I spent AGES trying to get pkgsrc to work as the package manager. It does NOT build in Yocto. I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING GOOD I SAID ABOUT PKGSRC THE BUILD SYSTEM IS SO SHIT AND IT DOESNT WORK AND IT USES NON STANDARD BUILD AND AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
REST IN PISS PKGSRC YOU WILL NOT BE MISSED

I ended up using DNF/RPM (yes, the package manager from Fedora!)

You will see in the screenshot below that DNF is failing to update repos, that’s because I kind of forgot to get networking working before trying the package manager (also using Fedora repo just for testing, will not be in final one)

Goodbye GNU, hello BSD!

I spent some time modifying my Linux distro BitBake/Yocto recipes to migrate from GNU coreutils (and BusyBox) to FreeBSD coreutils, specifically chimerautils, the ported FreeBSD core utilities used in Chimera Linux.

I did this to add some extra security (*BSD is normally more security-focused and scrutinized, afaik) and to align a bit more with UNIX philosophy ^_^

I spent a LOT of time debugging the build system. Last time I worked on this was 2 months ago, and that was before I switched to Void Linux (musl) from Gentoo. Logged time for this devlog is so low because it’s 99% debugging black magic logs and 1% of actually modifying the configs.

Lessons learned: don’t trust the GNU mirrors. don’t trust BitBake to do its job, and don’t set a custom DL_DIR for BitBake because it will not use it properly and cause issues. also do not do Yocto development on musl libc.

It turns out that Yocto compilation also just dies on musl so I’m now running the build in Docker (recurring theme with my projects, isn’t it?)

I think I’ve almost got the build to start working again, just need to fix some locales in the Docker container and we should be good to go!

Switching the focus of this project

Hey everyone! I know I’ve been gone for a while, I’ve been distracted by many other projects and ideas and also trying to work on the package manager for this distro. (got distracted with that too)

I’m not sure what this logged time on this devlog is for, it might be for some few changes I didn’t devlog last time I worked on this project.

I think I’m going to switch the focus of this distro from here, to not just be minimalist and a knockoff of Void, but to be a Void-like minimalist distro with secureblue/GrapheneOS-level security.
It’s probably going to be hard to pull off but I think it will be worth it.
Thanks all!

Added a footer! This was pretty simple because it was mainly just copying over the footer from my old site and tweaking it here and there
Just realised I need to write a README and then I’ll be fully done!

I spent some time migrating pages from my previous site (licenses, pgp) over to the new site and also added a 404 page!
The next thing I need to do is pretty much just add a footer and then I’ll be done!

I had (still have) some extra time, so I thought I’d finish off the rest of my site and ship it properly this time, but turns out that Zola, the templating engine my site uses, made some breaking changes in 0.23 that are for some reason undocumented because they’re too new??? What the hell why are they undocumented my poor sanity

I fixed it by just hardcoding the header into base.html instead of splitting it into a separate file (jank but works) and changing a few lines to detect if either section or page should be used depending on the context

JNI is very confusing
I spent some time getting a Foreground Service to run so that I can start working on the real assistant code inside of it
It was a pretty big headache of wrapping my head around JNI and to be honest I still don’t understand it, most of my JNI stuff is just heavily modified examples and pasted from Stack Overflow

Now that I’ve got it working, the next step is to handle audio and actually send it through Vosk!!!

To integrate Vosk properly with the new Gradle build system, I had to switch from ndk-build to CMake and add a custom task in app/build.gradle that extracts libvosk.so from the Vosk AAR and fetches vosk_api.h into the include directories ^_^

Spent a bit of time getting this to work and the app now compiles properly, linking against Vosk, with the new Gradle + CMake build system!!!

It turns out I can’t make an Android Foreground Service without a little bit of Java/Kotlin, so I spent a hot minute migrating the entire build system to Gradle so that I can write a few Java service wrappers.

Along the way, I had some issues with Android SDK and musl libc, so the build now runs in a Docker container with docker-compose.

Did more build system things

Spent a little bit of time trying to figure out licensing for Vosk and figuring out how to integrate the Vosk shared library into my application ^_^
Licensing is still confusing but I think I have it mostly figured out!
I’ve got the Makefile to download the Vosk AAR and extract the shared library from it, and I’ve also got Android.mk (ndk-build) to link against libvosk.so!
Oh also I made the screen red instead of green because I can™️

I got it to render a green screen to the buffer!
Next step is probably to make it start processing audio and the actual asisstant part because the UI can be done last
At the moment I might just use color screen indicators (?)

I GOT IT TO LAUNCH
IT LAUNCHES
WITH THE C BOILERPLATE CODE
For some reason rendering doesn’t work yet (Unable to lock window buffer)

I spent a bit of time getting the build system and boilerplate to work, and I now have a working Makefile that produces a signed APK with the Android NDK (ndk-build) from my C code!

Spent a little bit of time porting my blog posts over, and the site seems mostly done!

Finished up the projects page!

Finished off the blog list!

I’ve now got a much more full and much better looking homepage!