Developing on FreeBSD

My box at home runs FreeBSD rather than Linux. I have the Linux emulation libraries installed, so I was able to download the arm-linux toolchain package from www.empeg.mars.org and successfully build a few of the examples on that site, and run them on my empeg.

Next thing I want to try is getting PPP running over my wireless modem (Ricochet in the SF Bay area). There is a package on the mars.org site, but it is in some Debian package format that I don't know how to unpack (there's a gzip'd tarball in there somewhere, I just know it ;). Little help here?

I guess going further, assuming I get the package installed on my empeg, does it *NEED* a debian environment to run, or would it work in the standard config using the ppp kernel on the empeg.org site?

brian

You can convert the Debian package into a generic .tar.gz by using alien.

I considered putting a tarball on the web site, but the pppd binary has been linked against the libcrypt shared library which I would also need to distribute, and I'm uncertain about possible (albeit ridiculous) U.S. export restrictions on this library.

As far as I know, as long as you have the necessary shared libraries, only the pppd binary is needed to run PPP using the PPP kernel - a Debian environment should not be required.

Next thing I want to try is getting PPP running over my wireless modem (Ricochet in the SF Bay area).

Keep us posted on this, and feel free to ask if you need help with the modem itself. I've never run ppp on linux, but I was in Metricom's tech support group for two years. ;)

-Zandr

Debian packages are ar(1) archives - you can extract a standard .tar.gz from them with

ar x wibble.deb data.tar.gz

HTH

--
Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)