Building thoggen on a PPC: An update

["Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D." <joseph_sacco comcast net>]

Earlier I had reported:

        * thoggen
        ----------
        Toggen requires a couple of gstreamer plugins that you may not
        have installed:
                - mpeg2dec
                - a52dec
        
        Toggen uses snippets of i386 assembler and will not build on a
        PPC.

Paul Drain asked:

        Thoggen does, or mpeg2dec does? -- I suspect mpeg2dec will fail
        due to the MMX code that's included -- i've got a patch here to
        get rid of that, but have got no idea who makes mpeg2dec
        packages for PPC (and thus, who to send it to)
        


Answers and other Issues:
-------------------------
Thoggen is the culprit, see 

	./src/th-utils.c

The issue arises because thoggen expects to find a working valgrind
running on an i386 platform.

The workaround is to define "NVALGRIND" when compiling th-utils.c, which
has the effect of removing the i386 assembler code from the definition
of VALGRIND_MAGIC_SEQUENCE:

                              ...
        #else  /* NVALGRIND */
        /* Define NVALGRIND to completely remove the Valgrind magic
        sequence from the compiled code (analogous to NDEBUG's effects
        on assert())  */
                             ...


With NVALGRIND defined, the application compiles, installs, and comes up
when launched.

Note: 
I did not say that the application runs on a PPC. I do not have a DVD
drive [hard to believe, eh???]. When thoggen comes up it hunts for a DVD
drive using hal/dbus magic and finds none on my system.


* mpeg2dec & a52dec
--------------------
"FRESH RPMS", run by Mattias Saou, has both source and binary RPMS for
PPC's:

	http://freshrpms.net


* DBUS & HAL
------------
As I reported earlier to the list, HAL needs to be at least version
0.4.6 to run on a PPC. The currently available version, which works just
fine on a PPC, is 0.4.7.

One tiny nit... DBUS and HAL must agree on the name [userid] of the user
running DBUS. Some systems use "dbus", others use "messagebus". The DBUS
user must exist in /etc/password and be specified correctly in
/etc/dbus-1/system.conf


-Joseph

-- 
joseph_sacco[at]comcast[dot]net