build.  This means that you should not install the 32-bit version and the 64 bit version on the same machine – but I’m not sure that was ever a good idea in the first place.

Please post here if you have any issues with the Qt 4.6.3 build or the qtcreator 1.3.1-1.

I’ve also posted the public key that I use to sign the packages here.  To use it, as root, type:

rpm --import http://software.freivald.com/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-software.freivald.com

NOTE: If you use yum-priorities you will need to set this repository to the same level as ‘core’ for these to install properly.  You’ll know if you have a priorities issue because ‘yum install qt-creator’ will scream at you that you are missing libaries.  These libraries come in the version that I compile but not in the Centos core distribution and if the priorities are wrong it will pull those packages from core.

Cheers.

I could not find my 2 GB card.  I used the original image, copied it to a 4 GB card, performed the update, and then copied only the first 2 GB back into the new image.  Please provide feedback if the image does not work on a 2GB card.

INFO: For those who are unfamiliar with Centos, it is a distribution that is binary compatible with RedHat Enterprise Linux.

EDIT: We’ve been added to the ALIX web page. Thank you for the testing and support from the PC-Engines crew.

I’ve been working with one of PC Engine’s Alix 6e1 boards a bit lately.  It’s a 500 MHz i586 AMD Geode-based embedded board with 256 MB of RAM that sells for under $150. I was testing various distributions and found that Centos was pretty easy to adapt. It wasn’t listed as supported on the PC Engines Web Site, so I wanted to contribute an image back to the community.

The image I’ve created has the following changes from a base install:

1.  It has no swap.

2.  It has the noatime and nodiratime options for all mounted partitions, although it uses ext3 because of the wal-wart-no-backup-power-for-shutdown configuration.

3.  Grub is configured for a 2-second timeout, and uses the serial port as the console – both for grub and the kernel.

4.  /etc/inittab was modified to use the serial console.  xdm was also disabled.

5.  All console settings are set for 38400 because that is what the initial boot-up bios uses on the ALIX 6e1 that I have.

6.  /etc/securetty has been modified to allow login via /dev/ttyS0 (tty0 and vc/1 are also left open because I used VMWare to modify the image).

7.  Fortunately, due to the stock Centos LVM configuration, no changes were necessary to fstab or the initrd image.

8.  Only a base install was performed.  Several of the ‘default’ packages have been omitted (things like bluetooth, extra shells, smart card reader daemon, procmail, cups, NetworkManager, etc. )  Of course they are still available using YUM.

9.  Lots of the startup stuff is turned off (kudzu, gpm, netfs, iptables and others).  Use chkconfig to turn them back on if you want them.

10.  The root password is – yep, you guess it: password

11. The eth0 (next to the USB ports) is configured for DHCP. eth1 (next to the serial port) is configured for 192.168.1.50. The hardware MAC lines have been commented out so that it will work with any box, but there is a slight chance that the order of the ports will get reversed. This has never happened to me, but YMMV. You can use either port to get the box up and running with ssh or putty if you don’t want to use or don’t have a serial interface.

12.  The CF card I used was A 2GB SanDisk Ultra 15MB/s.  Because it’s LVM based, you can use the LVM tools to shrink or grow the volumes.  Check out the LVM Howto for all the recipies you need.

13. I updated the packages using ‘yum update’ on the day it was created, so hopefully you won’t have as much downloading to do. I did not enable centosplus, extras, or any other repositories, which makes the image binary compatible with RHEL 5.4.

To use the image,

1.  Download the image from http://software.freivald.com/centos/alix-centos-5.5-2gcf.gz.

2.  Unzip the image with bunzip2 and copy it to your Compact Flash drive using ‘dd if=<inputfile> of=<outputdevice>’

3.  Install the Compact Flash into the ALIX.

4.  Attach your favorite terminal program to the ALIX platform.  I use putty.exe under Windows or minicom under linux.

5.  Apply power to the unit.  It should boot without any fuss. If you don’t have a serial port, use eth0 (next to the USB) to have your DHCP router assign and address, or use eth1 (next to the serial port) for a static configuration. eth1 is configured for 192.168.1.50 and the connector auto-rolls the cable if it needs to, so configure your computer for something like 192.168.1.51 and ping until the system is online. Then use ssh, or putty.exe if you are using Windows, to access the unit.

6.  I recommend some changes: Obviously, the root password.  Also, add an MD5 password to the grub configuration, since without one anyone with a serial cable can pass parameters to the kernel. You will also probably want to add more software using yum. You might also want to create some scratch space under /tmp, or some of the /var/cache directories using tmpfs. I didn’t do any of the these because they are simple, and different users will have different requirements, especially with the advancement of CF cards (wear leveling, 1000000+writes/block, etc.). You will probably want to customize /etc/securetty for your installation.

With this setup, the initial boot up takes 1:32 and has 193MB of free memory. Should be plenty for your embedded Linux server.

–JATF

The Qt4 packages for Centos are updated to 4.6.2 and Qt Creator is updated to 1.3.1.

To install:

rpm -ivh http://software.freivald.com/centos/software.freivald.com-1.0.0-1.noarch.rpm

yum update fontconfig fontconfig-devel qt4 qt4-devel qt4-doc qt4-postgresql qt4-odbc qt4-sqlite qt-creator

Verify that the versions are coming from software.freivald.com and enjoy.

UPDATE: Nokia released Qt 4.6.0 and qt-creator 1.3.0 today.  The new RPMs are compiled and stored in the repository.  ‘yum update’ should be sufficient to grab the new ones.  I also changed the directory to reflect Centos 5.4 instead of 5.3.  Let me know of any issues.

–JATF

Want to get the Qt SDK working on Centos 5.3?

Quick instructions:

rpm -ivh http://software.freivald.com/centos/software.freivald.com-1.0.0-1.noarch.rpm

yum update fontconfig fontconfig-devel qt4 qt4-devel qt4-doc qt4-postgresql qt4-odbc qt4-sqlite qt-creator

Verify that the versions are coming from software.freivald.com and install.

Longer story:

All of the RPM’s described in this post are in a yum repository that you can access by installing this RPM.  It includes both x86_64 and i386 repositories that are automatically selected based on your architecture.

The first problem: the FcFreeTypeQueryFace problem that is very well described here, with a manual compile and upgrade way around it.  I thought I would go one step further and create an RPM.  Here is what I did:

I started with this source file from fontconfig.org and this SRPM from redhat.com, modified the spec file from the SRPM because of a changed config file location, and created these RPM files for you to install.

The second problem:  the QtSDK is built against several other libraries that are newer than provided with CentOS 5.3.  Rather than update those libraries, I’ve opted to compile RPMs for qt4 and qt-creator for CentOS 5.3. There are all new packages for them in the repository. They upgrade the shipped version (4.2.1) to the new version. They should be binary compatible, since theoretically Qt only breaks binary backwards compatibility on a major revision number change, but I don’t have any real way to test this. Feel free to post any problems you encounter.

The third problem: qt-creator isn’t included with the qt4 source.  I created it as its own package.  ‘yum install qt-creator’ to install it by itself.

Hopefully after installing the repository package, a

yum update

and everything should ‘just work’.

Oh, and feel free to use the ‘joewidgets’ and ‘joewidgets-devel’ packages.  They include some widgets that I use for other projects, primarily a back-port of the KLed widget to QLed that removed KDE dependancies, and a multi-state button with configurable colors for each state.  The ‘devel’ package includes designer plugins that also work in qt-creator.  Source for those are published in the srpms directory.

–JATF