GNOME on NetBSD/sgimips 5.0

["Jared D. McNeill" <jmcneill%invisible.ca@localhost>]

Hey folks --

I've spent the past ~week or so building GNOME against native Xorg on my 
O2. Still not finished yet, but I have enough installed that I can at 
least do some testing. Some notes:

 o I am using the Feb 21 crime_drv.so build, along with macallan's
   sample xorg.conf with one change:
     Options "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
   This is now the default in native Xorg on -current and 5.0.

 o My O2 firmware insists on configuring the display at 1280x1024
   instead of the panel's native resolution, 1680x1050. Everything is
   distorted as a result.

 o In my limited testing with GNOME I haven't seen any of the rendering
   glitches that I encountered with pwm.

 o If you're using anything that uses fontconfig, you probably want to
   generate a cache in advance, otherwise startup time for the first
   application in the session takes a serious hit as it has to generate
   a temporary copy. I timed 'fc-cache -fv' on my system and it took 88
   seconds, so this should result in a big win for all. If you're using
   GDM you will want to run the same command as root to populate
   /var/cache/fontconfig otherwise GDM will see the same hit.

 o http://gnats.netbsd.org/40814
   lang/mono fails to build on mips, so I had to comment out a few
   things from meta-pkgs/gnome/Makefile (nothing critical).

 o http://gnats.netbsd.org/40932
   gnome-power-manager is built with -Werror, and some of the
   gstreamer0.10 headers are reporting alignment problems.

 o famd performance is awful, not sure why, but top shows it sitting
   around 18% CPU at all times while GNOME is running on my R5k 180MHz.
   Turning it off made things much better.

 o firefox-2.0.0.19 doesn't start, no error messages (epiphany built
   with the firefox2 SDK works fine, however).

 o There's a bug with the volume control applet (seen on x86 as well)
   where it only shows the first mixer control it finds; in mavb(4)'s
   case that is the microphone, so the volume slider doesn't work.

That's all for now, I'll send updates as I get around to testing more 
things.

Cheers,
Jared