Long time slacker, but new to arm!

My family bought me a Pi 400 for Xmas (Yay!), so I've immediately installed slackware-current from SARPI. So far so good. Some of my favourite apps are missing, most noticeably VLC.

I've tried building AlienBob's package (which seems to be ARM friendly), but it complains about apache-ant being missing, which is NOT ARM friendly - as far as I can see, anyway!

The distro supplied with the 400 (Raspbian?) does have VLC, and I think Raspbian is based on Debian? In theory, if I can find the .deb package, I should be able to run deb2tgz on it and install it, provided the dependencies are met.

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Has anyone got VLC working under slackware-arm?

All suggestions gratefully received!

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Pete

build script vlc-3.0.11.1-aarch64-1mara.txz, but the compiled package is not under aarch32

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Wow! That was quick! Many thanks for that!

As I said, I'm very new to Arm, although I've been using Slackware for a very long time. I was under the impression that the Pi 400 was 64-bit. Is this correct? And does this imply that the SARPI install is only 32-bit?

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I've only had it a couple of days, and I'm still finding my way around it!

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Pete

yes, it supports both aarch32/64 architectures.

yes, Slackwarearm is used.

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Thanks for the replies!

I'm currently downloading slarm64 to my local (home) repository. If I can figure out how to tweak the slackware installer to suit, I'll have a go at installing it instead of slackwarearm. I need to find out how the boot system works on arm, because it appears quite different from Intel/AMD.

Shame there isn't something like AlienBob's usbimg2disk.sh to create a bootable install media. SARPI seemed to have something like that, but it still involved a lot of manual fiddling on completion of the install, in order to make the SD card bootable.

I have a lot of research / reading to do! Can you recommend a good "idiot's guide" to arm?

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Pete

for raspberry pi 3/4 there is a ready-made image, you just need to write to the card.

Hi Pete. Merry Christmas and welcome to the ARM side of Slackware.

I've looked at the Pi 400 previously and didn't fancy buying it. Though I did wonder if the SARPi installer in its current form would get Slackware ARM running on this new device easily. You're the first person I'm aware of who's used SARPi to install Slackware ARM on this device so that's answered my question. Thanks very much for sharing the info.

As for VLC, I've taken a quick look at Eric's work and it looks pretty intense on the face of it. Looking at his build notes it's obvious why... http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slac...vlc.SlackBuild

Even though it's labelled as "a monster" (@alienBOB - LOL WTF?) I've found that if it's possible on Slackware x86_64 then it's almost nearly always possible on ARM as well. That being said I haven't tried to build VLC for ARM because I'm a very infrequent desktop user with Slackware and therefore have no use for it. However, this looks like the kind of challenge that I'd undertake just for the hell of it. Obviously Eric's way of building VLC works and the trick will be to find a way of building it successfully on Slackware ARM - which doesn't always involve the same modus operandi or method(s) as x86.

For example; I can't remember what I was building last year (or maybe earlier this year) but it required Google go-lang to be installed in order to build. Somebody said to me "Oh, you're out of luck! That'll never build for the ARM platform because there are missing <insert forgotten elements here>." So I looked at the Slackbuild.org scripts for go-lang, which seemed pretty straight-forward, and decided to build the dependent pkgs one by one in order before having a stab at go-lang itself. It took me a few hours to build the dependencies and 6-8 hours on building and installing go-lang itself (it was a real PITA as I recall). Managed it in the end through manipulation and installation of the required pkgs in the right order.

So that leads me to questions. Why is apache-ant not ARM friendly? Is there any reason why apache-ant cannot be built for ARM architecture? If you had apache-ant for ARM installed would this enable you to build VLC using Eric's scripts?

apache-ant arm build, package.
this package does not depend on the OS architecture.

and you've built VLC on ARM with it successfully?

Thanks. I wasn't sure because your post says "the compiled package is not under aarch32" and the link to your pkg and rpi4 image is labelled 'aarch64'.

Just wanted to know if you'd built it successfully under ARM (i.e. 'aarch32'). Do you have a link to your 'aarch32' version of the pkg by any chance?

no, there is no ready-made assembly for aarch32, but only packages included in Slackware are used for building.

I'm asking because the OP installed Slackware ARM using the sarpi installer - therefore it's 'aarch32' and not 'aarch64'. OP would have to install slarm64 in order to use your 'aarch64' pkg. Unless that's what you're suggesting he does?

I work exclusively with the official Slackware ARM source-tree. I once had a very bad experience with a version of "Slackware" (note the double quotes) on the Orange Pi and it wasn't pretty. However, I am interested in alien's "monster" VLC build scripts. Think I'll play around with them a little while I'm under house-arrest due to lock-down regulations here in the UK.

I pointed to the build script by aarch32/64 and pointed to the complete package under aarch64.

Ja. I was thinking if you already had a 32-bit pkg it might be useful and save a little time. For my purposes it's just as easy to use alien's build scripts and modify them to suit. Thanks anyway.