After two more 3-day builds of qt6-webengine, the last was successful! New packages are present in the .onion link and a couple of small additions to the ports repo.
I was tempted, because distcc was farming all of the compilation to my desktop and I had crammed an 8GB microSD card into the USB port for swap, to leave the JOBS=6 in. It turns out that if the wifi gets congested, distccd will sometimes blink out temporarily and distcc will do the compile locally. This is usually fine, but in this case, there wasn’t enough RAM to do six compiles locally, so it started eating into swap. I wake up and check the screen and the clock is lagging about 30 minutes in the past. After that, a couple of dependent packages needed to be rebuilt, nothing serious, and then qutebrowser was easy.
Nothing special to report for Firefox. Took about a day to compile, distcc handled it, except for the parts where rustc was involved. I think it might have worked out fine without distcc but I didn’t wanna risk it after spending a little more than a week trying to get qt6-webengine to build. I was braced for it to take three days but it was just under one day; I’m actually moderately surprised. (I might have skipped qutebrowser if I’d known Firefox was going to be this easy by comparison, but I had expected the opposite.)
This is, I think, the end of the part where I’m just checking in every few hours to see if it’s done. :P
So all that remains is to add ports for a couple of packages (e.g., drawterm is useful, cool-retro-term is fun, maybe try to build retroarch and love2d, though I mostly use my DevTerm for work and the uConsole for games), make some tweaks to the startup scripts, set up some defaults that are friendly for the DevTerm (e.g., minimize writes to disk and generally run lightweight), clean and polish, live with the system a few days to see if I’ve missed anything, and then use these packages to build a fresh image and upload that somewhere a little more accessible than just a Tor site and IPFS. (If you are in a hurry to run it, you can just take the packages and dump them into a rootfs.) I am excessively excited to have my machine available again instead of leaving it plugged in, occupied building packages. Very excited to pass -s 2 to the gear script again!
Except some small changes to the hardware (no rotating the screen, trade the printer for 4G modem, etc.), the same images work on both the DevTerm and the uConsole, so maybe next up I run off a uConsole image.
As a side note, barrier is extremely useful so there’s a package for that: git.debu.gs Git - cpi-ports/blob - barrier/Pkgfile . If you are not familiar, it’s a fork of the last open-source version of synergy, and basically it allows you to just move your mouse off the edge of one screen and onto another, running on another machine, so you can control multiple machines with one keyboard/mouse. (Like VNC but if you can just see the other monitor and thus don’t need the screen mirrored.) So when I’m at my desk, I have my DevTerm between my monitor and keyboard, and I turn on barrier and then I can just move my mouse down. I’ve also used it to control the uConsole from the DevTerm (uConsole is way newer, but you can imagine sitting at a table and using the DevTerm to edit code while using the uConsole to show documentation or play a video), or to control a machine that’s sitting on a desk using the DevTerm that I’m carrying around the room. Highly recommended.