And so it begins ...

First major push for BlueOnyx on CentOS 6.0 has started.

I finally managed to wipe the dust of the trusty server that I had set aside for the development of BlueOnyx on CentOS-6.0. As there is no Beta of CentOS-6.0 available, I had two choices as OS for development purpose:

Fedora Core 12

RHEL 6.0 beta

While RHEL-6.0 ist just a beta and will have far more bugs and quirks first time around than the trusty FC12, I went for the RHEL-6.0 beta. After all: It'll me much closer to the eventual CentOS-6.0 than FC-12.

After popping in the RHEL-6.0 beta CD and booting off it I realized that the hardware didn't support 64-bit. Just great, innit?

So I went back and downloaded the 32-bit version and gave that one a try.

After just two attempts (bloody Anaconda!) I had a minimal RHEL 6.0 running and started to install all the dependencies needed for building and running BlueOnyx. Because "us programmers" are lazy, we just barely documented what dependencies are needed to run BlueOnyx. Getting all the pre-requisites that you need to actually build it is an entirely different matter!

Of course quite a few dependencies are not available on the RHEL 6 YUM repository, so the first attempt involved compiling a lot of dependencies from SRPMs. In some cases this proved pretty troublesome as some of the dependencies needed to be updated to more recent versions as they wouldn't compile.

Or they wouldn't compile due to differences of the build environment and the much newer rpmbuild, or because the architecture was still set to i386, whereas we now to build for i686. The newer rpmbuild was giving me quite a few headaches until I could "bend" it to my needs with the right rpmmacros. Even sausalito-devel needed a few overhauls until our makefile related build process for RPMs (and SRPMs) worked out just right.

The actual coding then started with making the code "aware" of the new model numbers that we use for CentOS-6.0, but that was only the beginning of it ...