Marcin Juszkiewicz

The pirates of Silicon Valley is a movie about how Apple Computers and Microsoft was created, how they grow. It is a story about creators of those companies — how Steve Jobs and Steve Woźniak built computer which show something on monitor instead of LED interface used in Altair.

It’s nice movie — a must for all geeks ;)

From time to time someone ask me why their attempt to use OpenEmbedded fail — I’m a bit tired of saying the same each time so I decided to write how I have directories setup.

I use ~/devel/ to keep all things where I’m involved:

bitbake/ -- Subversion tree of Bitbake
build/ -- place where I do all OE builds
build/0912/ -- currently used build (c7x0 related)
build/oz353/ -- OpenZaurus 3.5.3 upgrades
build/armv4l/ -- testing "collie" build
build/native/ -- native i686 build for developing OPIE
build/wrt/ -- build for my OpenWRT powered router

doc/ -- misc documentation (QT/E, Qtopia and other)
fonts/ -- DejaVu fonts which I convert from TrueType to QPF

oe/ -- OpenEmbedded directory
oe/org.openembedded.dev/ -- development repository
oe/branch.oz354fam083/ -- frozen repository for release
oe/hrw-packages/ -- my misc testing packages
oe/hrw.db -- database with all OE stuff

openwrt/ -- copy of OpenWRT build system
opie/ -- development for OPIE
sources/ -- DL_DIR, CVS_DIR for OpenEmbedded
tmp/ -- place for all misc tweaking

This gives me easy way of doing builds. All to do is:

cd ~/devel/
. setup-oe.sh build/0912/

and everything is configured — BBPATH set, bitbake and gcc 2.95 added into PATH so I can start bitbake shell and do OE related work.

setup-oe.sh:

#!/bin/sh

# Set this to the location of bb
BB_DIR=/home/hrw/devel/bitbake/trunk/bitbake

# The location of the packages
OE_DIR=/home/hrw/devel/oe/org.openembedded.dev

HERE=`pwd`

cd $BB_DIR
svn update
cd $HERE
cd $OE_DIR
monotone pull monotone.vanille.de org.openembedded.dev
monotone --lca merge
monotone update
cd $HERE
cd $1

#use this if using the openzaurus cross compiler
PATH=$BB_DIR/bin:/usr/local/arm/2.95.3/bin:${PATH}

# Blank this so we don't link non-arm libraries
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=

# Don't export TARGET_ARCH -- it *will* cause build failures
export PATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH

#make error messages understable for everyone
export LC_ALL=C

#one command to make rebuild
bbrebuild()
{
        bitbake -b $1 --cmd=clean
        bitbake -b $1
}

export BBPATH=`pwd`:$OE_DIR
unset BB_DIR
unset OE_DIR

I started writing database of CF cards — which driver they need etc. It contain info from pcmcia-cs 3.2.8 package and other OpenEmbedded generated packages with CF/PCMCIA drivers.

Current version only can show data.

WiFi cards which use Prism chipset can have miscelanous versions of firmware. Hopefully they can be flashed to newer version — this page have instructions how to make it.

But which version to choose? I tried to collect some infos about firmwares and here are results:

• 1.3.1- Added ability to perform non-destructive AP scanning (i.e., maintain current association state)
• 1.4.9 — Earlier version (1.4.2?) has some problems with PCI-based cards. The symptom is corrupted packets. If you have PCI cards, upgrade to this one.
• 1.5.6 — This version and later ones enable hostap driver to use standard 4-address packet format for WDS packets.
• 1.6.3 — Supports hiding ESSID.
• 1.7.0 — Supports WPA encryption.
• 1.8.4 — Latest flashable version.

Today I looked into my FF 1.5beta extensions list and after little cleaning (removed few not recently used ones) I have 21 external extensions installed. Some of them are little tweaks which imho should be integrated in FireFox itself (like AutoMarks, Bookmarks Full Titles or LiveBookmarkThis).

Many extensions does not work out-of-box with 1.5beta — I changed MaxVersion for them and tested does they work.

Enabled Extensions:

Content related:

• Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.2.6: — Synchronizes Adblock with Filterset.G
• Adblock Plus 0.5.10: — Filters ads from web-pages. Now with whitelisting and synchronization.
• Flashblock 1.3.3: — Replaces Flash objects with a button you can click to view them.

Bookmarks related:

• AutoMarks 0.1: — Use the Location bar to autocomplete with URLs from your bookmarks.
• Bookmark Backup (Test Build 4) 0.4: — Creates a backup of your bookmarks each day.
• Bookmarks Full Titles 1.1.1: — Shows bookmarks’ full titles in the Bookmarks menu and Bookmarks Toolbar menus.
• BookmarksHome 1.4.3: — Makes pretty startup page out of bookmarks
• LiveBookmarkThis 0.2: — Gives an Add Live Bookmark option when right-clicking links
• OpenBook 1.3.4: — Allows for customization of the Add Bookmark dialog
• Sage 1.3.6: — A lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator.

UI related:

• CuteMenus 0.4: — Adds icons to menus and popups.
• Menu Editor 1.2: — Customize application menus
• Tab Mix Plus 0.2.5.2: — Tab browsing with an added boost.
• Uppity 1.2: — Navigate up one level (directory).

Development related:

• Live HTTP Headers 0.10: — View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing.
• Web Developer 0.9.4: — Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

Other:

• All-in-One Gestures 0.17.3: — This extension allows you to execute common commands using mouse gestures, rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation and page scrolling.
• ConQuery 1.5.8: — Context sensitive webquery extention
• FlashGot 0.5.9.97: — Enables Firefox, Mozilla Suite, Netscape and Thunderbird to handle single and massive (“all” and “selection”) downloads using the most popular external download managers for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD (dozens currently supported, see Extension’s Home Page for details). FlashGot offers also a Build Gallery functionality which helps to synthetize full media galleries in one page, from serial contents originally scattered on several pages, for easy and fast “download all”.
• MR Tech Local Install 4.0: — Local Install power tools for all users.

Today friend sent me a message that Sharp Zaurus SL-A300 appeared on Allegro (Polish biggest auction site). This is the only one model of Zaurus not supported in OpenZaurus.

Someone want to donate? :)

After using BitKeeper (when it has free license), Subversion and monotone each time when I have to work with CVS repository I feel sick. Simple operations takes time — comparing changes need contact with remote repository which sucks especially with SourceForge CVS service (avoid if you can).

But sometimes there is no other choice ;(

Today I decided to try KOffice 1.4.1 on my desktop as I wanted spreadsheet which can open MS Excel or atleast OASIS OpenDocument files and wont be called “OpenOffice.org Calc”.

After few hours of compile I started KSpread, loaded OpenDocument saved by OOCalc2 and I got so many error messages in terminal that I decided to skip another release of KOffice.

Who knows — maybe KOffice 2.0 will be finally working…