I also run into the issue of handhelds.org being no longer active when trying to build the Arago based filesystem and other applications such as python for the AM3517 EVM.  (NOTE: the first time I ran into issues accessing the GIT and CVS repositories it was a result of the traffic being blocked by my company's firewall.  Once that was resolved I discovered that handhelds.org is no longer active.)

This may be a problem as all of the pre-built Arago releases seem to have references to handhelds.org.  Also in the main arago git repositories there are a number of bitbake recipes that still reference handhelds.org. 

When attempting to connect to handhelds.org:

Handhelds.org is undergoing renovations - The site should be active on the week of March 1st, 2011!

How can this be worked around?  I have searched for mirrors for handhelds.org and have yet to find one.

I found one web-site that has some of the files that were on handhelds.org:

http://developer.irexnet.com/iOn/Sources/1.0/Third%20party/all/

##################################

NOTE: Handling BitBake files: - (7548/7548) [100 %]
Parsing of 7548 .bb files complete (7548 cached, 0 parsed). 7230 targets, 318 skipped, 129 masked, 0 errors.
NOTE: Cache is clean, not saving.
NOTE: Resolving any missing task queue dependencies
NOTE: Preparing runqueue
NOTE: Executing runqueue
NOTE: Running task 460 of 797 (ID: 96, /home/richard/AM3517/Rootfs/arago-oe-dev/recipes/ipkg-utils/ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.bb, do_fetch)
NOTE: package ipkg-utils-native-1.6+cvs20050404-r21: task do_fetch: Started
NOTE: Fetch cvs://anoncvs:anoncvs@anoncvs.handhelds.org/cvs;module=ipkg-utils
cvs [checkout aborted]: connect to anoncvs.handhelds.org(128.31.0.23):2401 failed: Connection timed out
ERROR: TaskFailed event exception, aborting
ERROR: Build of /home/richard/AM3517/Rootfs/arago-oe-dev/recipes/ipkg-utils/ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.bb do_fetch failed
ERROR: Task 96 (/home/richard/AM3517/Rootfs/arago-oe-dev/recipes/ipkg-utils/ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.bb, do_fetch) failed with exit code 1
ERROR: '/home/richard/AM3517/Rootfs/arago-oe-dev/recipes/ipkg-utils/ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.bb' failed
NOTE: Task failed: Fetch failed: Unable to fetch URL cvs://anoncvs:anoncvs@anoncvs.handhelds.org/cvs;module=ipkg-utils from any source.
NOTE: package ipkg-utils-native-1.6+cvs20050404-r21: task do_fetch: Failed
ERROR: TaskFailed event exception, aborting
ERROR: Build of /home/richard/AM3517/Rootfs/arago-oe-dev/recipes/ipkg-utils/ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.bb do_fetch failed
ERROR: Task 96 (/home/richard/AM3517/Rootfs/arago-oe-dev/recipes/ipkg-utils/ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.bb, do_fetch) failed with exit code 1
ERROR: '/home/richard/AM3517/Rootfs/arago-oe-dev/recipes/ipkg-utils/ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.bb' failed
ERROR: '/home/richard/AM3517/Rootfs/arago-oe-dev/recipes/ipkg-utils/ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.bb' failed

One further observation, the versions of the files at 

http://developer.irexnet.com/iOn/Sources/1.0/Third%20party/all/ 

may or may not be the same as referenced on cvs.handhelds.org.  I find that the version there of ipkg-utils-native_1.6+cvs20050404.tar.gz doesn't successfully patch because it is a version different than _r21 when using it to build python.

I finally gave up trying to find the missing files and moved on.

The solution that I found is to build the bootloaders, kernel, and filesystem at http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/

Angstrom offers a slick on-line builder that can be used to configure and build bootloaders, kernel, and filesystem.  I took that route and in less than 30 minutes had the system I had been attempting to build using arago, built and running beautifully.

Hello,

when you bitbake van't fetch a package, you can search it (the tar.gz package) in the requested version and download it. after that you need to copy it to $HOME/source directory (it's a directory when bitbake download the differents requested packages in *.bb) and re-execute your bitbake command for continue without problem ;)

Thanks Mohamed! Your comment helped me fix a problem I was facing with DM355 PSP 03.01. It was looking for fakeroot_1.12.4.tar.gz package in the Debian FTP site which wasn't there. Downloaded it from fedora package tree and put it in "oe/downloads" directory and my error was gone :-) Thanks!

Kapil Pendse9562 said:

Thanks Mohamed! Your comment helped me fix a problem I was facing with DM355 PSP 03.01. It was looking for fakeroot_1.12.4.tar.gz package in the Debian FTP site which wasn't there. Downloaded it from fedora package tree and put it in "oe/downloads" directory and my error was gone :-) Thanks!