ARMV7 Compatibility???

Amethyst

i installed crystal linux using my phone?? could i be able to isntall it ONTO my phone ??

Matt C

I recall that @Michal S. wanted to look in to possibly supporting running crystal with Arch Linux Arm (alarm) as a base.

We haven't built any packages for ARM in a long time, though, so I'm not sure if he'd still be interested in exploring that.

If you happen to have a phone that supports any of the existing mobile Linux distros, you should give that a try first, though. Their lack of drivers will disappoint.

Michal S.

There are some concerns regarding handling packages when shipping for any ARM-based architecture, my initial idea was to ship only for Aarch64, as that's the easiest target for us all to test on

One big issue however is that ALARM currently uses the old *.pkg.tar.xz format, while Arch nowadays uses *.pkg.tar.zst, this means that we'd have to rebuild all the packages we ship for each ARM architecture we aim to support

With the newer automation-focused features of Malachite, we should theoretically be able to do this fairly easily, but that would still require reliable ARM machines for us to do this on
I do have ARM-based machines, just not enough SSDs to go around (I would rather not host a build server on my previously opened-up 80GB HDD)

Michal S.

Michal S. I'll see if I do have any spare SD cards lying around however, and this semi joke-y question could be a reality before either our 22.11 or 23.05 milestones

Matt C

@Michal S. im happy to sponsor SD cards or proper drives lmao

Oro

I have an RPi4 with a crap ton of 32GB SD cards I can test with, so I can try out converting ALARM to Crystal during runtime rather than providing a prebuilt image, I think

Michal S.

Oro That might be too hacky. Why don't we write up a Python script or something to convert an ALARM image to a Crystal image? We could use a feature of proot that essentially lets you chroot in using qemu to emulate a specific architecture, and write it up in a Python script maybe?

Oro

Michal S. That would work, I wasn't aware a tool like that existed. For now, it's probably best to focus on building the actual packages for the repo and then work on providing an image.

Michal S.

Oro We could use a script that utilizes proot to build packages for Aarch64 using the generic ALARM image potentially? I can try to start working on such a script in the following week if possible

Matt C

@Michal S. wouldn't we also have to use proot to build packages for aarch64 also?

Michal S.

Matt C Not once we already have an Aarch64 system 😛

Fries

Michal S.

Fries 👀

PariahScion

Whoa ... Cool... <-- my best Keanu Reeves impression.

Don't know if you need the help, but I'm kinda new to Arch in general and REALLY new to Linux on ARM machines, but I got like four pi3's. I might be able to help test if you can point be to where I can DL dev versions of Aarch. Lemme know what you want me to test and I'll see what I can do. (I'm coming from Debian distros, Netrunner and BunsenLabs).

Matt C

PariahScion

You can install Arch on your Pi3 with https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3

Are you in our Discord? Our less formal discussion and experimenting tends to happen there.

Pop on in and ping me once you have Arch running on the pi3, and we can help you move it over to Crystal! 🙂

MJ

Hi!

Hopefully not a faux pas to ping an old AF thread, but curious if any headway was made on this and if there’s support for installing Crystal on an ARM machine (specifically RPi4). Thanks!

Matt C

Hi! Our dev work is basically at a standstill. If you wanted to contribute the time to build our packages for ARM (the big one would be Amethyst, I don't think there are too many binary packages), we would certainly consider working on support for ARM. Additionally, I'm not sure how well GNOME + Onyx would work.

Matt C

Please feel free to ping me in the discord to discuss this. I would love to help out getting ARM suppot working once again!

MJ

Thanks! What is the discord server name? I am very new to Linux and somewhat clumsy at installing and compiling so far. But also willing to learn and expand my skills.I could probably manage a few hours a week rn?

Matt C

Sorry for not seeing this! There's a discord invite on our main website